• What should my website look like?
• Whom should I contact to make a design for my website?
• Is there a quick way to grab some ready-to-use designs which I can use for my website?

The design, layout and look and feel of your new website are some of the most crucial parts of the whole process of getting a new website made. A poorly designed website may not captivate the attention of the user visiting it, could be boring or might not be able to convert the users to customers for you. Therefore, choosing the right design for your website is very important.

Today, there are hundreds of websites on the web which offer thousands of website templates to people looking to start their new websites. DreamTemplate is a website selling thousands web templates, flash templates and powerpoint and word templates categorized according to different themes. They even have free website templates which can help you start a business or personal website in no time. You can also benefit from their limited time offer for unlimited access to all their website templates for a special price of only $59.95!

Benefits of using web templates

Choosing a website template to start your new site has its own benefits. Some of the most important benefits are listed below:

• You have a wide variety of options available to choose from
• Instant availability of design
• Saves time contacting a web design firm which can take a lot of time, effort and money
• HTML Text is also available readily so you do not have to worry about the design conversion
• You also have an option to pay the unique price for a template

There are many more advantages of choosing a website template for your website. Another interesting thing about these templates is that they follow the latest design guidelines. If you hire a web designer, you might be worried if the designer will be able to make a design for you which is colorful, trendy, stylish, and modern, is user friendly and meets your needs. Moreover, you should make sure that the design is completely user friendly as well as search engine friendly so you will not have problems with the site later on.

So if you plan to buy a template for your next website, visit www.dreamtemplate.com

Title Tags, Meta Keywords and Meta Description Tags, along with the website content and keywords used in the body content all contribute towards the on-site or on-page factors. What webmasters sometimes ignore is that the design and development of a website is also another factor which affects Search Engine Rankings.

A website can be designed with a table layout or it can be made div-based. The DIV based design uses CSS styling to control the layout of the entire page. Since most of the design is controlled through the CSS Style Sheets, the HTML code of the web pages itself decreases considerably, hence improving the Text to HTML ratio of every page of the website. This improvement helps in on-page optimization and hence, can lead to improved Search Engine Rankings.

Having a Search Engine Friendly website is important for improved Search Engine Rankings. Some webmasters focus on making their websites W3C compliant. However, it should be taken into consideration that W3C standards are over-hyped and making websites compliant is not extremely necessary.

Other factors which contribute to having a Search Engine Friendly website include the following:

• Text based navigation
• Good Internal Linking of the web pages
• Website Sitemap

Other things to avoid are the following:

• Flash navigation
• JavaScript drop down navigations
• Use of Frames
• Flash based website

So when you design and develop your website, make sure you follow the above listed points to make it as Search Engine Friendly as possible. Stay tuned for more tips on making search engine friendly websites.

is an Arizona web design company in Phoenix, Arizona, based in the US, which provides Arizona SEO services to clients. It is an online marketing and web design and development company which has been successfully serving its clients for more than 10 years. They provide a complete range of online business solutions, starting from web site hosting to design and development of websites, to search engine optimization and online marketing. The website itself is ranking high on search engines and coming on page 1 for its main keywords like “Arizona search engine optimization”, “Arizona SEO”, “Arizona web design”, “Arizona web company” and several other key phrases.

has worked with some of the leading businesses in various industries, including travel, finance, entertainment, health, ecommerce and service sectors. Some of their featured clients include big names like Nissan, National Car Rental and University of Phoenix. Be sure to check out their cool before and after gallery which features selected projects from their portfolio.

Here is a screenshot I saved from Google for my rankings

Sadly, I just checked it a few minutes back and my site is again near the bottom of page 6 on Google. I’m looking forward to a lot of improvement in this week, especially after the new updates get indexed on Google.

There are now 3,480 results on Google SERPs for the search term SEOContest2008. Almost 55 days to go. They are definitely going to increase to a very large amount.

Yahoo Back Links Update for my SEOContest2008 page

I checked my back links on Yahoo yesterday and I had 13 Inlinks to www.seo-reloaded.com/seocontest2008/, but when I checked them in the morning today, Yahoo! wasn’t showing any links at all, which was a bit strange. I rechecked the Inbound links again now, and they are finally back. Yahoo is showing 43 Incoming links to my SEO Contest 2008 page, which is good

Here is the link to check my updated links on Yahoo to the contest page:

Yahoo InLinks for www.seo-reloaded.com/seocontest2008/

UKWebmasterWorld.com is holding a 2 month contest starting from 1st February 2008 and ending on 31st March 2008. Google.com will choose the winning entry and results will be checked on 1st April 2008 1pm UK time.

The rules for the contest are simple!

