The Press Hacker

In December 2005, Manaro, the volcano in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu showed signs it was about to erupt. Smoke and ashes shot up from the crater and many of the population fled their homes. In point of fact the volcano did not erupt. However, as the old year came to an end and we entered a new one, news flashed around the world that the South Pacific had experienced a large earthquake. Could there, I wonder, be a connection?

Mount St. Helens, located in the Washington State in the Pacific Northwest, also a volcano , erupted in May 1980. The eruption is attributed to an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale. Certainly, this was not the first time this mountain had outbelched larva, smoke and ash in its 50,000 history of eruption. This time the north face collapsed in a gigantic avalanche of sand, rock and larva, taking with it 230 square miles of verdant forest. The volcano spewed a mushroom cloud high into the sky that turned day into night and scattered gray ash over most of eastern Washington State and the surrounding area. The eruption itself lasted a mere nine hours but the affects felt as far away as Canada, have changed the area out of all recognition. It was as if an atom bomb had exploded in the area on that day almost 26 years ago.

In 1982, President Reagan and Congress voted to create 110,00 acre National Volcanic Monument not only to mark the events of that fateful day in May 1980, but also to take from what was described as a national disaster and turn something negative into a positive creation. Within the Park that comprises the Monument the land is left alone to recover from the shattering disturbance it had experienced. Slowly and without the help of man the area is beginning to return to life. The once gray, larva strewn terrain is now gently turning green as plants and shrubs take root within the ash and debris. Bird life, which deserted the area after the eruption, is now coming back and the elk that lived and grazed within the surrounding forest are now straying back to what was once their natural habitat. Who says these creatures do not have instinctual memory?

For the traveler who remembers the graphic TV pictures of the Mount St. Helen’s disaster a trip to the National Monument will help restore faith in the notion that no matter what happens, it will pass and life will move on to its next mighty stage of growth and development.

Interested in this subject? Try this link for more of the same

Are you disgusted or disappointed with your current web host? Have you switched web hosting companies too many times? Have you thought of hosting your own website(s)? Do you have the ambition to control and manage your own web server?

If you answered ‘yes’ to the questions above, then you may be ready to host your own sites. This article will give you things to consider while making the switch.

When being your own web host you should be technically inclined and have basic knowledge of operating systems, understand technical terms, understand how to setup a server environment (such as: DNS, IIS, Apache, etc.) have basic knowledge of scripting languages and databases (PHP, Perl, MySQL, etc.), be familiar with current technologies, and have a basic understanding of hardware and server components.

You should realize the pros & cons. It is one thing to say, you want to host your own web server and it is another thing to actually do it.

Pros:

Own sense of responsibility
Awareness level raised (you are at the frontline of all server happenings)
No monthly hosting fees/accounts
Incompetence no longer exist
Non-shared environment (dedicated server)
Unlimited websites, databases, content, storage, etc.
More bandwidth
No more waiting on someone else time
Complete control

Cons:

Exhausting at times
Faced with server/hardware problems
ISP business account (monthly business/broadband expense)
If server goes down then the website is offline
No technical support team
Software, hardware, and network expenses

There could be many more pros & cons but I’ve pointed out some of the major ones. Managing a web server starts as a full time job, you must constantly monitor its performance and security. This can sometimes be an exhausting task, especially if you currently have other responsibilities. Though, the control you will have over your website and its performance is rewarding enough. You no longer have to wait for technical support or approval to install a script onto the server. You can have as many websites and databases you want, as long as your hardware can handle it. You no longer have to go into the discussion forums and search for the best web host or rant about how much you hate your current host. You can even begin hosting family & friends personal websites.

Ask yourself, how technically advanced are you? Many times you do not have to be a tech guru or anything of the sort, but you must be very resourceful. You must know how to find resolutions and answers to problems, quickly and efficiently. This means you must be internet savvy. Not just the average surfer, who surfs aimlessly, but you must be the surfer who can always find what they are looking for. This is key, because with any server environment you are going to run into problems and finding the answers are most accomplished online, using multiple resources, search techniques, and engines. Sure you can hire someone to fix your problems, but as we should have learned from the “web hosting”, having someone do it for you isn’t always the best option. Here is a test to see if you are ready to find solutions. I need a solution to a Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Event Error – “Event ID: 1056″ it’s a DHCP Server Error. How would you search? Go ahead find the solution.

