Starting tips for a NEW website

There is no point in having a new website that looks beautiful and is unknown to the internet community unless you take some active steps to promote it,oe else all your efforts will be futile and useless.If you are not sure where to begin, here are some steps that are bound to prove useful.

1. Tell Your Associates:There is no need to reach the unknown millions of people out there surfing the Internet,instead it would be wise if we contact our friends and associates.Look at your e-mail address book and get the word out, tell your business contacts, friends, relatives and tel them to tell their friends too. Channelise them in a proper way.

2. Link to Your Own Site:If you already have one website, make sure that this site is linking to your new site. A website without any incoming links to it will have a very low page ranking in the all-important Google search engine and will face an uphill battle to be seen in Google search results, especially if you are in a very competitive category.Even when your site is in the construction stage you, or even your web designer can link to the new site from another already well-established site, mentioning that the new site is under construction. If you already have several sites, then link them to your infant site. It will help the new site to be seen in competitive search engine listings even in its debut period.

3. Get a paid inclusion in one of the big search engines:It takes 4-6 weeks to get listed in Google, and other search engines are equally slow. However there are a few fairly important search engines that have inexpensive express inclusion programs. If you join these programs, then your site will be listed in 48 hours. Inktomi, which provides results for MSN and 100 other search services, has an inclusion program which costs $39 for the first URL that you submit, and subsequent ones cost $25. The value of the Inktomi submission is that they revisit your URL every 48 hours and if you make changes on the page you can see the results in the MSN listings very quickly. Thus, you can tweak your pages and see how it affects your position.

4. Add your site to the Open Web Directory and the major search engines:Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to search engine submission. Forget about the sales hype that tells you to add your URL to 300, 000 search engines. Only a few search engines and directories provide the lion’s share of Internet traffic. If your site is in good shape, no longer under construction, then go to www.dmoz.org. This is the Open Web Directory. Find the category where your site fits, and make a submission. If you are accepted here your site will appear in the many search engines and local directories that use the results from the Open Web Directory. Inclusion in this directory usually takes time but it will help you a lot. Similarly submit your site to Google, Alta Vista and All The Web, these are the remaining giants where you can submit for free.

5. Start a reciprocal links campaign – Once you have given yourself a link from your other sites or from your designer’s page, you can go out and ask other complementary sites for links.Always try exchanging links with sites that have a good page rank for it indicates that the site has good hits and is often visited.By having a trackback link chances of your site having hits is enhanced.

6. Write an article about your product or service – If you have a website the chances are that you are an expert in the field that your site is all about. Write an article about your product or service, or write an article related to the subject matter of your site. Submit the article online to various websites and e-mail lists dealing with your topic. The publication of your article in a big e-zine, or on a popular web site can get your new site off to a roaring start.

7. Promote Your Site Off-line – Now that you have a site, put the URL brochures, business cards, TV advertising, and circulars.The cafepress.com has a program enabling you to put your URL on these items and even sell them online.
Last but not the least be unique and be promotionally inclined initially for traffic generation.
from http://www.selfseo.com/story-19537.php
Posted by marketraise

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Free Web Hosting

There is no concept of free lunch in the world, this is exactly true when we talk about free Web hosting for the webmasters. Before going ahead we must talk about what hosting exactly is; Hosting is the process of storing files onto a web server so that it can be accessible to viewers through a web browser.

A lot of new webmasters have to face the decision of choosing the right host for their website and what attracts them is free web hosting that is available all over the internet worldwide. But as mentioned earlier, the free web hosting never comes as FREE as it may sound, it comes with its own limitations such as lack of autonomous domain name.

For the new webmaster, the choice of finding the best host may be very much difficult and even in the case of free hosting providers; the decision is to get the most out of them as most of these free webhosts try to get benefits from those webmasters who plan to use their services. Besides been some limitations, the use of a small server place and non-ability of using the FTP clients, no domain name, lot of ads from the web company and very low benefits may be faced when looking for a free hosting. The webhosts thus try to cover their costs by displaying their ads or some other companies.

