1. Possibly the single most important element for determining the “theme” of a web page, the header tag seems to be often overlooked completely by people new to SEO.

So, I’ve added another article to my SEO-101 section. It’s called “Header Tag Tips” and I think it’s worth a read.

As always, any thoughts, comments, or criticism are welcomed here…

I was contacted by a business that wanted to leave their current situation (a SEO  / hosting / website management / web design environment) quickly and cleanly. That should be simple, right? The trick was, he didn’t want his current consultant to know until it was complete.

Everything was done in under four hours, and we were all ready to change the DNS Name Servers, when I asked if it was inappropriate for him to use this previous design. In other words, did he owe this company money? Was the design completely his to use?

Well, he ended up dragging his feet a bit, and then left things sit for a week, and the old designer found the site, because his Google analytics code was still in it.

Yes, dumb me, we moved it exactly as it was, and we were busted by the old designer, who called the client to ask about it. One day my phone rang, and it was my client telling me we’d been caught, and wanting me to deny any contact with him. He asked me to lie to the other designer in case he called.

The next minute, while still on the phone with my client, my other line rang, and it was the first designer asking me why I had stolen his clients site. Aaaaggghhh!

Placing him on hold, I returned to my client call where he instructed me not to spill the beans, and even gave me a semi-plausible lie to use. Returning to the designer, I spouted my lie halfheartedly, and hung up knowing damn well that he didn’t believe me.

Returning to the client, I told him to please wrap this up soon, because I valued my reputation for integrity, and this put me in a very precarious spot. The other designer claimed to be well known, and I did not want him believing I had lied of my own volition.

Jumping ahead two weeks, and I’ve not heard from my client in over a week now, and my emails go unanswered. I’m not sure if I’m looking for advice, consolation, or redemption by writing this here, but I’ll never let it happen again, that’s for sure!

There is an entire industry that does nothing except buy and resell expired domain names, and most of their inventory comes from grabbing the expired domain names of businesses just like yours.

Knowing these ten items below could save you hours of time & aggravation, and save your businesses hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

These are, in my opinion, the ten things you absolutely must know about your company domain name…

Domain registrar company name – This is the company that your domain was purchased from. The registrars website is the only place you can update or renew any domain information – look this up at http://www.betterwhois.com and type in your domain name, then a confirmation code you’ll be provided. Instantly, you’ll be given the name of your registrar.

Domain registrar username and password – Wherever your domain was registered, there is a user name and password required make any changes. This username and password is crucial for you to know.

After determining the registrar, visit their website and attempt to log in. If you don’t know the login and account name, you’re going to have to contact them, either by phone or by email.

Domain registrant – Normally, the business owner is the registrant. But, whoever possesses the registrar username and password is effectively in control of the domain.

The registrant is the legal owner, but many companies find out too late that they’re not the registrants of their own domain names! Often, it is an ex-employee, or the web hosting or design company they hired to create the website.

This leaves the site owner out in the cold if they ever want to make hosting or design changes. Your initial search at http://www.betterwhois.com will also show this information below the name of the registrAR.

Domain registrant contact information – The contact information of the registrant MUST be kept current at the website of the registrar. If you register a domain name and then change your email address or ISP, you will never be notified that your domain name is expiring, and you will lose your domain name.

Verify the registrant contact information at the registrar website. This is how most domain names are lost. When the expiration date comes up, the registrar attempts to notify the registrant. If there’s no response, then you lose it.

Domain Expiration Date – For obvious reasons, you should be well aware of when your domain name is set to expire. There are vultures perched on every tree branch waiting to pounce on your expired domain name, then try to sell it back to the rightful owner at 20, 50, or even 100 or 1000 times the actual cost.

Domain Locked Status – New domain name registrations are locked by default at the registrar. This means no changes can take place without an email notification getting sent to the registrar. If you’ve had your domain for a couple of years, your registrar may not have your domain name locked. Check this at your registrant website.

Your Web host – It’s hard to believe, but many businesses faced with the loss of a key employee don’t even know who is hosting their website. To determine your webhost, do the following”

1. Use http://www.betterwhois.com to determine your “Name Server” settings
2. Visit DNS Stuff and use the search box under “DNS Lookup”, (selecting “NS” from the dropdown box) to search for one of your Name Server settings. Just type in the domain name, without the first prefix, which is usually NS.
3. This should give you the name of the domain that owns your name servers. In many cases it will match, but in some cases, it will be another domain name.
4. After you have the Name Server owners domain name, just visit that site to get their contact information.

