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Marlar Technologies

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We provide quality services to small businesses at completive prices and offer a complete line of products to help your web presents grow. Specailizing in getting your business on the net at prices you can afford. We can provide a one-page site to redeveloping your existing site, custom databases, and e-commerce pacakges avaiable.

Providing web services, development, hosting, optimization, marketing plans for small businesses. We can help put on the web and offer several packages to start your business on the web. Small business needs big experience to help them get started call us today for more information visit our website for more information.

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Web Develpoment

Improve your Search Engine Ranking

If you are an internet marketing novice, you are probably facing the seemingly impossible and somewhat daunting task of trying to get your site listed on the first page of the search engines. You probably have no idea how to improve your ranking. For the purposes of this discussion, we will outline the procedures you should follow to climb steadily to the top of the search engines, while still making sure that you attract qualified traffic that will actually be receptive to the products or services that your website offers.

The first thing you need to understand is that your search engine ranking will not improve overnight. There are quite a few charlatans in cyberspace who work as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants. They will charge you an arm and a leg for their services, sometimes as much as $2,000 per month or more. They often make dubious claims that they can get you ranked on the first page of the search engines within a few months, and if not, they will kindly refund your money.

However, there is a catch. Once you pay the initial deposit and the SEO company begins working on your website, they will often optimize your website in such a manner so that you will be able to quickly rise to the top of the rankings for a keyword that is either not significant or will not attract any real traffic to your website.

For example, if your website provides auto insurance quotes, any SEO consultant knows that it will be impossible to expediently get your website ranked on the first page of Google for a highly competitive phrase such as AUTO INSURANCE QUOTES. So, instead, they will pick a variation of that phrase, such as AUTO INSURANCE QUOTES FAST, for which there is no competition, and you will quickly rise to the top. The only problem is no one will ever actually use that precise phrase when searching for auto insurance quotes, so even though the SEO company delivered on its promise to improve your ranking, you will still not get any visitors to your website because you will be ranked high for a keyword that no one will ever use when searching for auto insurance quotes.

So, you need to use a different approach if you want to not only improve your ranking, but also attract qualified traffic to your website. The first thing you need to do is optimize your website for the keywords or phrases that people actually use when searching for products or services related to what you offer. For example, if you sell vitamins, you would want to improve your ranking for the phrases BUY VITAMINS or BUY VITAMINS ONLINE. To optimize your website for your chosen keywords, you should either hire a web designer that has experience optimizing websites, or you should purchase search engine optimization software that will show you how to tweak your website and how to change your HTML code so that your site is properly optimized. You should also try to have a decent amount of free content on your website that relates to the keywords or phrases for which you want to be ranked higher.

The next step is to submit your site to the search engines, if you have not already done so. It seems silly to mention this considering that we are talking about search engines anyway, but some people actually forget to submit their website to the engines, or only submit their site to a couple of search engines and then quit. There are hundreds of legitimate search engines and directories in cyberspace, and you should submit to all them. I recommend that you look for search engine submission companies on Google and pick one that charges a small monthly fee to submit your site to the search engines once per month.

The last step, and probably the most important component of getting ranked higher on the search engines, is increasing your link popularity. The more websites that are linking to your site, the higher your ranking will be. To increase your link popularity, you will need to submit your website to link exchange directories so that you can swap links with other websites (they will link to you if you agree to link to them). Also, you can write articles and submit them to article submission directories. At the bottom of each article you write, you are allowed to include a link to your website. As the articles you write are put into circulation and are published on other websites, your link popularity will increase.

If you employ each of the strategies outlined in this article, you should be able to improve your search engine ranking while at the same time garnering the kind of traffic that you want. No website can improve its ranking overnight, but if you are persistent, your efforts will be rewarded in the long run.

Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make free HTML forms.

Google Puts Domains Up For Sale

Not its domain names, of course, but ones that people may want to register while signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain services. It could be an indication of Google's future intentions for the Apps services too.

