There are many tools available to make the Internet Marketer's live easier. Some of these can be positively dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. And no, I am not even talking of black hat SEO, spamming or anything as overtly dangerous like that. There is something available on the market called 'content spinners'. These tools take an existing piece of text, preferrably a Private Label article that you want to change so that the article is more unique, and 'spin' it so that the end result does not resemble the original. Now, sometimes unscrupulous people take other people's content and also try to spin it. This is content that they really do not have any rights over. Luckily for the original author (me), the end result was, well..., less than what they expected it to be. Some kind soul traced this article back to the original one that I wrote, (have no idea how she managed to do that, the feat in itself is worthy of Sherlock Holmes...) and emailed the mangled piece of work back to me. My original article is posted in various article directories, you can read the original article on this link, for example: http://www.articletrader.com/internet/a-hosting-review-can-help-you-find-the-right-web-hosting-provider.html (http://www.articletrader.com/internet/a-hosting-review-can-help-you-find-the-right-web-hosting-provider.html) The same article that was spin doctored can be read below - enjoy!

Jaco van Niekerk is the owner of a website called Benchmarktimetable.com, a website that helps schools create timetables (http://www.benchmarktimetable.com/). We have helped him here and there with technical support on his site (which he built himself), and a couple of months ago he came round for some SEO and Internet Marketing advice. This morning he sent me a reference letter with some statistics of how his site has performed over the past couple months since our conversation. He implemented some of my suggestions and this was the result: Past Now Ranked 25 downwards Google : Position 2 Yahoo : Position 1 MSN : Position 1 Visits 379 4000+ and increasing every month Monthly Google ads Very high A fourth of what it used to be Overall Had to pay a lot to get visitors to my site. 10 times more traffic with more credible visitors. High ads with few visits VERY HAPPY. He wrote: Hi Christine. I thought you might like to know the success I have had after following your SEO advice. Again thanks for share your expertise. You saved me time and money. Jaco www.BenchMarkTimetable.com (http://www.benchmarktimetable.com/)

The most difficult thing in CSS to get right is the layout of your site. Here are a couple of tips dealing just with that. Tip 1 : Clear out the default padding and margin settings before you start working. Different browsers have different default margins so you want to start with a clean slate, so to speak. Use this command: * { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; } to clear all margins. Also note the border, which is set to 0. Please note that if you do this, you will also get rid of the pesky purple border round clickable images, although some people argue that the purple border is neccessary for accessibility and usability. But lots of people do not like the purple border round images, and this is one way that you can get rid of it in one fell swoop. Tip 2 : To center your layout, use a container div to contain all your content. Declare it as follows: #container { margin: 0 auto; width: xyzpx; } There are a couple of points here to take note of. DO NOT declare the width to be 100%. This defeats the whole object since you will just have to declare the sub elements within the container and then center THEM using margin : 0 auto. This is VERY BAD since it means that instead of declaring the central layout once, you will have to declare it in...

...and make it SEO friendly too What with all the fanfare made about generating links and adjusting title tags, it's often very easy to overlook other vital aspects of web marketing. Few of these are more important than good web content on ALL of your pages. This not only influences your search engine ranking as I will explain later, it also just makes your users experience better.

OK, everyone knows that Google recently opened offices in South Africa. Today I went to an event organised by Intoweb (probably the undisputed leaders in South Africa with regards to web design, training and Internet Marketing) where Google presented some of their ideas with regards to search marketing. I say 'some' since on 'some' questions they were remarkably silent...

The Free Wordpress Themes (http://themes.rock-kitty.net): This site is only three months old but already has over 300 themes. Nice thumbnail previews. Not all the themes have live demos but seeing that you can look at the thumbnail it gives you a pretty good indication of the theme already. Another Wordpress theme viewer : No thumbnails, but live previews. Nice 'Web 2.0' style templates, most of them widget ready Another collection of Wordpress Themes : Also no thumbnails, just a live demo function.

I will be running an Internet Marketing and SEO course on 29 November 2007 and again on 7 December 2007 in Johannesburg. The course will cover aspects of Internet Marketing from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to Keyword research to link building and more. To read more about what the course is about and to book, you can click here Internet Marketing Course Details and Booking Form (seo-training-booking.html)

It is often difficult for a corporate to justify the costs of website design. There are all sorts of arguments that can be levied against spending money on a website. Some of these are for example that most B2B purchase decisions are not really made through vendors found on the internet. These types of decisions are often made on existing vendor-supplier relationships as well as the ubiquitous 'network'. However, there are actually some very compelling reasons for a B2B company, or corporate, to spend attention on their website design. Having a website is actually not a nice-to-have or a luxury, or even just case of 'having a presence' or keeping up with the proverbial Jones's. Let's look at some good reasons why a corporate, or B2B company, should have a website - the main of which is to gain more customers and improve the bottom line:

My friend Phil, the copywriter (http://www.philcopywriter.co.uk/), recently asked me a series of questions about article writing and SEO. I asked him if I could publish it here and he said yes - so here goes! Phil: A quick question. How exactly do copywriting articles sitting on a zillion different directories and on my website help with SEO? The articles don't contain my web address and the keywords are not unique. So how do the search engines link my articles to my website? Explain for me please.

We completed the Ignite Products (http://www.igniteproducts.co.za/) website just in time for the National Braai day, held on 24 September 2007 to commemorate National Heritage Day in South Africa. Ignite Products ideal for supermarkets and convenience stores and just thing that you need to get your braai going. The funny thing about building this website was that it was extremely difficult to get pictures of people 'braaiing' together. Strangely enough the stock photo websites were all geared up and presented lots of pictures when you looked for 'braai', which is essentially a South African word for barbeque. But the pictures were all of flames and food - not of people! Phil the copywriter (http://www.philcopywriter.co.uk/), another client of ours, did the copywriting for the website.