Whenever you look for the decision of finding the free web hosting, then there are a few things that one must consider, what is your requirement, what the web host is offering, how much space they are offering, any statistics, what domain name they offer, do they offer the ability to use your own domain name or provide name servers, do their provide email address capability, what sort of ads that they put on your website and where they put that? All these questions are very much important to be answered completely in order to decide the hosting service that you choose for free.

As far as the requirement is concerned, today websites are either static or dynamic, most of the free hosts provide static webhosting and if your website is dynamic then you will have to look for a host that gives you the ability to host your website with the scripting languages that you have used. Very less free hosting companies provide dyamic services and those who do provide have a lot of limitation, like no database availability and stuff like that. Similarly, the requirement is concerned with the space that they are providing, most free webhosts provide from 5MB-50 MB of web space depending upon various other factors, the more space that you use, the more benefits the web hosting company would take from you. Most of the free hosts don’t provide the use of your own domain names as it hinders their own benefits in this way. So, most of the times the web address that your website is uploaded becomes www.yourname.freehosting.com or www.freewebhosting.com/yourname

Besides giving the long URLs, another big issue of these free web hosts is their reliability which is always in question. It is often termed that most of the free host providers are one who have old servers and give free space so as to cover the cost by getting free advertising by providing space. That is why most of the free web hosts don’t assure you that servers will be running 24 hours a day without frequent breakdowns? Similarly, these free webhosts don’t offer a good bandwidth, hence you may be in a problem if your website is popular and it gets beyond the server bandwidth limit and it will block your website till next month.

So, keeping all the factors in mind, free web hosting is not bad, if you are just trying your hands out on the web and want to explore without paying much. Free web hosting have its own set of limitations but are extremely helpful for the newbies to make their impressions on the web.

by Yasir Nisar

Yasir Nisar is a 25 years old poet, writer, freelance journalist, script writer, director, software engineer and web master of many websites. He has been writing when he was in his early teens and till then he has written thousands of articles, tens of poems, have handled edited many magazines, directed as well scripted many shows and music videos. He has been handling and managing his own software house where he specializes in web marketing, web development, web promotion and technical writing. He can be reached at yani@yasirnisar.com or at his website http://www.yasirnisar.com

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7 Simple Steps For Choosing A Great Web Host

There are thousands of web hosts around today with thousands of plans to choose from making what was once a simple procedure seem like a daunting task for both newbie and pro alike.

Whether you're looking for your first host or looking to move on to a better one there are 7 simple steps you must follow to succeed in choosing a great host.


1. Platform
The first and most crucial step in choosing a web host is determining the platform the web server should run, usually a choice between Unix/Linux and Windows.

Your choice is largely determined by your website and the technologies used to create it, generally a website created with Microsoft technologies (ASP, VB) will run on Windows servers while most other sites using open source technologies (PHP, Perl, Python etc) will run on Linux based systems.


2. Features
Once you've chosen your platform the next step is determining the features you'll need from your web host. Take your time with this step as the feature lists of web hosts are getting longer and longer every day and while some plans may look similar on the surface, a good look at the feature lists may tell another story.

Only you can determine the specific features you'll need, but some key things to keep an eye on are:

Disk Space
Bandwidth
Backups
Uptime
Money Back Guarantee
Domains Allowed
Databases (Number & type)
CGI, PHP, Perl, Python, SSI
Cron
Email accounts

The list goes on and on, just remember to take your time and make sure your new web host is going to provide you with everything you need.


3. Cost
Often this is the only thing people consider when choosing their first web host, funds are usually tight and on the surface most hosts look very similar. Sometimes you get lucky and choose a good host, but more often than not it turns out to be a horror story.

I can't stress enough that choosing a web host based on price alone is asking for trouble, remember that the cost of your web hosting is more than just the monthly fee, think about the total cost of ownership. TCO includes lost sales due to downtime & slow speeds, downtime rebates, extra bandwidth charges, setup costs, extra feature costs, and your monthly fee.

Many hosts will require you to pay yearly to get the best price available though there are some that allow you to pay by the month and still get the best price, it's really a matter of personal choice as to what payment method works best for you.


4. Customer Service
Customer service is another aspect that is often forgotten about until it is too late, something breaks and you need it fixed and those wonderfully handy sales people who were more than helpful in taking your money are now nowhere to be seen, all the while you're losing out on sales every minute.