1. Create a brand new page on an existing website, domain or sub-domain of your website which has no backlinks to it, and compete in the contest to take it to Number 1 on Google in 2 months for the keyword SEOContest2008!

2. Insert the following HTML code into the competitive design page, where “your name” is the ID you use on the forum:

<a href=”http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com/” target=”_blank” user=”your name”>UK webmaster forum seo contest</a>

3. Register yourself on the website to enter yourself in the SEO Contest as an entrant, using the registration form.

I entered the contest yesterday with this new page for SEOContest2008 on my blog.

You can also register yourself today for the grand prize of $1000 or $100 for the 3 runner up positions. Winners will receive the prize through PayPal transfer!

For more updates on the contest and its progress, do visit my contest page regularly!

Change from 2 column to 3 column

I wanted to have a new 3 column layout blog, so I tried my HTML skills last week to change my blog to a 3-column format from the old 2 column layout I was using before. I’ve tried to keep it similar to the old design so my viewers don’t get a completely new blog when they visit seo reloaded

Dedicated IP for my blog

I now have dedicated IP for my blog which is great You can access my blog by going to http://208.76.245.13/

Yes I was announced the winner of the free LCD giveaway at Cash For Comments!

I won the free 24 LCD contest at CashForComments.com but did not get the time to update it on my blog. So I’m officially announcing the contest results on my blog and the prize I got from Prija. It was the second contest I won online, after the T-shirt from EverybodyGoTo.com

I’m a sponsor at the Car Give Away at Blogging The Movie

As a thank you note to Prija for the lovely 24 inch LCD, I decided to give something back to him by becoming a car sponsor at BloggingTheMovie.com and I was the 23rd sponsor out of the expected 500

You can also become one of the car sponsors by buying a link for $100 only and get excellent chances of promoting your blog or website. You will get 2 free reviews on his sites, with links to your website or blog, a permanent link on the car sponsors page and your domain on the two Scion tC’s, free car giveaway. Be part of the 1st FREE car giveaway in blogging history with a one time payment of $100. Only 500 spots are available, so hurry before they are filled up.

You can access these SEO adjusted packages through webhostingsearch.com. There you can also find lots of new packages, including cheap web hosts, linux hosting, and much more.

Website owners and newbies especially need some kind of guidance or assistance to help make their online presence a success by driving more and more users to their website. Tony Williams’ ebook named Web Traffic in black and white is just the book to cover all the different kinds of methods that one can use to drive traffic to their website. I recently got a chance to read the e-book and in my opinion the book has everything you need to know about the secrets of driving traffic to your website, whether it is free traffic or paid traffic using PPC or any other kind of online advertisement. After reading it, I was surprised to find several methods which I was overlooking which could actually drive tons of traffic to my sites.

Guide to Drive Traffic to your site

There are lots of ways of driving traffic to a website, including white hat and black hat methods. Most of the methods involve optimizing your website so that it ranks high on the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). The ebook discusses all the possible methods that one can use to drive traffic to their website.

1. Keyword Research

One of the most important steps before starting any website is a thorough Keyword research, which helps refine your niche, the topics you should be targeting in your area of interest and other niche or long tail keywords which you can target to drive traffic to your website.

2. Start Early

As with any other profitable niche or idea, you should always start your website or new project as soon as you think of the idea. Starting a website early can also help you drive more traffic to your website, especially if the topic id related to something new which can cause a hype among the internet users. Also, starting a website early can help you prevent the Google sandbox penalty and your site will get indexed over time, which will eventually lead traffic to your site.

3. On-page optimization and formatting

This part of the ebook covers some of the most crucial and important factors any website owner needs to know who is interested in driving quality and targeted traffic to their website. Some of the on-page factors addresses in the book include Title Tags, Meta Tags, Alt Tags, on-site optimization and similar factors you should be aware of before starting your online project.

4. Fresh and regularly updated content

As most of you might already know, Content is King in the SEO world. Regularly updated websites help drive a lot of traffic to them, and also get natural back links to them from other websites.

5. Buying Traffic

Paid traffic using PPC (Pay Per Click) methods, Online Advertising, Banner exchanges, Paid Links and reviews are all different methods of driving traffic to any website. Many more traffic buying methods are explained in detail in the ebook.

6. Free Web Traffic

Like paid traffic driving methods, there are also free methods which can be used to drive traffic to any website. These methods include Social Bookmarking, Traffic Exchanges, and similar methods.

7. Getting Links for your site

Links are the most important factors when it comes to website rankings for any website. Where Content is considered as King in the SEO World, Linking is considered the Queen in Search Engine Optimization. The ebook discusses and explains the importance of Anchor Texts and discusses all the different methods for “How to get Backlinks” which you wouldn’t want to miss at any cost!

