Here is teh growth of e-mail campaigns:

Well…. It’s not that hard to be annoying. However, some webmasters are much better than others at annoying their visitors.

Check my top 5 list and decide for yourself whether you have been annoying your visitors.

1. Background music – Unless you are operating an online internet radio station or sell music CDs, why play a midi/wav file in the background continuously on every page?

2. Huge font size – If you are designing a website for people with a disability then you are doing the right thing, but if not then you are shouting. People don’t like it when someone shouts at them.

3. Small font size – Do you want to be heard? Keep a normal tone, don’t shout but “speak” in a reasonable volume.

4. Overlapping layers – Layers can be very useful up to the point. But not when they are being used to put an annoying message in the visitor’s face. Don’t try to force your visitor to read your messages. Try persuasion instead of brute force.

5. Popup windows – Even though popup windows are now blocked by many add on tools, webmasters keep using them. The annoying part of popups is sometimes we actually miss important information because of those anti popup tools. Haven’t you heard the old phrase “if you can’t beat him, join him”? Don’t use pop up windows. Put your important messages in a central place on your website.

Most likely each one of us has our own private top five lists. You probably have many more annoying design cases in mind. Well, you’re right, the list is much longer then that. I just wanted to describe some of the highlights in order to bring this important subject your attention. Some of you are probably reading those lines and smiling while some others have a feeling a deja-vu. Keep in your mind that as a webmaster the last thing you want to do is put lots of effort into your website and then find out that your visitors hate it. It’s not a matter of taste, it’s more about being the same polite person we all try to be when we go to a party.

Our recommendation would be surprisingly, No.

“Why not?” you ask. If you post a budget, most freelancers will bid based on the budget amount. Unfortunately, a reasonable cost in one part of the world is insanely high or ridiculously low in another part of the world.

For example, you want someone to create a logo for you. Any decent graphic artist should be able to do that. So, it probably is safe to go with the lowest bidder. But, suppose you need a sales letter written for an American audience, do you really think someone is Eastern Europe or China will be able to do as good a job as someone native to the US?

Basically, you get what you pay for, either in website design, graphic design, or SEO services.

What does this tell us?  Social networks definately skew young.  This means if you have a product targetet at older comnsumers, more traditional marketing efforts may be more effective.

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats.

This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.

1. Web crawling
2. Indexing
3. Searching

Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google’s handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned webpage. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document’s title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of webpages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results. Those search engines which do not accept money for their search engine results make money by running search related ads alongside the regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads.

Revenue in the web search portals industry is projected to grow in 2008 by 13.4 percent, with broadband connections expected to rise by 15.1 percent. Between 2008 and 2012, industry revenue is projected to rise by 56 percent as Internet penetration still has some way to go to reach full saturation in American households. Furthermore, broadband services are projected to account for an ever increasing share of domestic Internet users, rising to 118.7 million by 2012, with an increasing share accounted for by fiber-optic and high speed cable lines.[8]

The very first tool used for searching on the (pre-web) Internet was Archie.[3] The name stands for “archive” without the “v.” It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these sites.

The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine “Archie” was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, “Veronica” and “Jughead” are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.

The first Web search engine was Wanlex, a now-defunct index collected by the World Wide Web Wanderer, a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993. JumpStation (released in early 1994) used a crawler to find web pages for searching, but search was limited to the title of web pages only. One of the first “full text” crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public. Also in 1994 Lycos (which started at Carnegie Mellon University) was launched, and became a major commercial endeavor.

Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. Yahoo! was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than full-text copies of web pages. Information seekers could also browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search.

In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal to be their featured search engine. There was so much interest that instead a deal was struck with Netscape by 5 of the major search engines, where for $5Million per year each search engine would be in a rotation on the Netscape search engine page. These five engines were: Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite.

Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s.  Several companies entered the market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings. Some have taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light. Many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble, a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in 1999 and ended in 2001.

Around 2000, the Google search engine rose to prominence.[citation needed] The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal.

By 2000, Yahoo was providing search services based on Inktomi’s search engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google’s search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions.

Microsoft first launched MSN Search (since re-branded Live Search) in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began to display listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot).

As of late 2007, Google was by far the most popular Web search engine worldwide.   A number of country-specific search engine companies have become prominent; for example Baidu is the most popular search engine in the People’s Republic of China and guruji.com in India.

Backlinks are when someone links to your website.  For example, a local paper writes about your company and products on their website and places a link along with the article to your website.  This link to your website is called a backlink.

Why do search engines give backlinks so much importance?

Search engines assume that if someone links to you, what you have to say is relevant and important because it takes time and trouble to creat a link.  It is assumed other readers of the content will find it relevant and important as well.

How do I get backlinks to my site?

There are a number of techniques to generate backlinks:

1. Affiliate Programs — join an affiliate program, or create one for your website. A good place to checkout is Commission Junction, the world’s biggest affiliate network marketing site.
2. Invite your friends to post a link to you from their pages. Don’t bother to ask to trade links with another site though, since trading links works to cancel-out the effect. The idea is to have your site thought-of by others as being more important. This is a zero-sum game, popularity. If you win, they lose. Everyone cannot be more popular than everyone.
3. Buy links on popular sites. Nothing wrong with that. Make sure those sites are page-ranked higher than you are currently, or what’s the point? If you get links from UNpopular sites, then that proves that these nobodies think that you are somebody. That’s a waste of time, and money too.
4. Write articles on subjects related to your site and post them to popular article sourcing sites. These are sites web-authors go to, to find new content for their own site. The rules are that people have to have one link in the article they republish back to the original authoring site. Works great!
5. Issue press releases to the many free press release sites now available. You can see a list of free press release sites at Yahoo’s press release site list page. Your press release should be newsworthy. This means that you should be making a claim, announcing an event, or commenting on something else in the news, etc. Don’t merely discuss how great your product, your store or your service is. Nobody cares about that. Talk about something that you think people would want to know about. Include your web-site URL of course, and also your contact information, including your phone number, email address, etc.

About Page Titles
Using specific and unique keywords in page titles help in making web pages more descriptive. Some have made the mistake of trying to stack page titles with keywords to the point that they become unreadable gibberish. This should never happen, because page titles need to be useful to a human reader first and foremost for three extremely important and distinct reasons:

1. Search engines give page titles a great deal of weight in determining both relevance and rank.
2. When someone bookmark a page, the meta page title is the title they will see in their bookmarks list
3. Page titles are frequently displayed in search results and users will judge whether or not to visit a page based on its title.

For instance, a good page title will be descriptive and reflect the actual content on the page and grab readers attention at the same time.

Guidelines on Meta Page Titles
When writing page titles, be sure to use the most important (primary) keyword phrase or phrases as the first words in the title tag.

More tips on page titles:

• Be sure that the page title tag matches with the first paragraph of visible content found on the page
• Page titles should be between 5 to 9 words long (the entire title should be under 80 characters in length)
• Page titles should be different for each page, but consistent in style (this helps people find the exact page they want)
• Page titles should be descriptive, compelling, but should always avoid overt sales and marketing language (Correct: Support Services – Spacely Sprockets, Incorrect: Spacely Sprockets the Greatest Support Service Ever!)

While some of these things may seem obvious, page titles are an easy way to increase SEO, and a surprising number of site’s have yet to make this easy fix.