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Build An Empire With Software And Tools
If you are a new webmaster you may have heard of SEO, but really weren’t sure what it was or how it can help your site. SEO is Search Engine Optimization and is important for helping get your site higher rankings in the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN.
Why higher rankings? More organic traffic. Organic traffic is “free” traffic, in other words, it didn’t cost you anything for that visitor to find your website. There are a number of factors that can influence your rank in the search engines. I’m going to step you through some of the basics today.1. How do the search engines find my site in the first place?First, you will need to give the search engines a reason to look for you. Either submit your website to them through their online webform, or work with other sites that rank well to get links to your site. Make sure the site that is linking to you is related to your type of site in some way. This is called relevancy. If the site is not relevant, it will not help you nearly as much as one that is. In fact, there are some cases where it could be a negative thing. Once the search engine is aware of your sites existance, it will send an agent to check out your site. Search engines employee programs called ‘bots’ or ’spiders’ to ‘crawl’ websites. These simple programs will simply sift through your site and report back to the search engine with what it found. . The spider will look at meta tags, links, and your site’s content and report that information back to the search engine. The search engine then uses an algorithm to determine how your site will be indexed and where. 2. What are meta tags? Meta tags are tags in your HTML code that describe certain aspects of your website. Metas can be used to describe the keywords for your theme, a description of your website, who the author is, and the character encoding your site uses. The two metas that we are concerned with, right now, it the “description” and “keywords”. There is some debate in the SEO industry as to how important meta tags are, but I feel you should at least be aware of what they are and how they are used so you can decide whether or not you should be using them. My opinion is: meta tags will not hurt your site, but can be beneficial in getting indexed by some of the smaller search engines and directories.Here are the meta tags for description and keywords for this site:meta name=”description” content=”PayPal Help : We can Help you Integrate your website
with PayPal. There are Code Samples and Examples to get you going. Help with Buy Now
Buttons, Donations, Subscriptions, Website Payments Pro and more.” />
meta name=”keywords” content=”paypal pay pal help helper website integration ecommerce
code sample samples example examples buy now buttons donation subscriptions shopping
cart api ipn” /> The description tag is simply that: a description of your site. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to keep your description under 250 characters. Descriptions that are too long could be ignored by a search engines spider and may even make it harder for you to get your site indexed by one of the smaller directories or search engines. The keywords tags describes the keywords of your website. You want to keep your keywords pretty focused, if you have too many keywords, it can dilute the impact of the whole list. You may have noticed that I need to change these. This site was originally aimed at just assisting people with PayPal integration, but it has evolved into a more general web design help site.3. Links, backlinks and reciprocal linkingLinks can be inbound or outbound. When you link out to another site, you are telling the world that you think that other site is related to yours and is important. If your website is about cooking, but you have a lot of links to webmaster resources, you may be hurting your potential ranking in the search engines, because, webmaster links have no relevancy to cooking. This is not to say you can not link to your friend’s website if theirs is unrelated to yours. You can. You just want to be sure that the majority of your outbound links are relevant to your site. Also, you want more inbound links than outbound, these are called. In the beginning that is difficult, as people don’t know about your site, and more importantly do not know if your site is a quality that they would want to associate theirs with. This is where reciprocal linking can be a very good thing.Reciprocal linking is where you link to another related site, and they link back to you. While this does not have the impact that one way backlinks do, it is still a good strategy to get your site noticed. Go to related sites, even sites you may consider as competitors, and find their “Links” or “Resources” page. On that page, many sites will tell you how to exchange links with them. If they do not have any imformation on link exchanging, just send them an email. A good strategy to get them to link to you, is to link to them first. That way when you send your email requesting a backlink, you can say “Hey, check out my site, I’ve already linked to you. Please return the favor.”4. Submitting to directories and search engines There are literally thousands