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1. According to SEO expert Brad Fallon (of Stompernet fame), one of the most important SEO “on site” factors is using keywords in your page title. This is usually a really easy thing to do (particularly if your website has a WebCare Content Management System back-end).
   
   The page title is the name that is displayed for every page of your website at the top of your browser window. Brad says that he has researched the impact of changing the words in your page title and it has had a dramatic effect on his rankings. The mportant principle is as follows:
   
   Use your most important keyword/s first in your title.
   Use your secondary keywords later in your title.
   Don’t just keyword stuff your title - it also needs to have a bit of “filler” in it.
   So, using WebCare’s home page as an example.
   
   The title used to be:
   
   WebCare Solutions: Fixed Priced Websites
   
   What are the keywords here?
   
   “webcare”, “webcare solutions”, “websites”, “fixed price” - all pretty irrelevant (and thus low quality traffic) keywords!
   
   What I really want my website to rank highly on is high traffic keywords like “web design” and web site design”.
   
   So, putting Brad’s research into practice, I have now changed the home page title to:
   
   Web Design by WebCare - Creative Web Design Services
   
   This includes the keywords “web design” (which is my best keyword and so it is right at the front of the title) and “web design services”. So there is repetition of the keyword - “web design” as well as an additional keyword phrase “web design services”.
   
   Of course, you also need to ensure that you use the keywords you want to rank highly for throughout the text on that particular page (the earlier the better and the more prominence given to the keyword the better). Have a look at the webcare home page to see how often we use the words “web design” and the different formatting that we have applied to this keyword (particularly bold).
   

A common question that people have is “How do I make money from a field I am passionate about?” You don’t necessarily have to sell products or an eBook that you have written (or had written for you). There is nothing wrong with either of these strategies by the way. But lets say you know a lot about a subject or have a particular field of expertise. What do you know a lot about? What are you good at? What are you interested in?
Once you have worked this out, what sort of website do you set up so you can make money in this field. The answer these days is often to set up a blog (or another form of web 2.0 site). What can you do with such a site?
Search engines (and your visitors!) like content - the more relevant and useful information your site has, the better. Search engines then index the content of each page, so you end up getting more free traffic to your website (which is, of course, a bonus).
You can have multiple goals on your website (unlike traditional squeeze pages which aim just to capture email addresses). Your goals might be:
a) promote your own ebook (or other product) and get a few people each week to buy itb) build up an email database by promoting say a free report or regular newsletterc) get people to click on google adsense (ie google adwords on your website which people can click on - you then get paid a % of the cost per click) located appropriately throughout your sited) promote someone else’s ebook (instead of writing your own) and making say a 45% commission (affiliate marketing)e) establishing yourself as a guru or expert in this marketf) referring people to other sites you own
You can achieve all or some of these things via a well-designed blog. It gives you multiple sources of income (your ebook, your email list which you can promote to, google adsense, affiliate income through selling other people’s products, additional participants in your downline, people buying your products etc). Have a look at this example (though it doesn’t have Google Adsense in it):
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/
So, building a website with multiple income streams, which also establishes you as an expert in the field, can be a great place to start. Once your site starts to attract good traffic and makes some income through Google Adsense or product sales or affiliate sales, or you get thousands of people on your database, then you have a viable business. You can now sell your site (people will pay good money to buy it from you) or keep on building it. The sky is the limit!
WebCare can certainly assist you with building a site like this.

For more information on getting income from your website, visit webcare at http://www.webcare.com.au

Why did this take me so long to do? I have been getting upwards of 400 spam messages per day - around 250-300 of these get automatically identified as spam and put straight into my spam folder (which I used to check every day to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything important - like a Viagra special offer!) and the other 100-150 went straight into my In Box! This take ages each morning to work through and was a distraction throughout the day.

Why was I getting so much spam? Because I have so many old websites that have email addresses on them and, more importantly, because I had the “catch all” option selected for most of these old domains. What that meant was that any email that is sent to “anything@mydomain.com” will get re-routed to my standard email address. I didn’t bother setting up email accounts for most of these old domains - with catchall on, I didn’t need them. So, all spammers need to know is that my domain name exists and they can send an email to “xyz@mydomain.com” and it would arrive in my mail box. Stupid!