Editor's Note: Google has teamed up with eNom and GoDaddy to offer up different domains for $10 per year. The cool part is that Google Apps for Your Domain service allows registrants to set up free email, IM, and calandar services with company logos. Would you let Google be your registrar? Discuss at WebProWorld.

Come for the applications, stay for the domain. That's Google's approach to enhancing the Google Apps for Your Domain service. The company has partnered with a pair of registration services, eNom and GoDaddy, to offer different domains for $10 per year.

Google engineer Costin Manolache also noted the offer includes private registration. This keeps personal information out of view of whois lookups. Google Apps for Your Domain offers five services that can be private-labeled by the organization. It's a quick and currently free way to offer members of an organization email, IM, and calendar services branded with the organization's name and logo.

Find Your Premium Domain Now! Click Here

A Google feature change article wouldn't be complete without a comparison to Microsoft. The competition between the two has been a wonder to watch, as Google poses a challenge to Microsoft that few technology companies ever have.

Microsoft offers a free domain registration as part of its Office Live service. There are three tiers of service, and they focus on establishing a website and email for the domain; higher tiers provide the Office Live Business Contact Manager service.

But Microsoft tucks in something else with all three tiers. They provide a free copy of the Office Live adManager beta tool, which is used for managing adCenter campaigns.

Google has kept its focus on effective communications over a variety of options. They have noted ever since the launch of the Apps service that a premium version will become available in the future.

Maybe that version will roll out an e-commerce edition of Apps. Google has Base for storing product information, Checkout for processing payments, and of course AdWords, their revenue generator, to promote a website and its products.

Google also has a partnership with Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks accounting software, in play. This placed management of AdWords, item posting to Base, and an option to get listed in Google Maps, in most of Intuit's 2007 product line.

The pieces are mostly there to make Apps a gateway to e-commerce. Instead of Microsoft, maybe Google will compete directly with Yahoo's small business e-commerce service.

Author: David Utter friday december 15, 2006 Webpronews.com

SEO Basics - Good Link, Bad Link

Your link profile is potentially the most powerful aspect of your SEO efforts, especially in the eyes of Google. Quality counts over quantity, but it is important to get a good list of well-balanced links pointing to your site. Diversification really is the key. Try not to concentrate all of your efforts on gaining links from one source, and similarly try not to gain them using a single method. A number of tactics should be avoided wherever possible because they either offer you no benefit whatsoever or your page may be penalized.

This article looks at the acquisition of links purely from an SEO standpoint and, aside from the really bad linking methods, if a link will provide good-quality, direct traffic then it is definitely still a good link and well worth considering. You will have to use your judgment on this, to a certain extent.

Good Links

Directory Links: Directories are viewed as being a very positive source of links by a number of search engines. Obviously, some directory listings carry much more weight than others and some directories are hardly worth the effort. Be careful to drip feed your site with directory links at first because it is possible that too many too quickly will see your site penalized until your link profile becomes more natural.
Start with the major Internet directories and consider getting links from free general topic directories as well as niche directories and also look at paying for inclusion in one or two of the seriously large directories like the Yahoo directory and business.com. As your link profile expands you can add more directories to gain extra weight.

Reciprocal Links: You may have read that reciprocal linking is dead. While it is true that Google and possibly other search engines now place much less weight on a profile that is crammed with nothing but reciprocal links they still have a place. Keep the number of reciprocal links you use down to a minimum and certainly don't base your entire link building efforts on this one tactic alone.
Again, balance is a big part of reciprocal linking but also of importance is relevance. Regardless of whether you offer a separate links or resources page, or you choose to include the links throughout your site you are still essentially endorsing the site. You will also gain much more credence from a link that is placed on a page containing information relevant to your own page.

Unique One-Way Inbound Links: These should pretty much be the staple diet of your link portfolio. An inbound link that is one way does not necessitate the inclusion of a link back to that page on your site. This can help to give your own pages the benefit instead of handing it out to your link partners. The more relevant and the more important that search engines deem the linking site to be the more weight they give that particular link.

