But, there is a dark side of Facebook that many people are unaware of. Many people who are new to Facebook and/or are not too web savvy can easily fall into a false illusion of security. After all, you’re just posting some innocent moments to share with your friends, right? At least that is what many people believe. What you might not know is that just about anyone can see a small portion or all of your Facebook posts even if they are not part of your “friends” list. Simply do a search on a name or e-mail address and you can easily find out just about anything about anyone you wish. Not sure of a name or e-mail address? Simply browse through someone you have added as a friend and view their friends list. Click on anyone of them and instantly get a preview of their world and private information. Some people have wisely gone into their account settings and blocked off most of their “wall” and other info, but there is still some information visible. On Facebook, you may run but you cannot hide…unless you shut down your Facebook account.

There have been a number of articles lately about online stalking and other crimes directly attributable to Facebook and other social networking sites like MySpace, etc. Some pretty scary stuff is going on out there in both the virtual world of the web and the REAL world. It would seem inconceivable that people would share personal and/or intimate details of their lives with total strangers but that is precisely what many are doing on their Facebook accounts. Perhaps the most foolhardy people are the ones who invite and accept anyone, trying to build a huge network of “friends” based solely on quantity not quality. I would be terrified to accept a friend invitation from someone unknown only to find out later that the person is a child predator or a serial murderer. Yet, some people don’t have a clue about who they are accepting (or inviting) into their circle of friends. That is a recipe for disaster.

Like anything else Facebook is what you make of it. If used responsibly and safely, it can be a great tool for business or keeping in touch with friends. Just be aware that whatever you are posting out there is just like standing on a podium and announcing it all to the whole world. Be careful and be safe!

Web design and development is a profession like anything else. Would I want a secretary dabbling in brain surgery during her lunch break, operating on me? How about the pilot of the next flight you’re on? would his gaming experience on Playstation 3, make you comfortable flying on a 747 that he’s piloting?

Yet, there are those people who are indeed willing to learn. Bottom line, if you have the inclination and desire to learn computer programs such as Word or Photoshop, you can probably get by managing your own website CMS and maybe even Dreamweaver or MS-Expressions. If you don’t know what HTML or uploading is, you’d probably be better off to leave the web design and maintenance to those with experience.

So how does a new website compete in today’s ever evolving web world? The old standbys such as reciprocal links, blogs and pay-per-clicks are still effective. The new trend is interaction with social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter…just to name a few. The dilemma comes when one realizes that leveraging traffic through social networking is not difficult but it can be time consuming. How effective your social networking campaign can be hinges upon the content you are delivering and popularity. There is no doubt that time and effort can provide a great boost in terms of search engine optimization and visibility. In other words, the more you work on your garden, the more crop it will yield.

I still get calls quite often and people ask for a quick 10 minute fix to get their website higher in Google rankings. The simple truth is that 10 or even 30 minutes is not enough to guarantee results. The most effective results are obtained through periodic review and actions to drive traffic to your site. Just like that morning exercise ritual, proper website marketing takes some minimal pain for maximum gain.

We are particularly interested in working with companies and organizations involved in Thai tourism. Thailand has some absolutely incredible tourist sites and we would like to offer our award winning web design and management services to assist in marketing and promotion of these wonderful resources to the world. If you’re a Thai business or tourist organization, contact us now. We can discuss your plans and goals in Thai or English and help get you started immediately.

Sawahdee khrap!