of search engines and directories out there. Many are aimed at very specific niches, whereas others just want to be the next Google. Regardless, these are opportunities to get your site more backlinks without having to provide a reciprocal link in most cases.First, don’t bother submitting your site to Google using the form they have. It’s pointless. Google will find your site when it’s ready. A sure way to get Google interested in your site is to get a backlink from a very well respected website. Notice, I didn’t say high ranking. Google uses Page Rank, otherwise known as PR, to help determine how important a site is. Page Rank is a scale of 1 - 10. You can use many different tools to determine what Page Rank a page is, but the easiest is Google’s toolbar. You can download it at http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/index.html?promo=mor-tb-en. With Google’s toolbar, you can instantly tell what a site’s Page Rank is. At the time of this writing, www.ThosmonCon.com, has a PR of 4.So, back to my point, get a site with a high Page Rank, 6 or higher, to link to your site. Google will find that link when it crawls the other site, and that will lead to Google crawling, and indexing your site.Many other search engines actually don’t bother with getting their own results, they just scrape Google’s. So, when you get indexed on Google, that will filter down (eventually) to many other sites. A site that is definitely worthwhile submitting to is: DMOZ.org. DMOZ or the Open Directory Project, is the oldest and most respected ‘human edited’ directory, and is the basis for many other directories. In fact if you go to http://dir.google.com (Google Directory), you will find that it is just a mirror of DMOZ. No kidding, Google gets its listings for the Google Directory from somewhere else. So, if Google trusts them, it can be a big boost to get listed on DMOZ. The problem you will run into: because DMOZ is human edited, all submissions are looked at by…wait for it…humans. So, it could be anywhere from 5 minutes to many years before you get a listing on DMOZ. This is one of the most annoying processes from an SEO point of view, but also the biggest reason DMOZ commands so much respect. Here are some directory and search engines listings I have found that you may find useful:http://info.vilesilencer.com/?rock=seo-friendly.php
http://www.isedn.org/
http://submit.isedn.org/ - this will submit your site to 40 directories with one click
http://searchwarp.com/AddURL.asp - personal favorite of mine, when you submit here, they will crawl your site immediately and index you within one hour on 3 different sites.
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html - Yahoo!
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm - MSN
http://alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/submit_site
https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/reference/cost - Yahoo! DirectoryLast, I don’t recommend paying for inclusion to any site other than Yahoo! directory. You should only consider this cost if you are confident that you have a quality site, and said site is going to make you money. The submission cost is a non-refundable $299 (at the time of this writing) and does not guarantee acceptance. If you have a quality site and it is accepted, this can help in many ways, including Google taking more notice in your site. The reasoning behind this is: the site owner was willing to spend almost $300 to be included in a directory, and they were accepted by the #1 site on the internet (according to Alexa).5. In conclusionThis is a lot to digest, and it’s barely scratching the surface. In future articles, I will expand even further on some of these points and introduce new points and things you should consider.
Source: High Quality Article Database - 365articles.com
Keeping Windows Applications Up-To-Date via Auto-Updates
As a developer of commercial Windows and .Net applications and components, one problem I’ve had to grapple with on many occasions is how to automatically distribute patches or updates for applications or components we sell. Our goal was to update-enable applications we develop, allowing them to poll for and, optionally, automatically apply designated patches or updates.
In this article, I outline some of the options for creating auto-update applications and describe, in detail, the approach we finally took.
Overview
Our solution needed to be easy to implement on the client
side, but also flexible enough to allow us to perform update-related activities that could potentially perform unusual tasks specific to the application. It should provide simple, ‘native’ support for typical update activities; like installing updated files or assemblies, adjusting registry entries, or launching a downloaded executable (It should support the ability to launch software installers built by Visual Studio or other installer creation tools). Ideally the solution would also support customized, application-specific tasks - starting or stopping services, for example. Also, it would need to be a component that we can easily embed in our end-user applications and utilities, although it would also be nice to be able to deploy the solution as
a stand-alone ‘agent’ which runs independently of our applications.