Site Wide Links: Again, these should be used sparingly. Gaining a site wide link means that a link to your site or your pages is placed on a number of pages in a site. Search engines are known to give less weight to links that are procured on this basis but it does help to give your portfolio a more rounded appearance.

Press Release Links: Writing and submitting a digital press release can provide good links. Many press releases are used by other sites and industries related to your site and they may also be included on some major news websites. There are free press release distribution services available, but it is common to need t pay to make the link clickable and to use anchor text.

Article Links: Writing and submitting articles to article directories can provide a large number of links. Not only can you submit one article to numerous directories but each directory has the potential of generating a number of interested websites. These websites also publish your article (which includes an author bio section with your link). This can be a good way to get authoritative sites to link to you.

Community Links: Join forums and include your link in your signature. Post useful comments on other people's blogs and include your link as your username. You should, under no circumstances, spam blogs or forums and only include links on the sites that allow it.
Presell Advertising Pages: Some websites will allow you to include an entire page on their site. In most cases you will either need to pay to have the page written or you, or write the page yourself. Generally the website will also include other forms of advertising but as long as you choose sites carefully this can generate some excellent links.

Bad Links

FFA Sites: An FFA, or Free-For-All page, is one that allows anybody to post any link they like on the page. Typically they are not only useless to your cause, because the search engines ignore them, but they will not generate any natural traffic but may attract the spammers to your doors.

Link Farms: A link farm is a page that contains an excessively large number of links. Some say a page with 100 links directed out of that page is a link farm, but in all honesty it is unlikely that a page will yield much benefit for SEO or non-SEO with more than fifty or so links.

Off Topic: Off topic links are something of a bone of contention. They may offer very slight weight with some search engines because it is quite possible that natural links from certain websites would point to any number of pages on any topic. This appears in the bad link section because they offer very little positive benefit and your efforts would be best placed gaining on-topic links.

Unindexable: Purely from an SEO standpoint, links that cannot be indexed by search engines are completely useless. A search engine spider must be able to follow the link to find your page and provide you with any benefit for that link. Avoid any page that offers to display your link in a frame, or includes the noindex or nofollow robots.txt tags. However, bear in mind that a site that is currently not being indexed by search engines may be a new site. It could also grow up to be the next Google.com and take your link with it.

Conclusion:Your link profile should appear as natural as possible so vary the good links as much as possible and avoid the bad links. Collect links from as many sources using as many tactics as possible and use keyword variants in your anchor text. By following these guidelines you should be able to improve the appearance of your link profile and, therefore, improve your search engine rankings.

About the Author: WebWiseWords is a web content writer and is also establishing theseoglossary.com to help those that want to conduct their own SEO. The site includes definitions, articles, resources, and tools as well as SEO tutorials.

Understanding HTML Color Codes

Understanding HTML Color Codes
By Fred Black (c) 2006

When I help people with web pages, I encourage them to edit
the HTML directly and not rely on programs like Microsoft
FrontPage or Adobe GoLive to layout their pages. One of the
things that most people have a hard time grasping is what
HTML Color Codes mean and how they work.

HTML Color Codes are 6 characters wide and look like
"#80FF12". This is really made up of 3 2-digit hex numbers
that represent Red, Green, and Blue. I probably just lost a
good portion of the readers, didn't I? Let me back up and
explain some things about hex values and color.

How to describe a color using numbers? There are a lot of
ways to specify a particular color, but one of the ways
that's used with computers is to specify the values of Red,
Green, and Blue to mix together to achieve the desired
color. As we vary the amounts of Red, Green, and Blue we
can create most any color you desire.