Imagine how discouraging it would be for someone searching for “Britney Spears” to land on your page about house training aardvarks, etc., simply because of your deceptive keywords. As you can imagine, somewhere along the line the rules would have to change. There is a line in a Roger Water’s song that says “if you give the human race enough rope soon or later they’ll **** it all up”. How true. Then Google came along and said “Guess what? People have misused the keywords meta-tags so we’re simply going to ignore them from now on.” Ultimately, this would negate the effects of “keyword stuffing” and rightfully allow the search engines to index web pages based primarily on a given web page’s actual content.
In other words, if your page is about house training aardvarks that is exactly how you would be found in a search. Wave goodbye to Britney Spears! Thus, the death of the keywords meta-tag.
To this very day, the legend of the keywords meta-tag refuses to die. 8 out of 10 of my new clients always ask if we can “put some really big keywords” into every page, so that they’ll come up high in the search results. And yes, I have to explain all of this to them just as I have mentioned here, so maybe now, I can simply say “check it out on our blog” and hopefully some day the great keywords myth will be laid to rest.

However, legends die hard so I can only imagine that in the year 2050 there will be a couple people still hoping to do a bit of “keyword stuffing” for “Britney Spears favorite wheelchair”.

If you already have a basic PayPal account and you try to make a credit card purchase on a website, you may be in for a nasty surprise. PayPal will use your bank account for funding and if you have a credit card listed as a backup, it will be grayed out, meaning that you will not be able to select the credit card for funding. PayPal wants to take the money out of your bank account, not your credit card.

The “dirty little secret” is that if you don’t use or have a PayPal account, the first time you make a purchase, you are allowed to use a credit card, one time only. PayPal makes you create an account and will later request that you add a checking account, etc. for funding future payments. The credit card will only be used as a backup in case your bank account is closed, etc.

You’re probably thinking, “well, I’ll just use another e-mail address the next time I make a credit card purchase with PayPal”. Yes, that will work and will create yet another PayPal account BUT if you attempt to use the same credit card, forget it. You will get a message from PayPal something along the lines of “this credit card is already being used by another PayPal account. For security reasons, you must use a different credit card”. So the bottom line is that in order to continue to make credit card payments using PayPal, you will need both a new e-mail address AND a new credit card that has not been used to make a PayPal purchase before.

For the above reasons, I am now recommending to all my clients that they spend the extra money for an Authorize.net or other payment gateway account. First, a buyer checking out at your shopping cart may not want to be forced into signing up for a PayPal account and second, if they make another purchase on a cart using PayPal and the same e-mail/credit card, there only option will be a withdrawal of funds from their bank account.

Buyers don’t want to be forced by PayPal to use their bank account rather than their credit card, especially if your cart prominently displays the credit card symbols. This could easily frustrate your customer resulting in a lost sale and a customer that may never return.

For the most part, depending on what the subject of your website is, you may have a tough time competing with already established websites to obtain that top ranking. Google and other search engines give preference to long established websites that are blessed with a healthy number of quality, inbound links. Also, a new website can take anywhere from a few months to a year to start showing results in the Google index. Google does this to make sure your website is a legitimate, viable resource rather than a fly by night website that is here today and gone tomorrow (their main intention being to leverage search engine results unethically).

That all sounds pretty grim for a company starting out with a brand new website. The good news is that there are some things you can do to promote and build up your website presence while waiting for Google to take notice.

First, if your website is already entering a highly competitive subject area, you may want to consider a “niche marketing” approach. This starts with careful website planning and research. Don’t worry about what your website will look like graphically at this stage. You need to build a foundation before putting up the window dressing. The number one mistake most companies make is putting graphic design ahead of website design. Graphic design is NOT website design. You need to understand the differences.
After you have researched your competition, keyword phrases and so forth, you need to think about your website architecture. The categories and sub-sections you will use within the site can also be created in a search engine friendly manner. Once this is done, you need to think about web copywriting which balances the appropriate keywords and subjects into strategically placed pages. There is also a huge difference between a “web copywriter” and a general “copywriter”. Adding a very well written page to a website is not enough. It has to contain proper keywords and phrases with the appropriate density and saturation levels.
Once all of this is done, it would be a good time to discuss graphic design and other options such as special effects, tell-a-friend features, blogs, etc. Your homework is done, you’re well prepared and ready to put on a pretty face for all to see.