We
wanted our solution to be robust enough to allow us to customize the behavior
and UI of the update process with minimal effort. Some examples of customization features we were interested in
included:
Since we
can’t predict where our applications (or applications incorporating our components) will be deployed, we want the communication between the client and the server to be over the HTTP protocol - ensuring maximum compatibility with secure, fire-walled environments. Furthermore, end-users of these update-enabled applications will essentially be ‘anonymous’ to us - we don’t necessarily know anything about the network environment where our app lives. The process should therefore be client-driven - the agent should poll for updates then request them if any are available.
Finally, the solutions needed to be relatively inexpensive.
To Build or not to Build
I began by looking at the commercial and open-source solutions. While a number of commercial products are available, I found that many of them tended to be strongly focused on managing the desktop in an Enterprise environment. Features like the ability to inventory the desktop, compliance and vulnerability
management, the ability to push software packages to named sets of machines, and robust reporting are all valuable for administrators of internal networks, but are overkill for our use-case. We just wanted a simple, embeddable agent
which polls for updates for the specific apps it’s embedded in.
There are some commercial solutions which are more focused on update-enabling specific apps, but they tend to be complicated to implement, not very customizable, not
embeddable, or not .NET-friendly. The commercial products also tend to be moderately to prohibitively expensive.
Open source solutions seem to be completely lacking for this use-case on the .NET platform. A notable exception is ’sample’ application available from Microsoft’s
.NET Framework Windows Forms website. The .Net Application Updater Component described there (and available for download) seemed to be closer to what I was looking for in terms
of a simple, lightweight component which can be embedded in an app. The component is dropped into your app, then polls a server for “manifests” available for that application and, if any are available, downloads the files described there. Unfortunately, the Updater Component is truly a sample application. Setup of the host is done manually, managing the host
manifests and file repository is entirely manual, and there is virtually no client-side support for user prompting, custom progress UI’s, etc. It is left to the developer to build out more robust features beyond simple update download. Update support is also limited exclusively to downloading files and assemblies. Still, the approach of using a lightweight client component that connects over HTTP via web services to perform simple update downloads was in line with the kind of solution I was looking for.
Ultimately, given the mismatch between commercial products and the features we required and the lack of robustness in free solutions, we chose to develop our own solution.
A Web-based Patch and Update Solution
Based on our requirements and the nature of our end-users, we determined that that our solution would have the following characteristics:
We also decided early on to design in some feature that would allow us to ‘productize’ our solution for sale to other developer’s who want to build similar auto-update capabilities into their apps without investing all the time and effort we did. These features included support for managing updates for multiple companies, tools for simplifying certain processes, installers for the client SDK and server web applications, extra effort in terms of the usability of the web-based hosting application, as well as two levels of administrative roles in that app. A full list of the features in the final product, EverUpate, can be foundhere.
Design Details
Host Application
We built the Host application using ASP.Net with a SQL Server database. The database schema consists of primarily of Company, Application, Manifest, ManifestItem, and User tables. A
Category table provides a folder-based organizational structure for Manifest Items. An intersection table representing a many-to-many relationship between ManifestItem and Categories provides the ability to define a Manifest Item once, but have it appear in multiple places in the Manifest Item organizational folders. Another intersection table between ManifestItem and
Manifest allows one item to be associated with multiple manifests. This is useful when some component is used in multiple different applications, for instance.
Fig 1 - General Table Schema
Application
Id
CompanyId
Name
Application
Id
CompanyId
Name
Category
Id
Name
ParentId
CompanyId
CategoryManifestItems
Id
CategorryId
ManifestItemId
Company
Id
Name
Manifest
Id
CompanyId
AppId
Version
FinalVersion
Name
RebootRequired
BackupFiles
ManifestItem
Id
CompanyId
Name
Action
Type
Sequence
Version
RegistryTarget
FileSize
FileName
TargetPath
Args
User
Id
CompanyId
UserId
Role
FirstName
LastName
ManifestItemManifest
Id
ManifestId
ManifestItemId
Rather than developing a lot of custom code for querying these tables and for persisting data to them, we leveraged an opensource ORM (Object Relational Mapping) package calledOJB.NET. ORM’s, like OJB.NET provide object-based access to relational databases, saving you from having to write a bunch of custom persistence code. While OJB.NET seems to be very much a grass-roots effort and is not as mature as similar packages that exist in the Java world (Hibernate, for example), it met our purposes well. I recommend you consider a package like this any time you’re considering developing a database persistence layer.