FTP Username and password of your domain – Not only is it important to know the company that’s hosting your domain, but you should also know their phone number, email, and their website. However, to make any changes to your website, you need to know your FTP address, your FTP user name, and your FTP password.

This information is to be guarded closely, and should always be changed after any key employee or subcontractor leaves your employment.

Domain control panel access – This is provided by your web host for convenience, and it’s where you would add or remove any email addresses, mailing lists, FTP users, or subdomains to your current domain.

Complete control of everything in your website starts here, and the username and password for the control panel should also be held close, and distributed only on a “need to know” basis.

Website Visitor Statistics – Only the most antiquated web hosts don’t offer free comprehensive reporting on your site visitors. Amazingly, many business owners aren’t even aware that they exist, or have no idea of the wealth of knowledge that they hold. Contact your webhost, and find out where and how you access your site statistics and give them a look.

Some Definitions:

Domain name – This is your url or your “address” on the web. www.domainname.com

Registrant – This is the legal owner of any domain name. Contrary to popular belief, this can is not always the business owner or company that is using the domain name

Registrar – This is an online service for registering domain names. There are dozens, perhaps even hundreds of registrars to choose from, and prices range from $7 to $30 per year, per domain name.

How devastated would you be if you lost your domain name and all of your company email addresses? Not a month goes by that I don’t encounter yet another business that got caught with their pants down… Don’t you be next!

Find out the answers to these ten items, fill them out on a worksheet, and keep it safe for future reference. You never know when you’ll need it.

Google was the first to announce broad support for XML sitemaps, and that has made it easier to submit your site to Google. Their webmaster tools may then be used to identify problems on your site as well.

At Pubcon this past week, it was announced during the “Search Engine Smackdown” that XML Sitemaps have been standardized, and that Yahoo, MSN and Google were all on board with a big group hug. Ask.com’s Peter Tinsley said they would be supporting it too very soon.
This is a noteworthy improvement in the way search engines will interact with webmasters, and I give the credit to Google for bringing about this improvement

What is an XML sitemap?

Sitemaps are how webmasters should inform search engines about pages on their websites that are available. This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site, and they will discover what you want them to.
Besides listing URLs, XML sitemaps include other data about each URL:

1. When was the last update
2. How frequently the page changes
3. How important each page is, relative to other pages in the site

Using an XML Sitemap does not guarantee that your pages will be included in search engines, but it’s a good start. Read more about it at Sitemaps.org
What do I use?

I often get asked what Sitemap software I use, and I’ve hopped aroung a bit. While there are others with more features, I really enjoy the simplicity of Site Map Builder.net for creation of my XML sitemaps. It’s fast, easy, and it works well.

Don’t confuse an XML Sitemap with a static sitemap, which I still recommend using on every website. A static site is a page that lists all the pages on your website in a user friendly way. To this day, the best static sitemap software I’ve found is an online service.

It automatically crawls your site, using your meta data (title and description) to create the listings. It generates the .html code, then you just copy and paste it into your own design. It’s free, and available here

If you are a web hosting customer of ours, this is an urgent wake up call. By the end of 2006, your site may no longer function properly unless you act now. Microsoft has already discontinued Unix server support for Front Page, and Windows hosting support is likely not far behind.

Recently Microsoft announced that FrontPage 2003 will be the last version of FrontPage to be released. The product has reached its “End of Life” with Microsoft. Microsoft also announced that the Unix FrontPage server extensions have also reached their EOL date. The official EOL date for Unix extensions was on June 30th 2006.

Many features used in FrontPage websites are based on FrontPage Server Extensions released by Microsoft. Things like form processing, themes, hit counters and even website publishing. These features are collectively known as the FrontPage web-bots, and they are all coming to an end on our Unix systems.

We’ve continued to run the unsupported Unix FrontPage extensions on our servers since June to try to provide as much support for customers as possible, however, we are officially announcing the end, effective January 1, 2007.

Having the server extensions support dropped by Microsoft leaves us in a bad position and we must remove these extensions from the servers to avoid leaving the servers open to a possible attack.