Did you first go to Google? If you did, that was a nice effort and common for most, plus a good place to start, but usually it is best to start at the developers’ website. In this case “microsoft.com” would have been the first option. Why? Google would more than likely provide you with the answer from Microsoft and other sources, but you don’t want to get inaccurate information from other sources. It is common to get information from Microsoft that would not specifically resolve your problem, but the developer should always be your first place to search for the answers. Now search the error again and go to the Microsoft site and find the solution.

You should had found this link: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;282001 (Event ID 1056 is Logged after installing DHCP)

What search phrase did you use? It should have been Event ID: 1056, because the Event ID is the exact error, it pinpoints your exact problem without broadening your search. Sometimes the error description is also appropriate to search, just the error description by itself or in combination with the Event ID. It depends on your error, your search feedback, your ability, and technique. For this example I did not include the error description.

Google or Yahoo! should have been your second option (the two largest search engines). Then search other smaller and niche search engines. A good search site which makes use of Google’s operator tags is www.soople.com. Next you should search within forums and discussion groups. If you are pretty internet savvy and have a plentiful or few forums and discussion groups which you frequent then you might actually visit those places before visiting Google or Yahoo!. You can even visit those before visiting the developer site since it is a trusted source, but I wouldn’t recommend it, I still would go to the developers’ site first. Okay, so now we have planted our feet and have familiarized ourselves with being internet (search) savvy. We are ready to purchase a server!

When making a server purchase you need to consider a few things before doing so. What to buy? A top of the line, quadruple processor, and super fast turbo server is always ideal, but many times it is not logical or affordable. Therefore, you need to weigh your options (sensibly).

What to buy?

First determine your budget. Be realistic and expect to spend at least $2,500 for a low-end server. For a low-end, quality server with other needed equipment and services I spent a little over $4,500 easily.

Determine your ISP (broadband) provider. Research and speak with several different vendors before deciding which broadband solution best suit your needs. Each provider plan is different and has different benefits, determine the best one which fits your needs. Bandwidth should be put into consideration when choosing your ISP.

A backup device should be purchased before implementing a server install. The backup device should be double the server storage space. This could be a standalone unit like an external hard drive or network storage device or the backup device could be multiple devices such as: backup tapes, disc, etc. The reason the backup device should be larger is because you want to be able to have months worth of backups and not just weekly or monthly backups. You should have at least 24 weeks of backups without the concern of storage space. The backup device or safe deposits should also be external, removable, and portable. This is so the backups can be stored in a remote location. Usually for safe-keeping, in event of a theft or disaster.

Determine your daily traffic goal (the daily traffic which you hope to see within 1 year – be realistic), divide that number by the daily traffic you currently receive, and then multiply that number by 5. That is the total number of GB space you need.
Example:

Daily Traffic Goal: 10,000 (Divided by) Current Daily Traffic: 500 (Times X) 5 = 100GB

In the example you should purchase a 100GB Hard Drive, it is best to buy 2 or more drives oppose to 1. In this case, since 50GB drives do not exist or harder to find, you would buy two 60GB drives giving you a total of 120GB. 2 or more drives are usually needed in a server to configure the proper RAID option, in some cases 3 or more are needed. Your backup storage space should be a minimum capacity of 200GB (or 240GB, optional).

Determine your memory. If your web server daily traffic goal is 500,000 then I would recommend at least 2GB worth of memory. If it is a shared server, meaning it also has other server services running on the machine, especially a mail server or database server (which is not recommended) then your memory should at least be 3GB or more. Otherwise you can think small and upgrade as needed, a 1GB memory stick should be fine for starters.