Why does this relate to computers? Computer displays, TVs,
LCDs, and other "projected light" display devices use
pixels to display what you see on the screen. The color
value for those pixels is specified in a RGB (Red, Green,
and Blue) value. For example, if your PC monitor is set to
1024 x 768 resolution, then there are 768 lines (going
across your screen from top to bottom) on your screen, each
line has 1024 pixels or little dots in it. Each of those
pixels or little dots is actually made up of three smaller
dots or light sources: a red one, a green one, and a blue
one.

Ink is different. Printers that you use with your computer
generally specify color as a four (or more) color
"reflective" ink value made up of Yellow, Magenta, Cyan,
and Black which is abbreviated as YMCK. Your computer uses
formulas to convert the RGB values to CMYK values so that
you can print what you see on your screen accurately.

How does the computer represent a RGB color value? As 3
separate values (one for Red, one for Green, and one for
Blue) and each one ranges between 0 and 255. If you count
the 0 as a value, that's a total of 256 possible values.
When you put the Red, Green, and Blue values together to
represent a color, you get a possibility of 16.7 million
colors (256 x 256 x 256). That's a lot of colors and most
people consider this to be "true" color because it can
represent most photographs and images.

OK then, what is a Hex value? I'm glad you asked! Your
computer stores information as single ones and zeros. Each
of these tiny single values is called a "bit". We then
combine 8 of these "bits" to make a "byte". So a byte is 8
bits. If you recall from high school math, you can count in
various "bases". We normally use base 10 or "decimal",
which uses 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 to represent a
number. Likewise, if we use the ones and zeros I just
mentioned, we're talking about just two possible values for
each digit, 0 or 1, and this is called base 2 or "binary".
However, in computers, we also use base 16, or hexadecimal
(hex for short) because it packs more values into a single
space. Hex uses the following digits to represent a number:
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. To
represent the number 128 in decimal or base 10 takes 3
digits (128), in binary it takes 8 digits (10000000), and
in hex or base 16 it takes just 2 digits (80). So by using
hex values we save storage space and gain efficiency.

OK, my head hurts now, how does this relate to HTML color
codes? HTML colors codes are made up of 3 sets of hex
numbers, one for Red, one for Green, and one for Blue.

For example:
000000 is black (0's for all three colors)
FFFFFF is white (255's for all three colors)
FF0000 is all RED (255 for Red, 0 green, 0 blue)
00FF00 is all GREEN (0 Red, 255 green, 0 blue)
0000FF is all Blue (0 red, 0 green, 255 blue)
FFFF00 is Yellow (255 red, 255 green, and 0 blue)
808080 is a gray (128 red, 128 green, and 125 blue)
Generally in HTML, you also put a "#" in front of the color
code, but this is not necessary when you specify all 6
digits. If you make profiles for mySpace.com, leave off the
"#" too because they filter them and it won't display the
color correctly if you use the "#".

You can use the calculator that comes with Microsoft
Windows to convert between Decimal and Hex values. Open the
calculator and select View and then Scientific. Once you do
this, you'll see more buttons and controls on the
calculator. Click "Dec" and the key in a number. Now click
"Hex" and it'll convert the number to hex. To convert from
Hex to Dec, click on "Hex", key in the number, and then
click "Dec". Sometimes you'll get a color specification in
Decimal, for example (128, 30, 80) and you can use this
method to convert it to hex (80, 1E, 50) which would look
like this for your HTML color #801E50.

I hope you understand more about HTML Color Codes and how
colors are stored and specified in computers.
===========================================================
Visit Fred Black's web site www.InternetMakeMoneyOnline.com
(http://www.InternetMakeMoneyOnline.com). Discover how to
Make Money Online with internet marketing techniques and
skills that are easy to master - 100% Guaranteed.
===========================================================
Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

Advanced SEO for Beginners

Advanced SEO for Beginners
by Chris Rutledge

Images or Text?