SearchCommander.com plans on removing the FrontPage extensions from all of our Unix servers on December 31st, 2006. After this date, any site using the FrontPage server extensions on Unix at the end of this year will no longer work properly.

We MAY decide to pull support even earlier if any incompatibility or security issue arise, since there will be no further patches or upgrades to fix these issues.

Microsoft has also announced that it will be replacing FrontPage with two new product lines…

These lines are SharePoint Designer, aimed at businesses and teams of developers working on a single site. Expression Web Designer is the other line, targeted towards your average business web designer or home user. Both of these products are based on more standardized code and features than Front Page.

It is very likely that once these two new products are out, the Windows server FrontPage extensions will also be discontinued, so you should stop using them now even on windows servers. Neither of these new products will require or use the features in the FrontPage server extension package.

This puts you in an unfortunate but unavoidable position. Many of our users use FrontPage not only on Unix but also on Windows as well. With Unix support already being terminated and Windows likely to follow, the time has come to convert to more standardized web practices.

There is no upgrade path or any one clear direction for each of our users. Each webmaster will have to determine the best possible path for them to take.

All Unix users will be forced to switch over to Windows hosting within the next 3 months, keeping their existing FrontPage extension sites on-line.

We will then be removing the FrontPage extension controls from the control panel to avoid any new instances of FrontPage being installed.

We are strongly urging all users who use the FrontPage server extensions, Unix or Windows, to standardize their web practices and STOP USING the Front Page extensions at the earliest possible date.

There are several different paths that can be taken for the users of the FrontPage server extensions, and we’ll outline some of them below so you can make an educated decision.

1) Wait For Microsoft Expression Web Design
Users can wait for Expression Web Designer to be released by Microsoft and then convert their existing sites to the new formats and technologies. There will likely not be any built in functionality as there is in FrontPage with its web-bots. We are also not sure if there will be a built in FrontPage converting tool.

Pricing for the software is likely to be around $400 and it is said to be ready for stores by the end of the year. This is just information gathered from various Internet postings so please don’t hold SearchCommander.com to the pricing or release dates.

2) Unix users can move to Windows:
Moving from Unix to Windows is a very viable solution for the time being, and will buy you a little bit of time. We are going to try to continue to support the Windows FP extensions for as long as possible. However, if there is a security exploit for FP we will have to remove the support from Windows as well, and you will be out of luck. Therefore, you need to get off the FP extensions ASAP…

In the event of a security exploit on the FP extensions for Windows, we will check to see if Microsoft releases a patch to fix the exploit. If they do not release a patch for the extensions we will have to pull support for those as well. Please use this option only to buy yourself a little extra time to get one of the other options to work for you. This is not intended to be a permanent solution.

3) Continue Using FrontPage on UNIX, but WITHOUT using the server extensions:
This is always a valid option for any of our users. FrontPage is a decent web design program that will continue to work without the use of the FrontPage extensions. Users can build their websites in FrontPage locally on their computers and FTP them to the server using a FTP client or the built in FrontPage FTP client. Other features like form processing and hit counters will need to be replaced using scripts. There are many places on the Internet to find free scripts for form processing and hit counters that are built using PHP or ASP.

4) Use a web design program other than Microsoft FrontPage:
This is pretty much the same option as #3. There are many other design programs on the market such as Adobe Dreamweaver, or Coffeecup Designer. Many of these programs use standardized web processing and all of them would still require replacements for the FrontPage web-bots.

Each one of these options may or may not be right for you, and there are others too, including blogs and content management systems (CMS) but one thing is certain –

You MUST STOP using Front Page Extensions before the end of this year on your Unix hosting account.

Please evaluate each option above, and decide what is best for you and your website before your site stops working.

Please ask your questions about this here, as blog comments, so that all of our users may benefit form the answers.

Any web hosting support emails about this subject will also be posted here, and I will answer each one personally.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but hey, the world is a changing place!

If you’re used to using http://validator.w3.org/ to try to validate your pages, then you’re going to absolutely FLIP if you haven’t seen this before – http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Perhaps this tool has been around forever, and people who are “in the know” will wonder where I’ve been hiding that I missed it, but I don’t care. It’s SO useful, and just saved me SO much time, that I had to tell someone about it.

