Should I Create a Website? Do I Need One?

By Kim and Charles Petty

People always want to follow the latest thing, be it in fashion, sports, that kind of thing. Websites have become a necessity to almost everyone. Companies, businesses, individuals, even young adults have created personal websites with their respective purposes, be it for profit, or for entertainment.

What one must consider, however, before creating a website, are the factors in which must be put to thought before doing so, such as the cost, maintenance, use, web host and so forth.

Firstly, associating with the cost, we must always try to find an affordable host, not spending too much, nor too little. A cheap host does not exactly symbolize a credible reliability rating, but we must always look for value for money deals. Also, regarding the efficiency and server/web host reliability, there are many cases of web hosts not providing the service they had assured other people, some had even shut down and were nowhere to be seen. Keep this note in mind, as if you would like a long-lasting website, this would be the first thing to look for.

Next, would hiring a professional be affordable? Is it the best option? For simple websites, we could always pick up the coding, or even use programs, as it is relatively simple. However, when it comes to more complex coding, and when you want it to do a tad more than just providing information, hiring help in doing so would be the best way. Not only in terms of design, but security is also a key factor in assuring a quality website. If the website also acts as a portal for businesses, security would definitely be the issue here.

So, having considered the things to do before building a website, do we actually NEED one? If creating one would boost sales or promote positive implications to oneself, then by all means, go ahead and do what's best. Yet again, planning is the key to success, in everything we do.

About the Author:

Kim and Charles Petty,experts in Real Estate Market. For FREE Special Report and CD and to schedule strategy meeting on how you can make Six or Seven Figures A Year Buying and Selling Propertiesacross the USA & overseas go to VirtualRealEstateInvestingPRofits or call 1-800-311-9228 You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.

Basic SEO Techniques You Should Know About

By Anson Hall

If you are a webmaster, you would probably know that you need to drive tons of quality traffic to your website. Yet this is also the most difficult part. It is very true that driving traffic is a very difficult task.

One of the ways to drive traffic to your website is to launch advertisement campaigns. There are a lot of different options when this is concerned. One of the ways is to join PPC networks. As a matter of fact, Google Adwords is probably the most popular PPC networks webmasters will choose.

However, you will also know that you will need to spend quite a large amount of money if you try to launch advertisement campaign. For webmasters who have not so much budget, it will be perfect for them to have some free traffic. To this end, they will need to learn some basic SEO techniques in order to enjoy the free traffic from the search engines.

The title tag is probably the most important thing you have to take care of when on page SEO is concerned. You have to make sure that you have your targeted keywords in the title tag of your home page. You have to do SEO for every single web page. As a result, you will need to make sure that the title tag is unique for each web page in your site.

You should also create the content of each of your web page such that it will include your main keywords. You should always remember that you should not put the same keywords again and again in the web pages. You have to take care of the keyword density. It will be perfect if it is less than 15%

The design of your site is also very important. Here the notion of design means the ratio between the visible texts and the program codes. As a rule of thumb, the amount of visible texts should contribute most part of a html file.

The link popularity plays an essential part in determining the ranking of your site. Consequently, you have to start your link building campaign as soon as you start your website.

The above are only some tips for beginners. There are a lot of other issues you have to consider when you are doing the SEO for your website. However, you should try to do the above well before you go on more in depth SEO techniques.

About the Author:

Anson Hall is an affiliate coach. You can learn more about Make Money Online Now from his website. Be sure to check Increase Affiliate Commissions.

Why Has My Website Lost Pagerank?

By Robin Porter

Back in October many webmasters were panicking as Google apparently reduced the Pagerank of millions of websites. Pandemonium ensued as many webmasters worried themselves sick as to why this had happened and how they could restore their glorious Pagerank back to their website.

Why did this happen?

First lets take a look at Pagerank and how it is calculated. Pagerank is understood to be calculated according to the number and quality of incoming links to a website. It's a complex formula that only Google knows, also taking into account the importance of the page that the link originates from. Pagerank is calculated on a scale of 1 to 10 but it is not a linear scale ie getting from 8 to 9 is a lot, lot harder than getting from 7 to 8.Other factors it is also thought to include are ones such as the authority and trust of a website.

It is wrongly believed by many webmasters that Pagerank may be the main critical factor that specifies their search engine ranking positions ( SERPS). To be honest there are a large amount of factors that Google looks at to determine the SERPS, One of them IS Pagerank although it can be a deciding factor if all other things are equal.

The result over the last few years has turned many webmasters into Pagerank junkies. They obsess about their Pagerank, about getting links from other sites with higher Pagerank, they decline to link to sites with lower Pagerank etc etc. This has led to a whole industry of websites buying and selling links according to the Pagerank of the link page. And this is what has infuriated sleeping dragon over at Google.

Broadly it has been described that this readjustment of the Pagerank cause is as a result of Google penalising websites that are involved in the buying and selling of text links, with the aim of passing on Pagerank and hence improving their better SERPS.

It is also an opinion that sites have had Pagerank reduced due to bad linking, broken linking and other general errors. The rationale behind concerns Trust and Authority - the powers that may be in the Googleplex consider that a site with broken links and links to "bad neighbourhoods" is not a site that should be highly trusted.

Could this be the sole reason for the Pagerank readjustment?

Unlikely, as it is not believed that this was the sole underlying reason, as various sites were affected that had no involvement in buying or selling links. It is more probable that this was a complete overhaul or readjustments of Google's Pagerank scoring systems, which has led to a complete broad reassessment. The fact that so many experts point to the trading of links as a reason, is a theory that Google are probably pleased to let us believe. Basically, they do not like the buying and selling of links for the purposes of increasing SERPS, so they're happy for us to believe that they've applied penalties to this which they hope will then deter webmasters from doing this in future. The true reasons will probably never be known.

So how can you increase your sites Pagerank?

- Continue to engage in an ongoing campaign of link building, obtaining links from sites with a similar theme to yours. Don't get too concerned about Pagerank.

- Avoid dubious practices that Google frown upon such as buying and selling of text links. If you do buy text links for any other reason than to improve Pagerank, make sure the no follow tag is inserted in the link. However, it is much safer to avoid them totally.

- Check your site for broken links - including links to other sites, and make sure you don't link to sites that may be considered bad - such as spammy sites and those involved in selling text links.

There are too many urban myths concerning Pagerank and the reality is it is not the "be all and end all". Just concentrate on optimising your site and building incoming links, getting good content and applying a good relevant theme to your website and let everyone else stress about Pagerank. At the end of the day, it just isn't that important.

About the Author:

Robin Porter is CEO of Arpey Internet, a Maidstone web design company based which provides affordable web design for the UK