Anyhow, this morning that all changed! I logged in to the control panel (”cpanel’) of every domain hosting account I had and changed the “Default Email” setting to ” :fail no such address here” - this will now bounce back all those spammy emails to the address they came from! Since I did this about three hours ago, three spam messages have arrived (all to legitimate email addresses) - compare that with the 40 odd I would usually receive during that same time span.
If I wanted to get rid of all spam completely, I could enable BoxTrapper (installed as part of Cpanel hosting accounts). BoxTrapper protects your inbox from spam by forcing all people not on your white list to reply to a verification email before they can send mail to you. This means that if you haven’t approved someone (ie they are not on your whitelist), then they will be sent back an email to verify who they are, before you receive their email. If they do not reply, then you will never see their original email. So, this can be a little dangerous as you might miss out on legitimate emails. But, it will solve your spam problem!

We at WebCare are very excited about being Australia’s first 100% green web design firm. From the core of our business model, we are totally committed to being not just carbon neutral, but carbon positive (WebCare produces much more carbon than it uses)!

Modern technology and communications infrastructure allows us to operate our business from anywhere with power and an internet connection. So we chose to set up our headquarters on a farm with more than 4000 mature trees (if each tree absorbs 650kg of carbon in its lifetime, then this property can absorb 2600 tonne of carbon) and new plantings of about 3-400 trees (260 tonne of carbon) occurring each year. The property is located about 35 minutes from Adelaide, South Australia - so ordinarily that would mean a long commute for staff and long drives to see web design clients or for clients to visit the office.

That is where our web design business model provides a solution - about 95% of our work is conducted by phone and email rather than face to face. So we are able to keep travel by car to an absolute minimum! The environmental benefit of this approach is huge. But that is not all!
The electricity that WebCare uses to power its business is 100% Green (Renewable Energy) Power. The other emissions from our business (such as the few times that a car is required and plane travel, and our host server) are offset by carbon credits from Easy Being Green.
Our office practices also support this committment to being environmentally conscious in everything we do. The office uses recycled copy paper, recycled toilet paper (yes - it is a bit scratchy, but we cope :-), is self sufficient for water (relying upon rainwater and dam water) and, of course, all lights have low energy globes.

If you want a website that is 100% green from its very conception, then talk with WebCare and you will know that the design and building (and hosting, if you want it) of your website is totally carbon neutral. You can read more on our environmentally friendly web design page.

Zencart enables you to easily set the meta tags for products via the admin system. But what if you want to change the meta tags for other pages in your site? This starts to get a little trickier. These instructions are not for the faint hearted. And, remember, you should only ever change the original code for your site if you have an up to date backup! Don’t panic though, because apart from Page Title, the meta tags are nowhere near as important as they once were.

Firstly, the meta tags are set in different files.

The default META_TAG_TITLE is set in includes/languages/english.php and as you browse through the pages additional text is appended to this title. This additional text is generated in includes/modules/meta_tags.php

The META_TAG_KEYWORDS are set in the /includes/languages/english/meta_tags.php..(custom keywords )

Also, the keywords are generated depending on the product selected in includes/modules/meta_tags.php. These meta tags can be set in the admin area for each product.If these meta tags are not set then the product name is used as meta tag keyword and its description in meta description.

The other meta tags (authors , generator) are hardcoded in the /templates/template_default/common/html_header.php
Initially category names with custom keywords are appended to it.
The SITE_TAGLINE is set in the includes/languages/english.php.
The META_TAGS_REVIEW is set in the includes/languages/english/meta_tags.php and it gets appended to the title.

See, I told you it wasn’t for the faint hearted! For more information on zen cart web design, visit webcare at http://www.webcare.com.au

Over the last few years, pay per click advertising (PPC) has leapfrogged free search engine listings and banner ads as the preferred method of online advertising. PPC is essentially the process of writing an ad, selecting various keywords, and paying a set amount each time a person clicks on your ad (and gets taken to the page you specify on your website).
The most popular exponent of PPC advertising is Google AdWords. Do a search for something in Google and have a look on the right hand side of the page - those little ads you can see are pay per click ads. This means, the advertiser will pay Google if you click on their ad!
Here’s an example of a typical PPC ad:

Brand name tennis racquets. Wilson. Prince. Head. Yonex.Free can of balls with every sale.www.tennisracquets.com.au

The sort of keywords you would use for this ad could be “tennis racquets”, “tennis racquet”, “cheap racquet”, “wilson racquet”, “cheap prince racquet”, “racquet Australia”.