The manifest management console was constructed almost entirely in ASP.NET with C# under the covers. As I mentioned earlier, since we anticipated marketing our final product to other developers, we put a fair amount of effort into usability - we pursued a “console” look-and-feel, used folder metaphors where appropriate, and generally tried to “keep it simple”. I say the app was almost entirely ASP.NET because there is one notable component that is not. Namely, our file-upload widget. HTML forms do not support uploading multiple files very well - either requiring you to upload one file at a time, or rendering multiple file-type input controls, each with its own ‘browse’ button. Either way, uploading a lot of file, which is a fairly common task when your assembling a patch manifest, is a real chore. We therefore developed a Java applet for our file upload. The applet provides much better usability in terms of navigating your local hard drive and choosing multiple files for upload to the server. It is also well supported across various browsers. If you’re interested in seeing the management console, a demo can be accessed here.
Fig 2 - Manifest Management Console
Client Agent
The client was implemented as an assembly which is included in any application. Fig 3 illustrates, at a high level, how the client library functions. As of this writing, the developer of the update-enabled application creates an instance of the Controller object, then invokes ExecuteUpdate() (see the object model in Fig 4 for more detail of key classes). Controller, as well as many of the classes it interacts with, consults a Config file, mentioned earlier. Several of the Config properties define which implementations of the IManifestProcessor, IUpdateHandler, and IUpdateProcessor interfaces to invoke. This provide a point of extensibility for advanced developers, but default implementations are included, so normally no custom development is required if the standard update behavior is acceptable.
When ExecuteUpdate() is invoked, the client library contacts the host web services via the UpdateProxy class. It first calls IsUpdateAvailable() then, if there are updates for the Application/Version reported, it calls GetUpdateList() to retrieve a list of appropriate Manifests. Finally, the file contents of each Manifest are downloaded via GetManifestItemFiles() and then the MasterInstaller is invoked for each Manifest. Depending on other Config settings, the end-user may be prompted at various points during this process, or some or all of the process may happen transparently. MasterInstaller creates instances of the four specific installer classes, one for each ManifestItem entry. File installer manages placing files (including assemblies and locked files) on the file system, RegistryInstaller supports the creation or update of registry entries, and RunInstaller supports running a downloaded batch or executable file.
The download of the files associated with a manifest is performed by the GetManifestItemFile web service operation. Since the files in a manifest are frequently binary and could be quite large, the underlying SOAP request needs to support large binary file transfers. We leveraged the DIME support provided by Microsoft’s Web Services Enhancements 2.0 (WSE 2.0). This requires WSE 2.0 to be installed on both the client and server, but allowed us to return large binary object by simply constructing DimeAttachments and attaching them to the response SoapContext. Since Microsoft provides a free runtime installare for WSE 2.0, we simply make it a prerequisite in our agent setup program and refer the end user to the Microsoft site if it isn’t detected at install time.
Fig 3 - Client Agent Block Diagram
Of course, this has been a brief description of a fairly complex process. The process, and the details of implementing custom functionality or UI elements via the supported extensibility points, is described in much more detail in the EverUpdate Client Agent Developers Guide.
