Today’s virtual and globalized working environment finds company CEOs looking at employee engagement as a key challenge. Reaching out to its people in a distributed working environment is done through the global phenomenon – the internet.

The World Wide Web brings closer the physical distances and bridges these distances between people in the communities and the society as a whole. While this method of communication is not yet all pervasive, it is certain to become the basic standard for communication in the future.

Blogs, an abbreviation for “weblogs” are microsites on the web that stand by themselves or are part of traditional websites. A corporate blog is either published by or with the support of an organization in order to reach the organizational goals. External blogs help strengthen relationships with target groups and position the organization as industry experts. Internal blogs on the other hand are used as tools for knowledge management and collaboration.

From politicians to novelists, business pros and aspiring businessmen, everyone seems to be starting a blog. Many large corporations already use blogs to communicate internally to their employees on a regular basis. This helps the organizational heads to cut across hierarchies and deliver their views without the concern of misinterpretation. Blogs are also considered to be a less formal way of communicating with the existing customers, prospective customers and investors. While many of the blogs are authored by individuals, group blogs are also becoming popular in a company setting.

Although, currently, blogs are used by a small number of consumers online, they have garnered a great deal of corporate attention and it is believed that they will grow in importance. At a minimum, companies can monitor blogs to learn what is being said about their services and products.

Collaboration

There is no denying the fact that the success of a business is due to the people that work in the company. These are the people that are trusted with the customers every day, trusted to talk to the media, trusted to talk in meetings, and now they can certainly be trusted to talk on the internet on behalf of the company. Blogs can be used as a workspace where project members keep others updated without having to waste time searching the inbox or writing reports. They work as a tool for collaboration, discussion and research.

Communication

Even individuals who otherwise have no means of participating in a discussion can participate in blogs. The biggest gain can be from internal blogs that open up communication channels between the management and employees, where CEOs can share their thoughts with employees openly and honestly. Improved communication, better team working, improved employee benefits have been reported by many organizations who use internal blogs regularly to communicate directly with their staff. They believe blogs helped them resolve a lot of HR issues, which otherwise may not have been brought to the notice of the management.

Investors

Investors are people who have invested their money in an organization and are keen to know the developments. Blogging can communicate everything indirectly to these people, including details of changes in policies, procedures, customer feedback etc. This gives a sense of security to the investors who will appreciate not being left in the dark about the internal happenings of the company.

Bringing People Closer

If the business of an organization is spread across different continents, countries, cities or even locations locally and there is need for people at different places to work together, blogging is the best way of creating links allowing people to communicate in the most efficient way. Blogging improves the spirit of teamwork, exchange of ideas and facilitates tutoring among other things.

Cultural

These blogs are used to strengthen organizational culture. They mostly contain non-work related posts and informal content which is social in nature. The management itself takes care of these blogs or designates bloggers, and some companies even let all the employees post on these blogs.

Safety Measures

There are potential risks of speaking to the world in public, for both the employer and the employee. There is a good chance of inappropriate posts being made by an employee and this could lead to several issues, even legal. This is the reason, organizations should have a blogging policy in place and it is also important to educate their employees on appropriate blogging and communication online, to be able to benefit from blogging.

Blogs are the most targeted tools used by organizations to form communities and bring about a change, create new businesses, improve existing businesses, improve human relations and discover new things. Corporate communication has evolved into a much needed benefit and whether to blog or not is not a question anymore. The question is how to use the corporate blog effectively to deliver thoughts and impart knowledge. Organizations today believe that sharing with the help of technology gives birth to innovation.

That’s all you hear all the time. Gotta have a GREAT product. That’s how you get the big bucks. Okay, but how?

For an internet marketer, one of the most difficult things to do is coming up with product ideas. For people who are new to internet marketing, it becomes even more difficult as they have no idea where to begin or even if their idea is going to be a success.

There is nothing better than creating your own product. Let us see how you can go about getting new products into the market. Once you come up with an idea that you like, make sure it is implemented immediately. This is where a newbie remains new for a long time. Because they are unsure of themselves and of their product, they do not implement many of their ideas.

“Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.”
~~ Andre Malraux

What Do People Need?

This should be the first question you should ask yourself. It is obvious that the product has to be something that people need and are looking for, something that is not out there or something that can be better than what is already out there in the market.