The most popular (and still the best, despite its imitators), is Google Adwords. You can set up an account and create an ad campaign in about 15 minutes, and be generating traffic to your website within minutes of the campaign launching. Each click will cost you a minimum of AUD$0.05, but you could pay AUD$15 for a very popular key word!

You decide whether to pay more than the minimum to increase the ranking of your ad. Depending on how competitive each individual key word is, you could be anywhere from No 1 to No 100!
Obviously, if you are out of the top 10, the chances of your ad being seen will diminish quite rapidly. But, don’t feel you have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to be no 1. It is not worth it. For a whole lot of reasons, the optimal position is between 3 and 7.

here is a whole science involved in Google Adwords. Many people have written ebooks about how to maximize your advertising dollar by getting the best return from Google. The best Google guru around is the fabulous Perry Marshall. I was lucky enough to see him live at the X10 Seminar and the guy is brilliant!

y the way, I have recently received his Advanced Google course with Dan Crowther – and it really is awesome: filled with sophisticated tips and tricks to take your Google campaign to the next level.

In our last blog posting on this topic, I wrote about some free software you can use to edit your images for web. In this article, I want to focus more on the practicalities of image size - why it is so important that your images are optimised, and what the real difference in image size means.
A couple of important rules of thumb for you to remember:
1. Image size - between 4kb and 20kb per image (depending on the no of images per page)
2. Page size - each page on your site should be a maximum of 50-80kb in total (though I reckon in these days of broadband that going to 150-200kb is probably acceptable).
3. Stickability - 50% of people leave the average website within 30 seconds! If your website hasn’t even loaded after 30 seconds, how many people will hang around?
I have recently had some clients who have experienced some challenges from this issue of image size - both clients I am thinking of have shopping cart (or ecommerce) websites. One of them had product images that were about 50kb and the other had product images in the order of 400kb!
Now, just having one image that is that much bigger than standard (4k to 20k in size) is not going to be a huge issue. But in shopping carts, you might have a page with 30 of these images showing at a time! 30 images at 400kb each is a whopping 12,000kb (12 MB) per page! Even at 40kb per image you are still looking at 1200kb (1.2MB) per page.
How long does it take to fully load a web page that is 1.2Mb or 12Mb in size? Lets check the

Download Speed Calculator :

Page Size - 50kb
7 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is quicker than people on Dial Up usually get)
1 sec - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
Instantly - Slow Broadband (512kb)
Instantly - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
OK Page Size (150kb)
21 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is quicker than people on Dial Up usually get)
4 secs - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
2 secs - Slow Broadband (512kb)
Instantly - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
Huge Page Size (1200kb)
2 mins 55 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is slightly quicker than actual Dial Up speed)
36 secs - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
18 secs - Slow Broadband (512kb)
9 secs - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
Massive Page Size (12,000kb)
29 mins 15 secs - Dial Up - At 56kb (which is slightly quicker than actual Dial Up speed)
6 mins - Very Slow Broadband (256KB)
3 mins - Slow Broadband (512kb)
1 min - Medium Broadband (1500kb)
So - you can see the problem with large image files!

From a speed perspective there is no question that you want small file sizes. So why would anyone want to use large image files? To preserve image size (ie the physical dimensions of the image) and image quality (low-resolution, medium-resolution, high resolution, very high resolution). If you are selling products (or services for that matter), you want the customer to be able to see the product in its best light - the image needs to be clear (not blurry) and large enough to see all the detail.
So, it comes down to a choice between SPEED & CLARITY!

The great thing about the way images display on the web, is that usually you can look at a fairly low resolution image and it looks pretty similar to a much higher resolution image.

• displaying products in suitable categories (so customers can find them easily)
• displaying key information about products (like price, description, pictures, variables (eg size or colour), manufacturer etc),
• putting items on "special" enabling a customer to purchase multiple products at once (by placing products in their "shopping cart"),
• calculating the final price including taxes and shipping costs, facilitating payment (usually through PayPal and credit cards)
• getting shipping details
• tracking the order
• reviewing products
• managing inventory (ie how many of each product are left in stock)
• managing newsletters and other email to customers providing reports on sales and stock.