Fig 4 - Client Agent Object Model
Conclusion
While there are a number of products out there for patch management, we felt like a simple solution for update-enabling .NET applications with minimal effort was missing. The solution we developed meets our requirements in terms of the kind of updates we want to be able to perform, while requiring only a couple lines of code at the minimum, without sacrificing flexibility. You may find, as I did, that other options on the market don’t fit the bill. If, however, your requirements are similar to ours, you may want to consider taking a closer look at the product of our efforts to address auto-update of .NET end-user application.
Source: High Quality Article Database - 365articles.com
Are you thinking of starting your own business? No idea how to do so? Now it is your chance to take a good look at this link where you can find software, tools and resources to begin your new journey of having your own business online. Yes! It is true that anyone can start their own business online and at a much lower cost than physical office. The normal office startup will likely be around the region of 50k - 150k but with online internet business, you can startup with just 1k or so. Yes, it is definitely a well worth venture with low startup cost.
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Take a peek at this link above and you will find yourself to begin your journey of running your own online internet business. It has the necessary software, tools and resources for you to begin your own business. Start small and let it grows. Soon you will realise the great opportunity that you can use and build for your own financial freedom. Instead of sticking to your own 9 - 5 job, you can have your own free time to do what you always wanted to do - spending more time with your family and bringing them to holidays!
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There was an era when people were talking about how to create a website using html coding or some easy tools to create attractive website in seconds. Today we are a level up, and we seek how to promote our website so that, the actual purpose of selling products or services could be attained by bringing more target visitors to the website.
There are basically two ways of doing web promotion i.e. paid and un-paid. Paid marketing brings quick results to the website whereas unpaid marketing brings slow response to the website but it is effective too. Now let’s see how it works.
Before going into web promotion, first of all the website should be polished or SEO (Search engine optimization optimizing website for search engine robot to crawl or read the website easily) so that, the major search engine robots can visit the website and update our web content.
Now let us see how this is done.
Step 1: Ensure each of the pages has Title, Keywords and Description. Here is the code that can be copy paste to the header of the web-pages.
<title>Broadband</title>
<meta content="broadband, free broadband tv, disadvantages of broadband network, home satellite broadband, rural broadband internet"name="keywords">
<meta content="Broadband is in high demand and it offer multiple features like internet, accessing computer remotely, TV, Games, Movies, Online Seminars, Etc" name="description">
The coding above is a sample extracted from a small broadband website. The letters which is highlighted bold is the text that a site owner is required to input, the other texts are the coding that has to be placed as it is in header of a page.
Step 2: Once the title, keywords and description is done, the next step is to create a sitemap. Sitemap enables spider (spider : a robot from google, yahoo, altavista and other search engines that reads and store the content of the website in the search engine database) to read each and every page, see the example at: http://www.evision.com.pk/sitemap.html
These are some very basic steps, although there are many other steps like writing quality content, adding information and article to the website, etc which would bring good traffic to the website.
Step 3: Now after going through the above 2 steps the website is ready to get submitted to major search engines. Here are few links to submit the website for free in google, yahoo, dmoz and altavista
Once the site completes the above steps now there is a question that how to bring more traffic to the website. So as mentioned earlier, the 2 methods i.e. fast and paid method and slow but free method.
In fast promotional / paid method, keywords that people usually searched, for example to reach 1800flowers.com people would search for send flowers, send valentine flowers, etc in search engine, are listed and best of the listed are added to the yahoo, google and to other search engine accounts, these keywords are then placed on top when anyone search for it in the search engine. Each keyword starts at 10 cents per click and goes upwards. There are many other sites besides search engine, which offer paid advertisement solutions and they are good too for promoting the website. These are called paid advertisement.
Slow or free marketing is where a site can be promoted by maintaining the site as per marketing standards, for example site must have title, keywords and description; it must have relevant content originally written and not copied, it must have sitemap, it should also have article and news section that should be updated on regular basis, site should be submitted to various directories and search engines, and other relevant activities needs to be performed so that the site gets listed in search engine and acquire top position in search results.
Gear up your website to receive more traffic. Visit our website http://www.evision.com.pk for more such free advice on how to promote your website to attract targeted traffic.
