Round Tale

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 cheap hosting has become more prevalent in recent times, there are many factors you need to consider before signing up for service.  Because you never know what is behind that unbelievably low price, here are four critical factors you should keep in mind:

Downtime

A web host could provide you with all the tools needed to create a professional, feature-rich website that garners the attention of your audience.  However, if your site is constantly unavailable, its beauty will not mean a thing to the users who cannot access it.  Realizing that excessive downtime is one of the easiest ways to kills your online popularity, it is critical to find a cheap host that is more committed to reliability than a low price.

Limited Bandwidth

Before entering any type of hosting arrangement, it is vital that you consider the monthly bandwidth allocated to your account.  It is a known fact that bandwidth is a key component needed to support website traffic and plays a huge role in its success.  If your site has a large number of visitors, it will obviously require more bandwidth.  The challenging part of it all is that you may experience traffic spikes when least expected and be left with a sudden shortage of resources.  This is definitely a situation you don’t want to find yourself in as it could once again lead to dreaded periods of downtime.  If traffic is of any importance, make sure your cheap hosting plan comes included with enough bandwidth to support your current and future traffic requirements.

Technical Expertise

The technical expertise of the hosting provider is one area that doesn’t get enough attention.  This doesn’t necessarily refer to the company’s infrastructure or hardware, but the people behind all the technology.  Web hosting providers must be technically inclined for the simple fact that many of their customers are not.  This expertise will be needed to provide you with support and encounter all the technical issues that might arise.  You may not know a thing about servers but there is no excuse for your web host, cheap service or not.

Level of Support

One of the biggest drawbacks of cheap hosting services has been the lack of support.  It seems as if some companies are cutting cost in various areas to provide affordable service and the critical department of support is often the one to suffer.  Support is very important and should come at no additional cost.  Even if you are only paying a couple of dollars per month, ensure that your plan comes with world-class support that makes you feel like a million dollar customer.

At the end of the day, it is not impossible to find a company that provides a cheap service yet works hard to keep up the reliability.  However, it may take you a little extra time so exercise a bit of patience and make your selection wisely.  After doing your research, it should be much easier to find a premium service that comes at a bargain price.

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.