Determine your network components, which NIC card best performs under high traffic levels and which router best performs for your LAN / web server. It is best to get a router which has a built-in firewall (commonly known as a “hardware firewall”). Your ISP may provide you with a router or hardware firewall, this is how they are able to authorize your traffic on their network. Like a cable box does for cable television. The router also shares your IP address with other clients on your network. This enables you to share your internet connection without having to get a different IP from your ISP. The hardware firewall is simply a router with a built-in firewall, which means it shares your IP address as well as provides added protection to your network. It blocks bad addresses and ports at the forefront, before it can even make it to your computer. It is not recommended to rely only on a hardware firewall for security, this is just the first step. It is recommended to also include a software firewall (firewall software which installs on your computer) and it is recommended to continue timely security practices, such as updating and patching your system on a scheduled routine.

Determine your processor speed and power. Regardless of the amount of traffic you are expecting I would recommend a dual processor or greater. A dual processor or greater is best because if your website unexpectedly take off then you will be well prepared and if you host other server options or websites on the same server then you will have better performance. At the time of this writing the 64-bit platform is the processor direction. 3.8GHz is the most available speed. If your pockets can afford the latest technologies then that is ideal, but keep in mind at this particular time a 64-bit compatible processor is not necessary, without having many applications that require or deliver on that platform. That is a lot of speed going no where fast. Also, remember the power of the 64-bit platform and the greater the processor speed the more heat it produces, therefore it must be cooled much more rapidly and efficiently. At this time a dual 32-bit, 2.8GHz – 3.2GHz processor will suffice (even that is way more than enough). Though, if your pockets can afford it then the latest and greatest would be fine, you will be well prepared. Otherwise, do like most people and upgrade when the time comes.

Make sure you have a CD/RW drive. A floppy disk drive is not needed, but I do recommend it for making system restore disk. The CD/RW drive is needed because you need some type of removable storage device. You never know when you need to install a driver from a different location…like a ethernet driver. An external CD/RW drive is the best option, especially if you have multiple machines.

Choose your operating system carefully. Choose the vendor which you are most comfortable with. Do not choose a MAC if you never used a MAC before. Just because your friend suggests it and says it is a piece of cake does not mean it will be for you. You are trying to get a web server online not re-learn a whole new system. Stay focused and grounded. If you are comfortable with Microsoft then go with Microsoft, regardless if the IT person at your job says Microsoft products are unsecure, Linux or Unix is more secure and much better for a web server. If you have never used Linux or (especially) Unix then you will be in for a ride of your life. Your web server experience will soon become a nightmare and you will have wasted thousands of dollars on equipment. Go with what you know, not what you are told. Each platform has its pros and cons: Microsoft is the user-friendly of them all; Mac is the web/graphic developer of them all; Linux is the open-source/developers paradise of them all; Unix is the most secure of them all. Each of them can be tweaked in ways to provide a solid, quality platform, it is best to stick with what you already know.

You should install on your system all the web services (such as: Apache, IIS, etc.), applications (such as: backup device software, RAID (Array) Manager), scripting languages (such as: PHP, Perl, etc.), CGI, Database (such as: MySQL, Microsoft SQL, etc.), and a web log analyzer (such as: weblog expert, nihuo, etc.). It is also recommended to perform system updates, security patches, and firewall installs and configurations. It is sometimes best to leave the security installs and configurations for after you have the system functioning properly to avoid any uncalculated problems. This way when you install the firewall and something stops working properly like connecting to your website from outside your network, you can troubleshoot assuming that it is the firewall, therefore you would begin by opening port 80 on the firewall. This method can save you a lot of hassle, but can sometimes be considered the unsecure method, especially if you don’t have a hardware firewall already in place.

Next, there are a few things to consider before installing and configuring a server. Where to put it? A secluded, cool location is ideal, but if this cannot be accomplished then adjustments can be made.

Where to put it?

Locate a location within your home that is static-free, we do not want to put the server on the carpet, near curtains, or anything else that can produce a static reaction. The reason for this is that you do not want the server internal components to receive a static charge and short circuit.

The location should be a cool environment, preferably below room temperature. The reason for a cool area is because servers (as well as desktop computers) produce large amounts of heat, the more heat it produces the more it needs to cool off. If the server is not kept cool, then this can lead to the server hanging and then eventually crashing. It’s the same result of when a car overheats, it stops running. You can keep a server internal components cool by keeping the room cool, additionally you can add more fans to the server which cools the server internal components, you can also position a standalone fan directly at the server back panel and constantly have the fan cool the server internal components. Depending on how cool your room is and how much heat your server produces, getting more fans for your server may be a must and not an option.