All done, right? Not necessarily. This is the point at which many websites fail or do not catch on as quickly as most people would like. As mentioned above, it could take almost a year or more for your shiny, new website to start coming up in the search engine results. During this time you need to seek out links for your website on high ranking reputable websites. You may want to consider pay-per-click campaigns, print advertising with your web address and other ways to get your domain name noticed. It’s a bit like growing a garden. The more care and feeding you provide, the healthier your website will grow. Best of all, after doing much of this, Google may soon realize that your website is an authentic, reputable site after all and speed up the indexing process.

There’s a lot more to all of this than what we’ve explained here, so contact Alpine Web Media today for a free consultation.

• Cheap web hosting usually results in your website being down periodically, due to the increased server load. Not good for your visitors or the search engine bots trying to index your site.
• Slow page loading. Nobody wants to wait around for a website to load up. If it doesn’t load up within a few seconds, your visitors will go elsewhere. Again, search engine bots won’t wait around either. Cheap and free hosting often results in page load delays so beware.
• Many of the inexpensive web hosting providers are in a different country. If your business is in the USA, you really should not have your websites served out of India. Search engines take note of where your hosting is being served from and generate search results accordingly.
• Technical support can be difficult or impossible to find when things go wrong. With dirt cheap web hosting there may be no one to call when your website goes down or any way of contacting someone to help. Even if they do offer a phone option, it won’t help much if the person on the other end cannot understand or clearly speak your language.

As you can see, it really isn’t worth the gamble to trust your website to companies who promise cheap web hosting. Alpine Web Media provides both Windows and Linux web hosting based in the USA, with fast, reliable service.

Believe it or not, I once had a client who quickly got first page results on Yahoo but was afraid of his own success and wanted out.

One of my first clients back in those days, enjoyed a number one, page one placement in Yahoo under ‘Vermont country stores’. These days, that is a very competitive search term and even getting on page one of Google results is a monumental task. Ok, back to the story. One day, I asked my client how everything was going. He asked, “You know that webby thing you did on the computer?”. I nodded yes. “Well, people keep coming into my store and saying Hey, Ralph…I saw you on the web.”

I was a bit puzzled and replied, “…but Ralph, that’s a GOOD thing!” Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to think so. He said that he didn’t have a computer so he couldn’t see the web ad (even though I had offered to give him printed hard copies). “Well,” he snorted, “I can see my ads on TV but this webby thing makes me nervous because I can’t see it and it makes me nervous when people come in my store and say they saw me there.”

He was very happy when I took down his “webby thing” and people stopped coming into his store and mentioning that they had seen him on the web. With the millions of businesses that would do most anything to be seen and easily found, I came across the one businessman who wanted no part of it.

Only in Vermont!

The days of tossing up a website on the fly and waiting for the world to beat a path to your door are long gone. First, determine the purpose of what your website will be. Search for the competition and try to learn how challenging it will be to compete. If you have a relatively new idea, you may have low keyword competition but a problem with familiarity. For instance, I develop a new product called “Tredlitely Chocolate Bon-Bons”. More than likely, I will have no problem coming up number one in a search for that phrase. However, without a huge marketing and branding campaign, no one would be searching for that phrase anyway. This is where niche keywords can be a great help. Don’t focus on the keyword “Chocolate” if you have a new website because your chances of competing for that keyword are slim to none. Instead, try to focus on “chocolate bon-bons” which would have a more narrowed focus, yet lower competitive ratio.

Here are a few free SEO tools to get you started:

• Nice Searcher - A free, online tool for comparing keywords and determining their effectiveness.
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - This keyword tool is powered by Wordtracker’s API and offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
• Xinu - Great for a quick check of your (or your competition’s) PageRank, backlinks and much more.
• Self SEO - Offers a wide variety of other free, online tools for checking page links, popularity and more. The best way to get your website off to a good start is to research what your competition is doing using these type of tools. Why re-invent the wheel?