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After building a nice looking website, you are ready to market your amazing products and services to the world.  With everything seemingly in place, you are still missing the one ingredient needed to make your business a success – traffic. Without traffic, your venture with an online business is destined to fail quickly.  Luckily, there are quite a few ways you can go about bringing traffic to your site.  Everyone claims to have the secret that unlocks the magical fountain of traffic, but one method that has been tried and proven involves site optimization.  There are many tools available to help you along the way and below are five of the very best.

1.) SEO Book – Founded by Aaron Wall, one of the true SEO experts, this site makes a great resource for learning about optimization and moving your site in the right direction.  Here you can find all the tools need to help you become familiar with virtually every aspect of the game.  As a member of SeoBook.com, you are a part of a tight-knit community that will mold you into a better search engine marketer.

2.) Submit Ease – This is a powerful software tool that bundles article directory submission and website directory submission into a single user-friendly package.  With Submit Ease, article syndication is easy, and you can submit your site to more than 600 article directories. 

3.) Bookmarking Demon – This is a tool every internet marker should have in their bag of tricks.  It is a fully automated pinging and social bookmarking software program that can help you create an unlimited number of backlinks.  With the free upgrades and all the advantages it offers, many users find Bookmarking Demon to be worth every penny.

4.) Animoto - When it comes to the web, you don’t have to be a expert with a video camera just to incorporate video into your site.  Animoto is a great tool that gives you the power to create movie style trailers from the photos you upload to your site.  You have the option to choose from various default music themes or upload your own.  This is all made simple through an easy to use interface.  Simply upload your photos, choose the music, enter some text and the system does the rest.

5.) Tube Mogul – Video sharing has become one of the most effective ways to attract targeted traffic in fast and cost efficient manner.  Tube Mogul makes an ideal tool as it allows you to distribute your video content to several sharing platforms, including YouTube, Meta Café and MySpace.  Best of all, this tool is absolutely free to use.

6.) Keyword Elite - This is a great research tool that can help you save a lot of time when looking for keywords.  Keyword Elite also integrates with other tools such as Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker, allowing you to truly maximize your researching efforts.  It lets you find out which keywords your Google Awords competitors are using and where their sites rank in terms of optimization.  The Keyword Elite tool is like having your very own virtual researcher.

Even though social networking has evolved to include sites like MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter, traditional blogging continues to be one of the hottest phenomenons in today’s web-based world.  There are quite a few blogging platforms, but WordPress is easily among the most widely used and perhaps the most popular of them all.  This powerful web publishing tool is easy to install, customize and maintain, providing you with the ability to have your very own blog site up and running in no time.  You can blog about a hobby, something that interests friends or family, or use this medium as tool that helps propel your business to the next level.  Regardless of what your plans call for, WordPress can act as that stable and reliable platform you need to make a name for yourself as a blogger.

The WordPress Phenomenon

WordPress has become an immensely popular blogging platform due to its ease of use and cost efficiency.  The software is open-source with no licensing fees required, making it absolutely free to anyone who wants to use it.  Being open-source also allows the WordPress software to be customized to meet the specific needs of the user.  Over the years, developers have created a number of themes and plugins that are now widely available to its large community of users.  All this activity gives you the opportunity to start out with a simple blog and later incorporate all the features and functionality needed to enhance your site.

Meeting the Requirements for WordPress Hosting

Perhaps the most unique quality of WordPress is that is can be self hosted through WordPress.com or WordPress.org, with the latter requiring you to install the software on your own web hosting account or server.  Finding the right solution isn’t necessarily difficult, but it does call for you to evaluate all of the available options before choosing a hosting provider.  Because it is such a popular software program, WordPress is widely supported by many companies on the web hosting market.  However, one must still conduct thorough research in order to make sure their requirements and expectations are met.  When shopping for a service, some important factors you want to keep in mind are bandwidth and disk storage so your blog will have enough resources to support traffic and store your files.  There are also some basic requirements that must be fulfilled to complete a WordPress hosting package.  The two most essential features you will need are a MySQL database, and a web server such as Apache with PHP installed, which is the programming language the software is written in.

There are many web hosting providers offering a wide variety of features and options that make it much easier to work with the WordPress software.  For example, some offer auto-install utilities and upgrades that allow you to remain current with the latest functionality and security features.  Others permit the hosting of multiple domains, which gives you the opportunity to host more than one blog under a single account.  WordPress can work wonders for your web presence, but the journey all begins with finding a company that can provide you with a reliable hosting solution.

Webmasters throughout the world will probably agree that website administration tools have come a long way over the last few years.  The software these days has been injected with more features and functionality than many ever imagined was possible.  One of the most powerful management tools on the market today is a type of software program known as the control panel.  This application provides you with an easy way to maintain a complex web server and all the essential features of your hosting account.

Different web hosting providers tend to utilize and offer different control panel applications.  For example, some use the industry leading Linux-based cPanel, while others prefer Plesk because of its ability to support both Windows and Linux platforms.  You also have hosting providers that offer their own custom or proprietary control panel software.  One such company happens to be one of the largest and most well know entities in the internet world.  This article will introduce you to the Yahoo control panel, very underrated yet highly effective and easy to use.

Tools and Features

In order to access the control panel, you must first sign in with the username and password designated for your Yahoo web hosting account.  After entering the required information, click “OK” to log in.  Once inside, you will see that you have a variety of options to work with.  Below are some of the options you will find:

Home - The Home tab lets you view your daily website traffic in the form of detailed reports.

Email – The email tab allows you to create additional email addresses that will be associated with your website and domain.  Simply click on “Add an Email Address” and enter the required information in the short fields.

Create and Update – The Create and Update tab allows you to incorporate a number of add-on programs and utilities such as the WordPress blogging platform, and intuitive file management tools.  It also offers a variety of helpful support resources for beginners.

Manage – The Manage tab lets you add or remove files from the web server and password protect specific domains, sub-domains and web pages.  It also allows you to generate online snapshot backups of your website data.

Promote – The Promote tab is a powerful SEO tool that allows you to submit your URL to all the major search engines in one easy click.  Underneath this tab you can also send news about the launch of your website via email and create a Yahoo local listing for your site or business as well.

Help – The Help tab offers a comprehensive menu that can be used to assist you with all the functions of the control panel.  This is where you want to go if you get lost creating emails or maintaining your domains.

Index – The Index tab gives you an alphabetized index of the features and options that come included with the hosting control panel.

While the Yahoo control panel in not the most sophisticated piece of software, it does provide all the tools you need to create and maintain your hosting account.  Hundreds of thousands of personal and business customers agree that it delivers more than enough functionality for their needs.