Situation: Navigation is based on images, even if these are images of text.
Problem: Search engines find links very important and only read text. they like to match the topic of the target page to the text in the link that pointed to the page.
Solution: Use text only navigation. the text and containing elements can by styles with CSS to make them look like images, give a background image, or at least make them look a little fancier. The alternative is to ensure that there is some text based navigation elsewhere on the page.
Benefits: Search engines will be able to match the topic of the target page with the reputation (link text). A higher relevancy is better. Ensuring there is text on the page will also help the visually impaired who use text only browsers in conjunction with braile-output devices or text-to-speach software.

Links, and Link Relevancy

Situation: You want lots of links to your website
Problem: Although links may be great for visitors and search engine spiders, the true value of the link may not be fully clear to you. Visitors are unlikely to click on irrelevant links and search engines hate them. Reciprocal links (you link to me, and I'll link to you) can be of use when relevant, but carry less weight in the search engines than one way inbound links.
Solution: Avoid link farms (pages of links, for the sake of links), treat reciprocal link requests with caution and stay relevant.
Benefits: Spending time and thought on your link profile will ensure natural growth of links. Search engines hate anything that looks artificial, or anything that could be interpreted as 'Search engine Manipulation'.

Duplicate Content

Situation: A webmaster copies content from another website, or sets up multiple sites which are identical, or very similar.
Problem: search engines apply duplicate content filters to the search results. Although the idea of increasing the market share is a good idea, multiple similar sites is not the way to go about doing it. Efforts put into the secondary sites will be wasted .
Solution: Ensure all of the pages on each of your sites are unique. Querying a search engine for an exact match of long strings of text will show you if the content is found elsewhere. If a webmaster does have duplicate pages and wishes to avoid any penalties or filters, the webmaster must choose one page to have the other identical pages redirect to. Redirects are covered later.
Benefits: Your efforts are not wasted, time and money can be saved.

Multiple Sites

Situation: Following on from duplicate content, there are multiple sites. A single webmaster has several closely themed sites, all inter-linked and hosted on the same IP address.
Problem: This is seen as search engine manipulation, the linking structure and multiple sites just isn't natural. Penalties can apply.
Solution: Such site structures can work if set out properly. this means that each site must reside on it's own IP address where, at least, the C class is different. IP address are covered later.
Benefits: Increased market share, well linked and spiderable sites, no penalties applied.

Unfriendly URLs

Situation: The URL (web address) of some of your sites pages look like [http://www.my-site.com/product-info.php?product-id=12345&category=6789&sid=f29a3483270cc10b3783706916216e3a]
Problem: Search engine spiders are getting better and following and indexing these type of URLs, bit not all of them. The spiders are scared of getting caught in an endless loop of identical pages with 1000s of different URLs. they are also off putting to your site visitors who could easily remember [http://www.my-site.com/products/autos/boost-valves.]
Solution: Use Search Engine Friendly URLs. If you are running the Apache webserver on Linux enabled server use mod_rewrite to translate the URLs into something nicer
Benefits: Higher chance of being indexed by more of the search engines, keywords in your URL, higher chance of being clicked on in the SERPs

Redirects

There are two main redirects, based on the HTTP specification
301 - moved permanenty
302 - moved temporarily
You should use 301 redirects where ever possible. this can be done in your server side scripting, eg

Code: php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Found");
header("Location: http://www.my-other-site.com/");
redirects can also be set up in your .htaccess file, if you run the Apache web server

IP addresses (C class)

IP addresses are the numerical addresses of computers connected tot he internet. For ease of reading they are broken down into four parts, each called an octet as they contain 8 bits of data when written in binary form. An example my be 209.85.76.114. in this example the C class is 76 (and everything up to it), so if you have several sites hosted on this IP they would all have identical IP addresses. If each had a unique IP address that started 209.85.76. then they all share the same C-class IP address. As the allocation of IP addresses within a server environment is usually configured so that each server has it's own C-class; this means that a search engine knows hat all sites on the same C-class IP address are all located on the same server

About This Author
Chris Rutledge is the Technical Director of JV Members Ltd - a revenue sharing article marketing and publishing system.