You can get to know what people are looking for by observing and understanding their problems online. Once you are able to identify a problem, time to think how you can help them with it. Finding problems on the internet is easy and this can be done by looking at the questions and complaints posted by people. Yahoo answers are one of the best ways of finding out what people are looking for. Simply put – their questions should be answered by you – in the form of a product.

Improve On An Existing Product

Take a look at all the products available in the niche you are interested in and see if there is anything that can be done better, if you can come up with a better product that is an improvement on the existing product. This technique is used by many internet marketers, even the more experienced ones, but never fails to work. The important thing is to choose products that are in demand. You are actually at an advantage here, because someone else has already done all the research for you, which means you have about 90% of the market conquered and all you have to do is add that 10% that makes it a totally unique and a better product.

A Forgotten Product

Look around and you will find many products that were previously sold but not anymore. There will be several products that people would have completely forgotten about. You must see what you can do to revive the product into something to cater to today’s market. Once you have changed it enough to make it totally unique, your very own new product is ready to be launched.

Take The Help Of Your List

If you are new, you may not have a list; but if you do, this strategy will help immensely in coming up with a new product idea. Find out from them what they want. Send a mail asking them for suggestions. Make sure you do not sell anything to them in the same mail. In fact, it has been found that people love being asked for suggestions and you will get many fresh ideas from them. One of their responses may just be what you are looking for.

Combine Products

Find two good products in the same niche and combine them into one. You must make sure the products complement each other and you are able to convert them into a single product without making it obvious and patchy. Package it uniquely and you are well on your way to earning big money with the benefits of two already in-demand products.

Conduct Surveys

If you are a webmaster and already own a website, you can conduct surveys asking visitors what they would like to see from you.

Adwords Ads

If you go online, to your right, you will see a lot of paid Adwords ads. There is a reason why those people are advertising in spite of having to pay for every click. The reason is simple – they are getting something out of it. Check the ads related to your niche, visit their websites and see what they are selling there. You can get some wonderful product ideas from these websites.

Selling A Physical Product

If you are keen on using physical products, then do your research and find a hot product that is already selling well. You will then take that product and add something to it and package it. For example, if a Yoga Mat is hot and selling well, you could add a good Yoga CD or something related to that. You will come up with hundreds of such products with a little research.

Keeping Track Of The Current Trends

Since internet is a fast changing medium, trends keep changing every day. It is Madonna one day and Avril Lavigne the other. As far as internet marketing goes, it is Bum Marketing one day and Adwords the other. Capitalizing on these changing trends is what it is all about. You could come up with products for every trend; however, to be able to do this, you will have to keep a close watch on the market and be quick. During the Cricket world cup season, you can create something related to cricket and take advantage of that wave.

Creating An Existing Product For A New Niche

What this means is that if a product is much in demand in one niche, it can also be introduced into another niche where it may be useful. You will have to of course make sure that the product has not been used in the new niche before. You will need to put in an effort here in doing your research.

All it needs is a little bit of research and a huge amount of common sense to come up with product ideas. The key to coming up with a great product idea is “people.” Look around and see what they need and you will find the answers you are looking for.

For many shoppers online, “legal” and “legitimate” are two words that do not mean much and they would not mind buying music from unethical sources, if it means having to pay much less than what it actually sells for.

There are several websites that sell all the latest downloads from top American artists for pennies on the dollar. Music fans are only too thrilled at the prospect of getting music so cheap, especially with the quality and experience being almost the same as the music downloads found at legitimate music sites such as iTunes and others. They willingly enter into the black illegal world of piracy, where they are asked to use their credit cards to purchase music downloads.

What they fail to realize is that, by buying music from these illegal sources, they are becoming part of the theft and piracy racket.

Not many music aficionados who download music from these file-sharing sites really understand the extent of this crime, but even those that do, pay no heed because of the convenience associated with such sites, in terms of low prices and newest songs.

Some even feel that it is perfectly okay to download free pirated music because the musicians have enough money and are not losing much or because the recording companies are charging too much for CDs. They fail to look at this as almost similar to stealing a CD from a store and most of these people would not dream of doing that offline. Stealing online or offline, still amounts to theft and downloading music without paying for it or paying less using illegal sources is stealing.