It is suggested that the server is at a higher level within your house (mid-floor), because if it is in the basement and a flood occurs it could ruin it. If it is in the attic and the sun beams on the attic for hours the server could overheat. Mid-floor level is usually the cooler place within the home, but these recommendations is optional and you should put the server in the most comfortable and convenient space following the rest of the guidelines.

Be sure the area you choose is not damp or wet (no leaks, moisture, near any liquids, or near a window “especially open”). We all know what can happen when electrical components get wet.

The server should sit at least 4″ inches from the ground

Be sure a working electrical outlet is near. It is an important to have a power supply, a good brand is APC. Having a power supply can save you from electrical outages, blackouts, and brownouts. Having a power supply helps the server keep its power, remain stable, and unaffected when there is an outage, as well it protects your server against electrical shock. If your outage remains more than 5 minutes it is recommended to begin backing up anything deemed important and shut the computer down voluntarily as well as any other electrical attached devices.

Have a LAN line near and also a phone jack (if you plan on using the server for any dial-up services). It is not recommended to use your web service with a dial-up connection. A broadband connection or greater is recommend for optimal performance. The LAN line should never come from your wall and plug directly into your server, it should plug into a hardware firewall (usually a router with a built-in firewall).

Depending on the size of the server and the internal components the server may be extremely noisy and loud, especially with the fans going. It is suggested to have the server in a secluded location which is not near any peaceful area of the house, such as: bedroom.

Those are all some basic things to consider before hosting your own server. Hosting your own server is not an easy task, but once you have had some time and experience with it, it becomes a breeze. You will have a better web hosting experience, you will be more in tune and reliant to your customers, and you will gain greater technical aptitude. Hosting your own web server is rewarding, useful, and gives you the opportunity to host unlimited websites, databases, services, etc.

If your web traffic becomes too great for your server then it is recommended to choose an offsite web host. It is recommend to purchase a dedicated server with a quality web host. If you choose a server with the above recommendations then your server traffic should be fine for at least up to 25,000,000 page views per month. It could be greater or less depending on your operating system, your server configuration, performance, applications, and services. The point is you should be well in a position to purchase dedicated server space by the time your traffic gets too high, because if you are getting anything close to 1,000,000 page views a month you should have some competitive advertising or ecommerce income. And plus, with the knowledge you will gain from the experience you will be able to support your own server at a dedicated server (remote) location, thus cutting more overhead.

The biggest disadvantage of hosting your own web server is the uptime reliability. If your web server powers down for any reason then your website is offline. Usually web hosting companies have methods and networks to prevent this failure from affecting your website. Usually if the system goes down they have a mirror location where your site is rejuvenated and doesn’t experience much downtime. Some web hosts do not practice this method or any other fault tolerance. Imagine if a blackout or power outage occurs, then your web server could be down for hours or even days, this can affect your business greatly. There are some hosting companies who provide mirror web hosting for a small fee, I haven’t found one that is reliable yet. Or you could cross your fingers and hope for the best, until you are able to host your server outside your home on a larger network.

Hosting your own server usually is not a money-saving experience. It sometimes cost more to host your own server, when you total the up keep and maintenance. The benefit of hosting your own server is usually a better platform for your customers, because it is no longer a shared server and it gives you the ability to make global changes almost instantaneously. When your customers request more performance or specific applications, then you will be able to implement this immediately. Customers like to know that you are in control. If you tell your customers that the server will be down for maintenance from 6 a.m. – 7 a.m. then it would be best if that is when your server is down, not from 5 a.m. – 10 a.m. You know how your web host will tell you one thing and then you have to try explaining it to your customer. In the end it will benefit you to host your own web server as a web business, this helps you and your customers.