That said, is site validation really important for SEO?  That’s another post…

If Google is showing a description for your search listing that you don’t like, then…

1. You have not got a` properly worded meta description tag. If that’s the case, then you should read this – http://www.pdxtc.com/seo101

2. Lately, Google may be showing the DMOZ directory description, instead of the keyword rich description tag you”ve painfully written for each page.

Google has finally posted this as a fact:

Adding this Meta tag will prevent Google specifically from using this information to describe a page:

This isn’t a new meta tag, merely an annoncement that Google will follow it. So…add the tag to your code and move on, or, read about it at Google

You have to look at your website from a customer standpoint, and make every page have the same identical buttons, all located in the same place etc. That’s important, because people will decide in less than 1/4 of a second if they’ll stay on your site or not.

There’s no point spending money to drive traffic if you’re not going to capitalize on those visitors that do arrive. Determine your goal for your site visitors. Is your desire to receive a phone call or quote form? Then that should be the focus of every page, with the phone number and “Get a free quote now” graphic on the header of every page.

Every single day I look at company websites that have no visible phone number, or hard to find contact information, and a general lack of insight about what their customers might actually be looking for. Unfortunately, these sites don’t just need search engine visibility, they need a  user friendly redesign!

By contrast, every single day I also look at websites designed by industry leaders. Helping them fine tune their conversion rates (getting visitors to act in some fashion) and defining what their customers want has really opened my eyes.

 One of my favorite websites, used to be http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/suckframe.htm which was updated quite a while ago to this more modern version http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/.

Both examples are chock full of bad design tips that may be hurting your website to this day. If you’re a  business without a big budget, look at those sites for examples of what not to do that can quickly improve your websites profitability.

In your Internet Explorer web browser, do some websites appear to be “broken”?

Do Flash menus and some other web page items frequently have a dotted line around them?

When you put your mouse over them, do you see a small yellow box proclaiming that you should “click to activate and use this control”?

A recent Microsoft Internet Explorer security update has “fixed” this vulnerability for you, causing you to have to “patch their patch”, if you want to use these menus and items on certain websites.

Ultimately, the responsibility of safe and compatible web design lies in the hands of web designers, however, at the moment, it’s YOU that’s inconvenienced.

To fix this annoying “protection’ that Microsoft has imposed upon you via automatic updates, you can either use the Firefox web browser or visit Microsofts website and download their “patch for their patch” – here

A domain name in your own name costs just $17.50 per year, and web hosting starts at $9.99 a month with PDXTC. Why would you pay hundreds of dollars a year for service elsewhere?

I suppose this is just a commercial, but every single day I see businesses that have been paying a fortune years to the same person or web hosting company, just because that’s where they began.

The cost for web space, bandwidth, data storage, backups and even the servers themselves have all dropped to just 30% of what they used to cost.  Are you still paying 1999 prices for your web hosting?

Few companies hesitate passing along increased expenses to their customers, but when was the last time your hosting company told to that your monthly bill was going down? 

If you’re paying $300 a year or more for simple business web hosting, or being charged for “extra mailbox” for your company email, then take a look at what a modern hosting plan can offer for just a fraction of the cost.

Not to mention that all PDXTC web hosting servers are in the secure Pittock building in downtown Portland Oregon, and monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  This kind of speed and reliability cannot be matched by most other Oregon web hosting companies.

View the PDXTC web hosting plans here – Unix and Windows web hosting are available

Is it possible to get a decent website for free? Well, yes it actually is, if you’re willing to spend a little time using some great free software. How little time? A clever 9 year old can have something online for the world to see in as little as 15 minutes.

All PDXTC web hosting packages come with FREE site design software called Site Studio. It’s easy to use, and creates a pretty nice finished product.

You can see a few Site Studio finished sites here. Some were created by PDXTC web hosting customers, and some were done for them, but were created using the free templates that come with every web hosting package.  

Try out the free Site Studio design demo, and when you’re ready to actually get a site online, all you have to do is sign up for an Oregon web hosting package and you’ll have instant access to the software.

I’ve noticed that more and more companies are using blogs as their website, as opposed to adding a blog TOO their website. This gives the owners total control over what’s said, and the freedom to update whenever they want, from any computer, with no web designer required.

I have some blog design info here, and below is an entire site devoted to business blog consulting.

Business Blog Consulting Companies : Business Blog Consulting