Source: High Quality Article Database - 365articles.com
Denver flash design
Flash design Denver
Using Flash in Good Web Design
There seems to be a constant back and forth between programmers,
systems developers, and web designers, not to mention users and
merchants, about whether or not Flash is a good thing or a bad thing.
You hear arguments on both sides, and they can both be convincing.
If you know someone in I.T. in Denver,
Flash design has probably come up in conversation before. The truth
is that Flash design is a very individual decision.
So what is all the fuss about? Many moons ago when Flash technology
first came out and the Macromedia Flash Player arrived on the scene,
there were very few machines that had the software or even the hardware
to play this stuff. Flash is basically the technology behind moving
pictures on a website. It is responsible for the swirling graphics you
see when you open an architecture firm’s splash page and the mini movie
preview or commercial you see on Yahoo! when you do a search for
movies.
When it comes to Flash design, Denver has some great minds. You can find quality web
design that includes Flash elements to suit your company’s style,
goals, and marketing scheme. A professional team is the best way to get
this done, as it takes a trained Flash designer to really give you
something seamless and highly functional.
And here is where the con side of the argument comes in. Some people
say that Flash components on a website are just showy and take way too
long to download. Well, five years ago, this was an accurate argument.
Actually, even a year ago there were still a relatively large number of
internet users who were still using a dial-up connection.
If you think back to the early days of the internet and how long it
took you to watch those first Flash videos your friends sent you, or
how impatient you became waiting for a website to load that had
animated graphics on its splash page, you know why this argument has
survived. But today, it is increasingly obsolete.
The majority of internet users today have high speed internet
connections of some sort, as the affordability of this technology has
increased. This means that the chances you will exclude a potential
customer with your animated intro are close to nil. So Denver Flash
design is on the rise.
A professional web designer who has experience with Flash design can
write a program that is customized to your needs. They can create a
thing of real beauty and excitement. Flash adds a touch of life to your
otherwise static website. Remember that you customers want to feel like
they are connected to you when they visit your website. By giving them
animated components to view, you create a richer user experience to aid
in this feeling.
There are so many ways that Flash can be used today that it would be a
shame for you not to investigate how it could help your site. From
interactive virtual salespeople to virtual makeovers, the possibilities
are becoming endless.
This article was written by Sytsma Morris-Reeves. Mr. Morris-Reeves
runs NewMediaDenver,an Internet technology company located in
downtown Denver, Colorado (http://www.NewMediaDenver.com).
Mr.Morris-Reeves is a highly respected Denver SEO Expert since 10
years, and he constantly develops and stays current with all the latest
SEO and Link Building
Techniques.
Source: High Quality Article Database - 365articles.com
Report on Viral, Buzz and Word-of-mouth marketing on German television show nano, including statments from vm-people CEO Thomas Zorbach and Martin Oetting, consultant and researcher from ESCP-EAP.
It is always said that once you have a good service and product, by word of mouth, it can spread like wild fire. This method is indeed viral marketing!
You know what? Helio has just announced a partnership with MySpace to provide MySpace on Helio which will be offered on this mobile device and offer things like messaging, MySpace layouts for your personal profiles and photo galleries.
This is a smart move by MySpace. Other social networking sites have faded away as they became less popular because they were not introducing new features in their offering. More than 60 million teenagers have a cell phone today and that number is growing rapidly. What better way to expand the community?
The key question is, will the MySpace community move to the new mobile device offering? Helios parent company, a partnership between Earthlink and SK Telecom have invested over $400 million in launching this new carrier. They project that they will need 3 million subscribers to recoup their investment. Many believe offering MySpace on this new mobile device will be just the ticket they need to attract many new teenage subscribers.
I would like to hear from all of you out there. Can you see yourself using MySpace on a mobile device? What advantages do you see?
But first, you need a good layout for your profile that will look good in your mobile phone. Get it here.
Source: High Quality Article Database - 365articles.com