About The Author

Ant Onaf is the owner and founder of http://www.JournalHome.com He is an online internet marketer, content writer, and IT consultant. Ant Onaf has years of IT-related experience and Internet-related experience. His ingenuity, dedication, and passion for technology, internet marketing, & writing have made him a monumental icon in the World Wide Web. His blog can be visited at http://www.journalhome.com/AntOnaf

Alot of individuals who had zimmer durom acetabular applied in their hip cup replacement surgical operations are finding that there are complications that far surpass the typical expectations for recovery. These patients are feeling a lot of extra pain for lengthier time periods, required to undergo revision surgical procedures and increased medical costs, and losing revenue by not being able to work at their normal jobs. Although Zimmer Holdings, Inc. is postulating that that their hip cup implant could never be defective and have basically denied blame for the faulty surgical procedures, many poor people are filing cases against them and receiving settlements.

These tormented poor people definitely merit some aid and restitution which is the reason product liability attorneys are telling them to file a lawsuit. hip implant attorneys has been paying some of these claims, too. Still, even if the payoff they are being offered sounds like a fair amount, in many cases patients are resolving too fast and without provision or allowance put in place for on-going issues down the road. If they don’t wait to find out what an actual case is worth, people could find themselves ending up paying alot more money out of pocket when more problems start to surface.

Anyone who realizes they may have a claim against Zimmer needs to start peering into it. If you believe you may qualify, you should probably visit a lawyer to verify this info. Look for a lawfirm that operates across the country and centers their attention on litigation against faulty medical devices. This law firm has done the extra work and setup a special division to do due diligence and process claims against Zimmer and win substantial settlements for their clients.

If your orthopedic MD tells you that youre going to need revision surgical operation to fix your Zimmer Durom hip replacement device, call an attorney as soon as possible.

Once your lawyer comes to the conclusion that you have a possible case, be ready to stick it out for awhile in order to get the very best settlement that your attorney will be able to negotiate for you. Heed the good advice that your attorney offers you and dont demand speedy restitution. You may end up losing a lot of money if you arent willing to be patient.

Some people or a lot of people knows what Web Hosting means, for
those people that don’t know what Web Hostingmeans I’m going to
help you to understand more about Web Hosting. First Web Hosting
is a service that some companies provide to users or people that
want to have a web site online. If you are planning to have a
web site or already have one web site, then you should ask
yourself this questions; How big is my web site? How many people
are going to visit my site? What programming language I want to
use for my site? and how much money I’m want to spent? After you
answer all the questions you’ll have a better idea on what type
of Web Hosting you need for your web site.

If you are not a webmaster or a programmer and you want to have
your web site, I have good news for you. You don’t need to be a
programmer or a webmaster to have your web site up and running
in a short period of time. Web Hosting companies have tools and
software like CMS (Content Management System) which its already
a site that have a lot of modules and templatesthat are ready
for you to use.If you are a webmaster or a programmer the only
thing you need to do is make sure that the company you are
looking for Web Hosting support the programming language that
you are going to use.

Make sure that you read and review all the information from the
web hosting company since normally if you want to save money you
need to pay a whole year in advance. If you want to have more
information about Cheap Web
Hosting packages visit http://www.chea
p-web-hosting-information.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=b
logcategory&id=16&Itemid=30for more information.

“What’s in it for me?” you ask. “Why should I measure how people use my website? How does it help and what does it all mean?” The purpose of this article is to try to give you some insight into effective web measurement and to talk about the most important page of any website, the landing or home page.

Why measure at all?

Fred Flintstone lived in the Stone Age but we live in the Information Age. We deal with a constant flow of information from TV, websites, email, RSS feeds, mobile phones, PDAs, radio, newspapers, flyers, billboards, and magazine covers. Even the sides of buses hit us with information about companies, products and services. So why on earth, in the midst of this information overload, would you want to measure how people use your website, another source of data to barrage you with even more information? The answer is quite simple and is summed up best by the 18th century writer Sydney Smith. “What you don’t know would make a great book.”

Consider this.

Your business is selling $50,000 worth of product a week (5000 units a month) through your website. You are delighted with these results, as many would be, and you only measure them because you figure you’re doing something right. However your competition, always watching and waiting for their chance, come along suddenly and steal a lot of your market share before you know what’s happening. How? They were consistently testing how they could improve their conversion rate online and after they had maximized their conversion rate, they went out and aggressively targeted your potential customers. The bounders! However since the conversion rate on their website is much higher than yours, they eat your market like a hungry lion.

Let’s put it another way.

