When my brothers and sisters and I got together last Thanksgiving down at my parents’ house I was actually really concerned. I didn’t know how they got so frail but now that they’re both in their 70s I worry about them and their health a lot more than I ever would have thought. They seemed to go from young and totally agile to elderly overnight and I just feel bad that I don’t live closer so I can really make things easier for them. I went to www.wildbluedeals.com/and got them internet for the house since my mom’s really into online shopping and as it was had to go to the library to do it. That just wasn’t working out since she had been having such a hard time driving. My dad on the other hand is still really good about doing things that require hand-eye coordination but his eyesight has gone downhill really fast. I think I need to plan a trip down sometime soon so we can go see an eye doctor and get him fixed.

My whole family is confused to the point of insanity. Like the rest of the world we love to watch the television. We now watch www.direct.tv as it broadcasts all of our favourite movies, sitcoms, and other programs. Our problem is that the selection is so vast that we cannot decide what to watch. I love the awesome and slightly dated ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ which features the new money family of the Clampets which is a real rags to riches story. My common law wife simply adores the little kid in ‘Two and a Half Men’. She just loves the way he is cheeky wi! thout being rude and seems to get away with his mischievous antics whilst he lives with his dad and his rich uncle.

My oldest boys only want to watch ‘South Park’ the animated sitcom. This is a fantastic cartoon which is really aimed at adults. The one line jokes in the show can be very close to the bone for younger children so we have to watch it first to ensure suitability for the kids. My daughter has just started to watch ‘Everybody Hates Chris’ which is a comedy about a boy growing up in the mean streets and learning to get on in life and school. All the sitcoms are brilliant I just wish I had more television sets.

If you want to be found on the internet, most people, even novices, know that having a site friendly to Search Engine crawlers and algorithm (mostly Google) is important for traffic.  One of the most difficult arenas for ecommerce sites, is that most of the content is duplicate content, when it comes to the description of a product.  There are only so many ways you can describe a purple cotton silk shirt or a plasma TV.  So it’s ever more important to bring all that you’ve got to the table when operating an eCommerce site.  One of the biggest elements in SEO is to have keywords in the url itself, which an eCommerce platform, AscenderCart, takes care of.  Their SEO shopping cart, takes care of what many eCommerce overlook and that’s taking care of the URL.  The shopping cart features custom keyword rich URLs (of course you’ll have to research and choose your keywords  – but the fact that you CAN do this is a big plus), custom image alt attributes, page titles, breadcrumbs (a great plus for search crawlers), custom H1 headers, configurable meta descriptions, 301 redirection, and the works.

Some other features that I like with Ascender Cart are the reviews section.  Although I would have loved to see them take an extra step with making the reviews rdfa compatible for Google to pull in search listings.  I also liked their easy to use interface/dashboard, integrated customer management and blog/w template creator, an affiliate module, gift registry and wish list, plus more.  They even offer a FREE SEO training manual.

Wanna hear more?

• Does the network have plenty of advertisers?
• What is the quality of those advertisers?
• What are their payouts?
• Are the CPM’s average, low or above average in payouts?
• What type of reporting do they have?
• Do you meet their minimum application requirements?
• What types of ads are available?  Banners, Inline, etc.
• Do they offer CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL?
• Would you like a worldwide reach?

An example of an online ad network, is Mediashakers.  The international ad network has the potential to reach a large target audience with over five billion impressions served monthly.  Great for someone with an international presence on the web.  With this much opportunity, matched with their optimized campaigns and performance based targeting, a publisher could be quite happy with a variation of relevant ads served to their visitors, resulting in higher revenue.  MediaShakers also offers hourly reporting data, dynamic CPM pricing, same day trafficking adjustments and helpful strategic consulting and services.

Make sure to take a look at MediaShakers ad types, which are very similar to Google Adsense’s options, which is great.   But what is unique to this ad network is that they offer a new ad unit called the ‘iDent Ads’ which grabs the visitors eyes by placing a floating ad to the left hand column (if there is sufficent room).  The floated ads can increase CTR by more than 20% per MediaShakers – which I could believe.  It’s a new placement for ads, which is always good as most of us are “ad blind”.

If you do apply to MediaShakers or any new ad nework, evaluate what your needs are and what are the offerings of the new network to make sure it’s a win-win pairing for the two.