You shouldn't settle for anything less than 24/7/365 service, your website needs to be running all the time so it's no good if your hosting company doesn't work during the holidays. Don't take the web hosting companies word for it, they all claim 24/7 support but few back it up with consistent performance. Be sure to test them out at various times of the day and night via phone, email and live chat if they offer it.


5. Support
An extensive knowledge base or faq can be a real time saver as well as being an indication of the level of customer service support and expertise you can expect to receive. Spend some time browsing the support sections of the website and see for yourself the level of support provided.

Are questions in the knowledge base answered thoroughly? Are real solutions provided or are they just “cut and paste” replies?


6. Longevity
Do a whois on the web host's domain name and find out the creation date, anything less than a year ago and the risk that they won't be around next year increases. They could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new hosts go out of business within a year that really isn't something you should be taking a chance on.


7. Uptime
It's a fact of life that a web host cannot be online 100% of the time, servers need to be rebooted for security and software updates and any web host that doesn't get updated faces the increased risk of being successfully hacked.

99.9% uptime guarantees are pretty standard in the industry however a guarantee is only as good as how it is defined and the company behind it. Look for no less than a full months free hosting should they not meet their guarantee, a prorated refund based on the amount of downtime is virtually worthless. Say you pay $10 for a month of hosting and your site is down for 24 hours. They will refund you for one day of downtime which ends up being about 33 cents.


There you go, 7 simple steps for choosing a great web host. It's not rocket science, just a little research and investigating that can save a lot of heartache in the future.

About The Author:
Kyle Tully is the Founder of Web Host Critique - http://www.webhostcritique.org

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Why Free Web Hosting May not be a Bad Thing

There is paid web hosting and there is free web hosting. Most people tend to steer clear of free web hosting as they tend to believe that “there is no free lunch”. Free web hosting must have its catches?

Well, that really depends on your purposes and your position.

Why purpose?

If your web hosting is for your website which is for commercial purposes, such as an ecommerce web-store, you need absolute reliability and uptime. Every second of downtime is lost revenue. While some free web hosting providers guarantee uptime, you cannot hold it against them if their services do not meet expectations and cause your business to lose hundreds of dollars of revenue. Why? Because most free web hosts will have a clause in their terms that state that they do not guarantee uptime at all because they are a free service. Now, most free hosts will not even guarantee any uptime and those free web hosting services are provided on a best effort basis. You cannot risk hosting your crucial business website on such a free hosting plan.

However, for most individuals who are experimenting with building websites, free web hosting is the ideal choice as there is no monetary commitment and no lost for both parties. Everyone deserves a chance to learn and what better way to learn than to do it? Free web hosting plans from free hosts are the ideal platform for aspiring webmasters to start their web-building careers. Of course these free hosts may require something in return: visiting sponsors, displaying ads on hosted pages, reading emails, and lately, participating in online communities of the free web-host. This last option may not be a bad thing as online communities allow the users to interact and learn from each other.

There is also a last category of users who just want free web hosting for a personal site which they do not find the need to be up all the time and do not see the need to pay for it and do not see the need to do anything for it. There are some free web hosts out there who offer free hosting for nothing – just a simple sign up. Therefore, a clear purpose for using free web hosting is important. If the purpose is critical and there is no tolerance for problems, then free webhosting is not suitable. Other than that, free web hosting is not a bad thing.

Why position?

Web hosting plans are relatively affordable these days (some plans as low as $1 a month) that almost any working person can afford it for their websites. Therefore, paying for web hosting should not be a problem for those who have an income, or some savings to spend on developing their websites further. Also, any working adult should be able to afford using a Paypal account that most web hosts will accept as a form of payment. On the other hand, students and young people do not have much to spend, much less a Paypal or Credit Card with which to pay for hosting. For this group of people, free web hosting plans are the obvious alternatives if they wish to set up websites without paying anything for them.

To conclude, free web hosting may not be a bad thing for selected groups of people who have a specific purpose. For students and people looking to learn about developing websites, free web hosting is a good thing.

Dax Christopher maintains a two year old webmaster community at http://www.Buildtolearn.com, a forum community that provides free web hosting to members discusses web-hosting and webmaster related issues such as web-design, page coding, SEO and many others.

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