You are successfully selling 5000 products per month through your website but your conversion rate is only 0.18%. According to research carried out by shop.org, the average sales conversion rate is 1.8%. That means that you could be selling 10 times as many products (50, 000)! Imagine what that could mean to your bottom line. If you don’t know what your conversion rate is, then you don’t know how to improve it or even that it needs improvement.

Measuring conversion is not complicated.

Measuring sales or prospect conversion is very easy. Over a given time period, you simply need to know how many people buy or register an interest in your product or services as a percentage of how many visitors turn up. However, there is more to effective measurement than simply measuring this kind of conversion.

What a good measurement tool should give you.

The ability to improve your conversion rate depends, at the very least, on 2 basic things. In essence, this is what you ‘have’ to measure to begin a conversion improvement program.

• Firstly, you need to be able to accurately measure the number of visitors arriving at your website.
• Secondly, you need to be able to see how they use the website by looking at the paths they have taken and how long they have spent browsing your pages.

Don’t just sit there going hmmm….

You look at the paths that regularly ‘don’t’ lead to a conversion and try to improve them. Don’t simply sit there looking at your path tracking tool wondering to yourself why people don’t convert, but look at your website and physically use the path that your visitor has exited. This is where careful analysis is required and where comparisons should be made with paths that ‘do’ convert people. In many cases, variables that are present in the higher conversion paths are not present in the lower conversion paths.

It’s that simple. If you regularly compare the best paths and the worst paths whilst measuring your changes consistently, there should be a steady improvement in conversion. You undoubtedly will make mistakes, but that is why you should carefully measure any changes you make, and why you should measure one change at a time. If you change more than one variable, then you won’t know which change made the difference and you won’t learn anything valuable.

Of course this takes a lot of time and effort on the web marketer’s part, but I never claimed it was going to be easy. In comparison to say direct mail marketing or TV advertising, it is still much less expensive when you do make a mistake.

The landing page

The landing page deserves special attention. When people do a search on Google, for instance, they have something in mind when they get to your landing (home/index) page, and if you’re not it, they have gotten to you by mistake. There is nothing you can do about this at all. It’s a simple fact of life that people using keywords like “improving conversion” could be talking about a web site marketing campaign or catalytic converters for their car.

The landing page however does require special attention from you as a web marketer because you want to reduce the number of 1 page exits from this page as best you can. This means your focus should be purely on the visitors who arrive. How well you service their needs when they find you is critical to your level of conversion. Again, measuring the visitors who arrive and the ones who leave immediately (the bounce rate as it’s sometimes called) is a good measure of how good your home page is at getting its message across. The ones who read for a few seconds and leave aren’t your target market so don’t worry about them. On the other hand, the ones who read for a little longer and leave might be slow readers, or might be your target market so concentrate on getting that number down. Your conversion rate for your landing page should rarely be measured as registrations or sales. It’s more likely reading time (for those websites that make the proposition on the landing page) or click-through to another section of the site.

Here’s an example…

Using our measurement system, we recently made a study of how people used our website. We found that the landing page was converting 68% of the readers. The objective of the landing page is simple: get the reader to move to another page. The landing page headline is “Are you driving qualified traffic to your website but not getting enough customers or prospects?” This headline, the fact that we go on to describe the target visitors dilemma in the first paragraph, and the fact that there are links to articles which educate the reader (more headlines, to pique the curious among you) mean that we get a good percentage of readers who arrive and continue further into the site. We’re always working on the other 32%, but by analyzing the bounces, we found that 50% of them were possibly irrelevant traffic. We have an article starring Winston Churchill that describes how colorful language can grip a reader, and many visitors were arriving at our pages looking for a history of the great man. And as we mentioned above, we also found that some readers were looking for catalytic converters (the keyword conversion brought them to our website). So overall, it meant that only 16% of our target audience left without doing anything. Maybe the phone rang. We can’t measure that!

Our tests on the landing page have been numerous, but now we’re frightened to change the headline. Seriously! Because simply by changing the landing page headline, we improved clickthrough by 36%. That’s nearly double what we were getting over the same time period six months ago. So if you think you can write a better headline for us than the one that currently grabs the attention of 68% of our readers, email me and I’ll test if it is better than the one we’re using!