8. Search Engine Indexing

Once your website is up and running, you need it properly indexed on the Search Engines to achieve any rankings on the SERPs. Methods that can help you get your site properly indexed on the Search Engines are also discussed in detail in Web Traffic in Black & White by Tony Williams.

9. Black Hat Methods

Any kind of black hat methods of SEO or promotion should be avoided for a website at all costs, and this section for Black Hat Methods guides newbies about the things they should avoid in order to stay away from any Search Engine Penalties or ban.

10. More Traffic Building Ideas

Tony discusses several other traffic building ideas that you can use to drive traffic to your website. You can actually use these methods to drive a wealth of traffic to your site, for free!

11. Surefire methods of getting traffic

The e-book lists all the Surefire methods of getting traffic to your website, which you will find useful and helpful, even if you have been in the website promotion business for some time now.

So if you are serious about making your online business a success by driving traffic and users to your website, then you should definitely go for the Ultimate Web Traffic Guide by Tom Williams. And the best thing about it is that it is only for $27 and you can instantly get it delivered to your mailbox by ordering online.

One tip is through the use of web proxy sites. This is the most recommended option since there is no need to perform any difficult technical work or hack into any computer. You will just need to use these specific websites as the platform to access Facebook and Bebo . Using web proxy sites means your search will no longer be filtered and will be undetected by your administrator. Numerous proxy sites are available online and most of them can be used free of any charges.

Despite its non-monetary and virtually good-willed purposes, Craigs list has been bombarded of a controversy that usually deals with unfair trade. Companies that focus on posting ads are threatened of the free service that Craiglist provides, due to the fact that people would choose a free service provider over them. But to craigslist’s defense, they do not charge for any of their service because of the non-monetary belief that their company has established, and solely charge paid job ads on cities such San Francisco Bay Area ($75 per ad); New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C. and Chicago (all aforementioned cities are charged $25 per ad). Despite the miniscule amount of workers needed to operate this functional website, around 23 employees only, Craiglist has placed 34th among the most famous websites in the World Wide Web, and 9th place as the most popular in the United States. But not all controversies were focused on company against another company. There were also moral issues thrown against Craiglist, such as the blatant postings of adult ads on the site. Craiglist fixed this by putting up disclaimers against boards, such as “women seeking women”, “casual encounters” (the most controversial so far) and “erotic services”, along with the user power to flag any content that they come upon which they feel is overboard, so that moderators can easily identify posts that are offensive. For more information about craigslist.org visit http://craigslistinfo.info

For those who do not know, Ali at EverybodyGoTo.com has designed funny t shirts and was giving away one free t-shirt to his blog readers every week till the end of September. I chose the “Comments Closed” shirt as it was one of the shirts especially designed for female bloggers. The shirt arrived in a Cafepress packing and I have some images here to share with my readers I even went ahead and took a photo of the parcel before opening it! Thank you Hyder for the wonderful shirt

You can see his entire collection of funny t shirts at his online store and order one for yourself.

A good and professional SEO Company can always do the submissions for you in a much more efficient manner and in much more less time, as they already know the most important, high quality and popular link directories on the web. What’s more, professional SEO Companies know that your website is valuable for you, which is why they take great care in choosing the most appropriate link texts and link descriptions for the submissions, and also choose the most appropriate category or sub-category which meets your website theme.

Professional Web Directory Submission companies also know that automated submissions are not the right thing to go for when submitting websites to web directories. That is why they take care to do manual directory submission to quality web directories, making sure that your website is accepted and listed on the directory by following the submission guidelines closely for each directory.

If you are looking for a professional directory submission service, be sure to check out SubmitElite.com. They are professionals in web directory submissions and also have a list of regularly updated free directories where they will manually submit your website to. Every order is taken personally and a detailed report is emailed once the order is complete. Submit Elite offer different submission timings also, and allow you to enter 5 different title text variations and 3 different link descriptions for the submission. The best thing about them is that their services are highly professional, yet the price is very reasonable, priced at only $0.10 per directory submission.

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing the site as per the needs of search engines. Nowadays most of the users using the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for search on the internet. Because of that its very important for site to rank high on the search engines. High ranking sites on search engines can generate lots of business and its one of the very powerful tool for brand promotion.

SEO optimization is mainly divided into two parts.

1. Onpage optimization
2. Offpage optimization

Below are the major factors of onpage optimization

• Title / Meta Tags
• Keyword Research & Analysis
• Site Navigation
• HTML Sitemap
• Content Analysis
• URL optimization
• Google Analytics Implementation

Below are the major factors of offpage optimization

Link Building

Backlinks for the site can be generate by directory submissions, article submissions, press releases, social bookmarkings.

According to Wikipedia, “Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.”