Are there any alternatives out there?  Well, there is another open source CMS being touted as an advanced SEO CMS, website,  and ecommerce solution claimed to work out of the box.  This SEO CMS product is called SEO Toaster and is developed by the SEO company, SEO Samba.

If you are already familiar with how WordPress works, you should have an easy time with using SEO Toaster.  SEO toaster’s dashboard has a “beginners” feel to it, as their dashboard is very simple to navigate and not “messy” with lots of tools.  Although the choice of lime green coloring is a bit jarring for today’s type of web design.

While digging through the features, I couldn’t get a feel for it being the most advanced system  for SEO, but by default I think it could be.  The SEO software can help you get setup and place you at the right path, but SEO will still require some human input and research (keyword targeting, anchor text choices, etc.)

I do give props to the creators for providing some excellent looking themes for their SEO Toaster product.  The themes come very close to appearing like a blogging or news type of templates.  It would be excellent to see how much support the creators offer and how many downloads they have already received to get an idea of how big is the community.  That will be its biggest draw to getting new users and retaining current ones.

The easiest route to exchanging free links is with their link exchange manager to offer instructions to other webmasters on how to place links.  As a webmaster/site owner you can offer more than one site for available link exchanges, by listing available sites to build links.  If you are not one to participate in the forums they do offer a link exchange tool and you will automatically receive links.

It’s definitely a site to check out and test.  It’s free.

Due to the increasingly popularity of WordPress (WordPress is outperforming Typepad nowadays), it’s not a surprise that there have been a great number of WordPress Theme sites launching across the web, including many Premium Theme Galleries.  Check out Google Trends for WordPress and you’ll see that the popularity trend is stable and is probably going to continue growing.

There are a great number of valid WordPress theme galleries out there but there are also some “not-so-great” galleries or “old” and “outdated” themes still pulling up high in the good ‘ol Google Search (you know you’ve seen them).  Here’s a few places to start if you are looking for a great WordPress Theme.  There’s the gallery hosted by WordPress at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, also wpsnap.com, freewordpressthemes.com and a newer site called newwpthemes.

If you still can’t find your perfect wordpress theme on any of those sites, maybe think about investing into an unique wordpress theme.  I know a few places to start (one of them being: ewebscapes.com).  Depending on your budget, you can really play the field on getting the right theme for you.

It’s amazing though…how the information that we hold on our computers are so fragile to being lost but many of us don’t backup our work. Whether it be website backups or making a copy of the files and folders on your computer many don’t backup. Imagine…losing not only our work but sole copies of family photos…eek…what a heartbreaker.

So, knowing that we could lose such information so quickly, why don’t we backup? My guess – the thought that “it won’t happen to me” outweighs the trouble it takes to make a backup. So…what if there was a solution to make backups automatic?

The company, Tilana System Corporation solves this problem. By being a convenient service, they allow you to continuously make backups from any location. For those on the go or blog at work, this is time saver since it also offers file synchronization. You’ll be able to have remote access to any backed up file, which of course has an internet connection. Working on any file, will save changes and upload them back to any number of computers. You get to selectively choose files to protect and/or synchronize, offering you continuous data protection. Files deleted from one machine can be deleted from another, while being archived permanently on your off-site Tilana Reserve data center space. Quite interesting, huh?

I’ve only had one scare, about 5 months ago. My computer pretty much died. I was lucky enough to turn it on one last time and copy everything to an USB drive. I was lucky, I grabbed my wedding and family photos, business plans and stock photos. I won’t let a scare like that happen again. Hopefully it won’t happen to any of you!

It appears that using the anchor text words “click here” has been proven to be a successful way to get people to click on a link.

Marketing Sherpa performed an experiment with their newsletter readers and found that wording used in hyperlinks influenced a difference in clickthrough rates (CTR). Changes to 2-3 link words was discovered to lift clickthrough rates by more than 8 percent.

Results:

• Click to continue: 8.53%
• Continue to article: 3.3%
• Read More: (-)1.8%

The results strongly revealed that leading a reader to click the appropriate anchor text would improve clickthrough rates (CTR).

I’ve seen some individuals who have placed links within the image and wondered why CTR is low – it’s because the reader obviously doesn’t know to click the image.

I’ve only played with using “Click Here”, “Url Here”, “Source”, “Product Link” but I haven’t toyed with it enough. The results from Marketing Sherpa has definitely inspired me to use ‘Click Here’ more often….. :)

Does this make you want to click?

Click here to find keywords tool to improve search or ad click conversion within your niche.