Another thing we tested was urgency. We had a section on our landing page that said you could get a free e-book by subscribing before a given date. The date was cunningly set to change every day to the same day’s date. It worked. We got high numbers of subscribers in a short space of time and hit a 35% conversion rate, which we considered incredible. Over 1 in 3 people subscribed to get the book. Why did we stop? We listened to our readers who were getting annoyed by irrelevant information on the landing page. New subscribers didn’t mind seeing the message, but the returning visitors, the ones you should really pay attention to, complained about the same message with an updated date. It proves one thing though. If you have a special offer in mind, urgency works.

Incidentally, the fact that all of the above was tested on the landing page doesn’t mean you should forget about the rest of your website. For instance, one of our recent articles is very well visited and got terrific feedback from critics and other web publications. But as an entry page, the URL also has a very high 79% bounce rate. We have analyzed it and have drawn a tentative conclusion. We think it’s because we haven’t given readers anything to do when they finish reading. They get to the bottom of the page and that’s it. The end. Article over. And they leave. So now we’re going to add a new section at the bottom of our articles which encourages subscription or clickthrough. Again, by analyzing and changing things, we hope to improve. If it doesn’t make any difference, or in fact makes the rate worse, we have lost very little, we simply put the page back to the way it was. Testing is about trial and error.

In Summary

I will never be too clever to ever stop measuring how people use our website. I don’t know what will work with our visitors the first time around. I couldn’t have said that one headline would work better than another until I tested it. I couldn’t have said that using great copy that instills a sense of urgency in the reader would work better than not instilling urgency in the reader until I tested it. I couldn’t have told you whether adding article links to the first landing page would improve click through until I measured it. I couldn’t have said whether one graphic would work better than another until I measured it. I couldn’t have told you that all these small changes altogether would improve our subscription rate to over 15% every month, until I measured it. In other words, by measuring how people use your website, you can continuously improve it and therefore improve the conversion rate, which eventually has a positive impact on your bank balance.

In other words what you don’t know about your visitors movement through your website would make a great book.

About The Author

Steve Jackson is Editor of the Conversion Chronicles, (http://www.conversionchronicles.com) and CEO of Aboavista a Finnish company which improves web prospect and sales conversion rates.

steve@conversionchronicles.com

Search engine optimization is the very key to all website success, and has been a driving force in gaining traffic for my blog/site. It is key for every website to have a search engine presence or you will not get the traffic that your site really deserves, and this goes for both websites and blogs. The reason that I am writing this article is that I was on a call with this guy that was asking many different questions about his website, and he was telling me how he was able to successfully optimize his website for Google, but was lacking the traffic from Yahoo! and MSN, that he felt would be nice to receive.

This leads me to another point. Every single search engine is different, and this may seem like a ridiculous statement because they are ‘work’ the same way, as in, you search for a keyword and it brings up all related content that it finds. But I guess the real question is, how do they retrieve the content? That is exactly my point, and that is the difference. Although every search engine works the same way, they gather content differently, there search spiders work differently. For the most part it seems that Google is a step above the rest when it comes to massive content searching, and seems to reveal the more relevant searches.

Now that we know how search engines work, let’s look at some ways to help you improve your search engine presence.

The most obvious but not always talked about way to give your search engine rank a life, would have to be search engine submission. It is very possible to submit your site or blog into search engines through very simple submission forms. This is sometimes a quick way to get your site indexed but not always. Google, and Yahoo! offer this service, but there are no guarantees on the amount of time it will take them to index your site. This isn’t always required because there search spiders will eventually find your site and index its content. The use of Meta Tags is of high important in the last sentence, and we’ll go over that a little later. Here are a couple sites that will help you submit your site.

AddMe.com Submit Express

Another great way to have search engine spiders crawl your site quicker is have a webpage devoted to links. In other words, create an entire page that has nothing but links to your pages, this is otherwise known as a sitemap and is a great optimizer once it gets indexed. I would highly suggest this, as it is good traffic booster. You can actually find neat little applications that will do this all for you.

Pingoat Google Sitemap Creator

There are several tags that you can place in your head tag that will also help search engines see and index you properly. The first that we will discuss is the