If you own a website and know some tricks for online marketing, you can use Affiliate Marketing to earn some extra income to compensate your day job. A successfully carried out Affiliate Marketing Campaign can help earn much more than your day job, which is why Affiliate Marketing has become so popular. The whole idea behind affiliate marketing is to drive traffic to the primary company whose affiliate program is being promoted by publishers. This helps drive traffic and a far greater number of potential buyers to the primary company and helps them make sales. As a reward, the primary company pays a small commission or part of the sale to the publisher or affiliate who has helped drive that traffic to the website.

There is a great deal of profit to be made by successful affiliate marketing. All you need to do is get yourself familiar with what is Affiliate Marketing, Which Affiliate Networks to choose, How to choose profitable affiliate programs related to your website niche, and other tips to promote your affiliate website once it is up and running.

You can find an excellent guide for Affiliate Marketing at BizFive Business Directory, which outlines the following important topics:

Affiliate Marketing Overview

The Affiliate Marketing Process

Affiliate Strategies

• Organic Search Engine Optimization
• Paid Search Advertising
• Social Media and RSS Feeds
• Niche Sites
• Direct Marketing

Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing

The article has everything you’ll need to start your own Affiliate website and start earning money in no time.

You can also find more interesting articles at BizFive.com for SEO and Marketing, Monetization, Business Basics, Web Design and Development and even an article on Starting your own LLC, Limited Liability Company. You can also submit your website to the Business Directory or use their Online Web Tools.

What is a Web Host?

A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. This ‘computer’ is called a server. A web hosting service provider will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web. With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and proper technical maintenance. That’s the whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to web hosting professionals while you focus on your own internet business.

Features Offered

The features that web hosting companies offer are getting quite standard nowadays. The following are some of the common features you’ll see in most web hosting plans:

· Control Panel

Control Panel is an interface where you can access your site on the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently update and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by far the most popular control panel; some hosting providers customize their own so that they can up-grade and expand it at will.

· Diskspace

A vast majority of sites that don’t have tons of graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in 50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in case you need to upgrade.

· Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted or received through a unit of time. In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed when visitors make requests for files on your web site and download them to their personal computers.

· Email Account

With POP3 email accounts you can check email from Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora or any other Email software.

· Scripting language

As all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform, php, perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about here. It is best to choose a host that supports the latest version to maximize the latest web technologies for the fee that you pay.

· Database

If your web site is going to store a lot of data that should be dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices, maps, Interactive news, message boards and forums etc.), you’ll need to look for an account that offers a database. MySQL is a powerful and most popular database program that runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to handle million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed to scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal for database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites.

Customer Service/Support

No matter if you are an expert or a novice in web hosting, you need a web host with good customer support system. What is the criteria of an excellent customer support? Let me explain.

· How big is the knowledge base?

This is particularly important for those who want to search for aquick answer without seeking direct assistance from customer support staff. Due to the huge database, normally it’s searchable. Some web hosting providers will even make your life easier by making a video tutorial guiding you step by step in setting up your new account. Very useful for beginners.

· Responsive customer service staff.

If you are too lazy to find the answer out of a big pool of database, get the direct answer from someone who knows it. Direct customer support comes in a few forms.

a. Email support
b. Phone support:
Normally, sales and technical support uses separate phone line. A good phone support staff knows what your problem is and answers with relevance.
c.Web Host like Lunarpages and Hostgator even have live chat support.
However, it’s not how many support channels that are available but how responsive it is of the staff.

Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth Ratio

Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting Plan? Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting companies, in general, we’ve come to this conclusion: the more disk space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive is the monthly price.

Popularity

A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let’s face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, it’s very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry. We judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider by looking at the number of awards won, the reviews of other websites and the Alexa traffic ranking. You can find out the hosting reviews and ratings of all the hosting providers on this blog.

Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee

Nothing can hurt you more than this: your visitors come to your web site only to find that it’s not accessible. You lose credibility and possibly even a sale. If your web host does not guarantee at least a 99% uptime, leave the web host now!

To ensure maximum uptime, installation of redundant back-up systems is essential. Each web host has their own management systems to minimize downtime. “Redundant” means that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection will take over.

As for speed, even though routing, web server set up and local area networks play a part in determining the speed of a site, the main concern of how fast your site is depends very much on the types of network connections. Many hosting providers still connect to the Internet through T1, or T3 connections. This is not the case for our top 10 hosts- they are using OC (Optical Carrier) lines. A T1 line will offer data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second), while a T3 line can supply data transfer rates of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps. Higher levels are multiples of that speed. Ultra-High Speed OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps and 622Mbps respectively. Some hosting providers have connections to major internet backbones at the speed of OC48 (2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).