Adhering to Web Standards to Improve Business

Adhering to Web Standards to Improve Business
By Yuri Filimonov (c) 2006

Taking web standards into account when designing a website may
not be a primary concern for many site owners, but when it
comes to finding an extra edge to improve their business, they
are more than willing to do anything required to increase
revenues. Let's see how complying with Web standards can
help a business website.

What are the Standards?
On the Web, the main standards are the languages used when
creating websites. The most wide-spread ones are HTML, XHTML and
CSS. HTML or XHTML are used to create the backbone of websites -
the structure. (The difference between HTML and XHTML is that
XHTML was formed from XML and is forward compatible.) CSS, in
turn, is used to style, format and position the structure and
content.

What is Web Standards Compliance?
Put simply, web standards compliance is using web languages
correctly. This involves using HTML tags properly and the way
they were and are intended to be used. For instance, one of the
most common felonies against the web standards is using table
tags for layout, while the correct usage is to use them only for
tabular data (information to be put in tables).

Benefits of Standards Compliance

Creating quality, standards compliant code has a number of
benefits:
* website forward compatibility
* increased site download speed
* browser compatibility
* easier site maintenance
* broader target audience

How Can This Help Business?
Perhaps every entrepreneur is asking himself right now, "And
where is the money here?" Probably every benefit can either
increase revenues or save expenses. Let's look at them in
detail.

Site Forward Compatibility
Web standards, such as XHTML and CSS, are designed to work
forever. They will also be supported for an almost unlimited
period of time. Designing a site according to web standards will
ensure the website backbone will not need to be redone any time
soon, which reduces the amount of work on the site and the
expenses of the site owner.

Increased Download Speed
When using XHTML for content and structure and CSS for styling
and formating, page size is reduced when compared to a page,
designed with tables for layout. For instance, a site with a
relatively small number of images is 50% smaller than a
table-based website. Because users enjoy fast-loading websites
(they start leaving after eight (8) seconds beyond clicking on
a link), they will be more likely to become a clients of a web
standards compliant website.

Browser Compatibility
A web standards compliant site is displayed correctly (and looks
the same) in all standards compliant browsers. Adjusting the
site to suit a less helpful browser (Internet Explorer, for
instance) is much easier with CSS than with tables. This saves
enormous amounts of time for a web designer.

Easier Site Maintenance
When separating content and styling with XHTML and CSS, it is
much easier to edit any of those, because they are located in
different files. Should one need to adjust the look of the main
page heading (

), he/she will just need to change a line or
two in a style sheet to change the appearance of all headings on
the website. Editing content is easier as well, because no
styling and formatting is in the way and it is easy to spot the
content in clean and semantically correct code markup.

Broader Target Audience
Furthermore, web standards are used not only on computers, but
also by PDAs (hand held devices, palm computers), phones and
other devices. A site, adhering to web standards, will be
displayed correctly either without editing or will require very
little work to be displayed correctly on a platform other
than a computer. Such easy availability will make the company
site easily accessible for a wider range of potential customers,
increasing the chances of business success as well.

So What To Do?
Naturally, there may be several choices for a business site
owner:
* do nothing and wait till something more noticeable becomes
obvious about the web standards.
* wait, research the topic, get more proof and then redesign
with web standards and visitors in mind.
* redesign the site right now, either with the help of an
in-house web designer or a professional, specialized
company.

Any of the choices above solely depend on the situation of the
business site. Most probably, making a site web standards
compliant will be most beneficial to starting or young websites,
which will reduce the amount of work needed in the future.
Mature websites can consider adjusting their websites to improve
the quality of their visitor experience. Those, whose sites are
barely important can live as they are, provided the site works.
Thus, it all depends on the site owner and the situation the
business is in.
================================================================
The article is contributed by Yuri Filimonov, a usability consultant for MyNeatSite.
MyNeatSite specializes in improving overall website usability
(http://www.myneatsite.com/services/redesign-web-site-design.php).
================================================================
Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.