A couple of day ago I decided to google our company name and found a bunch of blog sites that had our blogs attached to their blog site.  So I clicked to them and they where re-posting my blog on theirs without any link-backs.  Come to find they are automated systems that harvest blogs on certain topics and re-post them on their blog site.  Biggest problem is, Google considers this duplicate material and if your site is not the first one crawled by Google, your ranking with Google will be penalized!!

But how to stop it,  The easiest way is to add a plug in to your site that automaticly ads a copyright and link to your site at the bottom of each blog. You can download this plug at http://yoast.com/wordpress/rss-footer/ and install it into your Wordpress plug-in folder.

Or, you can add the code yourself.  Collin LaHay wrote an excellent blog about this and goes into much more detail on how to do it yourself. I would recommend you read his article. http://collinlahay.com/2008/01/11/protect-yourself-from-content-theft/ . He goes into more detail about blog theft.  DON’T LET ANYONE STEAL YOUR BLOG!!!

FREE PERSONAL HOSTING PLAN AND REGISTRATION with a 5 page web site or larger.  Regular price $30 per year. This offer is also good with domain transfers.  Visit our web site for more details http://gtlenterprises.com or email me at dave@gtlenterprises.com .

If your desire to see statics of the visitors to your site, Google Analytics is a good place to start but not the only place to go.  The great thing is, it’s FREE.  It also tells you how you rank with Google and lots of other great details about how your site is ranked.  You will need to add a few lines of code into the head of your index page, if you have no clue how to do this you can have your webmaster  do it for you. 

First, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up,  you’ll also get a good overview of what you will get.  You’ll then be asked to set up the first page of your site (the index.html page) with some lines of code specific to your site.

You’ll need to add your site to the your account then wait no more than a day and you’ll be able to see what pages people have been viewing and if there were any issues such as bad links hit plus much more.

But another source of much of the same information can be found in the admin area of your web site. If you don’t know how to access it, ask your webmaster for the user name and password.

  GTL Enterprises Web Design and Hosting uses c-panel. c-panel gives you a huge assortment of data such as  “awstats” where you can see how many unique visitors, visitors, pages hit, and bandwidth used each day as well as visitors, pages hit, and bandwidth used each hour of each day.  You’ll see the details of all the “crawlers” that have visited your site and which search engine they came from. You will see which keywords have been used and who’s been linking to you and bookmarking your site. You can visit c-panels website at http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpanelwhm/.

In conclusion, don’t overlook your websites optimization.  Much of it you can do your self or pay your webmaster to do. Some basic SEO services at GTL Web Design and Hosting are put into each site we build and we submit you to the major search engines but this is only the first step to search engine optimizing. For questions about optimizing your site  or starting a web site contact us at: http://gtlenterprises.com/contact.html

For $199 we are offering a 1 single page web site design and for a 5 pages site plus 1 year free web hosting and domain registration

Hosting starting at $7.00 per month or only $30.00 per year.  Visit http://gtl-hosting.com  for details. Also Check out http://gtlenterprises.com for web site development for as low as $199.

As we have said, Content is King.  Make sure your content includes your Key Words and Meta Tags – but make sure it reads well and catches your target audience.  In other words, don’t use only Key Words and Meta Tags as your content!  You need to write to be read! 
 
Don’t let some service or SEO Firm choose your keywords.  If you have someone research Keywords for your Business Web Site, ask them for the COMPLETE list of keywords/phrases that that search came up with.  You want to make sure when picking Key Words/Phrases that these words/phrases can translate into great copy.  Great copy isn’t written in the gibberish that sometimes Key words/phrases are.  Let’s say that you own a pet store and one of the Key Word phrases that came back is: ‘pet supermarket stores’.  Well, if you are not located inside a supermarket or next door to a supermarket, this would be a very difficult phrase to translate into good – readable – SEO copy.  So, skip this one and move on to the others. 

Write to be read.  Don’t use a Keywords or phrases just because it’s a Keyword or phrase.  Once you have completed a paragraph that you think is worthy to be published, read your paragraph out loud.  Does it make sense?  Good!  Now ask someone else to read it out loud.  Does it still make sense?  Great!  Go on to the next paragraph.  Reading out loud tends to highlight both the grammatical errors and the punctuation errors. 
 
Make sure your Keywords or phrases match your business AND each Web Page.  Now, this may seem like a “duh” statement, but hear me out.  Let’s say you are a Vacation Planner.  You plan it all for your customer, from Air Fare and Hotel/B&B’s to Charters and Flying Excursions.  Say you know that ‘Bear Viewing’ kicks LOTS of hits, but you put it on your B&B page as a Key Word, you will get lots of people looking for Bear Viewing, but finding a B&B page.  This isn’t good.  It means that your Key words don’t match your page and it creates a poor user experience – which will not lead to sales. 
 
In writing your own copy, you want to make sure that both the search engines and the humans that visit your Web Site see that you have original, relevant content that covers your Business Niche.

Does your web site have a robots.txt page.  Check and see just type your url plus /robots.txt. (ex. http://yoururlhere.com/robots.txt ) if nothing shows up you don’t have one.  You can also see if there is any syntax error in your robots.txt page here http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html, just add your url and they will check it out

Now, is this important?  When your site is crawled by the bots.  There is much of your site that you don’t want your site to be crawled such as javascripts, flash, login pages, admin areas, etc. and points the bot to key areas of your site. So yes, they are important.

This article goes into more detail http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/07/21/controlling-search-engine-spiders-for-improved-rankings/.

Content is King  – we’ve all heard that, but how do you write content that will get those awesome web rankings AND inform your customers about your business?
  
Use your Key Words and Meta Tags.  When setting up your Web Site, select Key Words and Meta Tags that will describe your Business.  Then use these same Key Words and Meta Tags when writing copy for your Web Site.  The Spiders will look at the Key Words and Meta Tags and compare them to the words in the copy.  The more they match up, the higher your rankings.
  
Make it short, sweet and to the point.  Experts agree that most people will spend from 15 to 17 seconds to decide whether or not this is a Web Site that they want to look through.  Make those first 15 seconds count!  Tell them why they need to stay and look at your Web Site.
 
Three to four paragraphs, three to five sentences per paragraph, and bold your topic (first) sentence in the paragraph.  I know, it goes against what we’ve been taught in school – but this is writing for the ultra rushed person to read.  Face it, how many of us have hours a day to search through a multitude of words just to find one or two golden nuggets of wisdom?  Not me!  So don’t waste words, bold what is important and people will pause to read the rest.

We are running a special right now till the end of July for a 5 page web site starting at $449, this includes 1 year free hosting and domain registration. Visit our web stie at http://gtlenterprises.com or call us at 907-226-3071 for more detail.  You can also go to http://gtl-hosting for hosting details

We’ve spent the last 2 day setting up Quickbooks with the help of lynda.com. For a small fee, you get access to hundreds of tutorials including the last few versions of Quickbooks. Great tutorial that we used step by step to set up our customer base, creating invoices, billing customers and paying bills as well as generating reports. 

I’ve never been good a keeping up with the book keeping and at the end of each year I stress out, cant remember the whats and whys and drive my tax person nuts.  Setting up your quickbooks wrong can not only lead to lots of problems but may end you up with lots of fines by the IRS so either have an accountant set up your quickbooks for your or use a tutorial by lynda.com or buy one from essential training. We still had many questions for tax person, but this time they were past the basics and much more constructive