Keeping aside the conscience part of it, most music fans are not aware of the risks of using credit cards at these sites. The few that are vary of using their credit cards on sites embroiled in legal issues, say that they do not feel secure as they are not sure where their credit card numbers are going. The problem with crossing international boundaries is that there is a huge grey area with no support.

There are several such websites hosted in Russia and these are supposed to be the riskiest sites on the web. Known as the king of Russian music websites, AllofMP3.com closed its doors in 2007, and during its existence was often part of the legal battles contesting its legitimate status. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), most Russian websites are said to violate international laws by selling copyrighted music without permission. RIAA slapped a lawsuit on AllofMP3.com in 2006, for $1.65 trillion, for all the 11 million songs that were downloaded from their site. Although, RIAA was not given that money, it did manage to shut the site down. After the closure of this site, there are other Russian websites, such as MP3sparks.com that continue to perform this illegal activity.

In fact, Visa and MasterCard stopped accepting transactions through several such sites and many people complain that their cards have been declined.

People who use credit cards at illegal sites can be aggressively pursued and caught, through their credit card details. They not only stand every chance of getting their ID stolen but also get their credit ruined.

As the music industry and the credit cards associations clamp down on this issue, consumers are seeing more and more lawsuits. Many file sharing users have been slapped with lawsuits. An aggressive example of one such lawsuit won by RIAA in the recent past is against a resident of Minnesota, for $222,000 for 24 copyrighted songs she had made available on the Kazaa network.

Experts feel that those dealing with Russian websites are more at danger because of leaving a paper trail behind, with the use of their credit cards. Music fans have to rethink what is right and wrong and whether it is worth taking these risks and being seen as criminals in the eyes of law.

Internet has long been bitten by the outsourcing bug and most online businesses tend to allot most of their product creation and some have started outsourcing their marketing as well. Internet marketers outsource ebook creation, article writing, web development and designing, software development, making lists of affiliate programs with all the details, sorting particular information into lists and every other job that is either time consuming or requires expertise.

Outsourcing is being described by some as an unfortunate byproduct of a global economy. The thinking is simply that when the same work can be done by someone else cheaper, get it done. While this is certainly a more profitable way of conducting a business, it does have its negative side too.

It is said to be for people who have little patience and a lot of money. There may be people who think that looking at the disadvantages of outsourcing amounts to thinking negatively; however, it is always better to consider all the disadvantages in advance to avoid any future surprises or should we says shocks.

One of the most crucial facts of life is that no third person or company can understand the product better than the owner. In spite of their best efforts, they may not be able to help business owners reach their goals.

Communication gap is said to be one of the demerits of outsourcing, where the person who the work is outsourced to may not be familiar with a particular culture and that lack of understanding could reflect in the work performed.

When confidential data is outsourced, it raises the question of data protection, as data protection policies differ and many countries may not even have proper controls in place.

When work is outsourced, the need for internet access is essential and if there happens to be a problem or an outage at the place where some emergency work is outsourced, that could lead to losses for the person outsourcing.

If it is marketing that is being outsourced, the feedback from the customers is routed through other channels, making the owner lose the power of control. Another thing to consider is that even companies who perform outsourcing work have their own way of doing things and it is not possible to bring them to think any differently.

The lack of insight of a business is the drawback with outsourcing marketing. Irrespective of the level of qualification of the professionals being outsourced to, they certainly cannot be as good at it as the owner. These companies or individuals that one is outsourcing to may be efficient in their ability to contact a huge number of customers, but it must be remembered that they are not representing any one client exclusively.

Many people who have outsourced to new companies or individuals complain of being burned, due to making advance payments and losing money from absconding virtual assistants, which is in fact a common phenomenon online.

Sometimes, it so happens that the third-party companies start demanding more money than was agreed upon, as they realize that the person outsourcing is totally dependent on their services. Major companies may not resort to this; however, it has been seen to happen in the outsourcing world. This problem arises because the web in most cases has no face.

Last but not the least, when offshore outsourcing is given, the difference in time zones can be a potential hazard.

Another negative aspect to offshore outsourcing that has been under discussion for a long while now, both online and offline, revolves around the loss of work to people from that country. They consider it a threat to their economy, even if it is online outsourcing. If an American is outsourcing work offshore, this is believed to be taken away from another American who could have done that work for them.

In spite of all these disadvantages, the outsource boom is on and steadily increasing with more and more webmasters looking for ways to get the job done cheaper and better, and save in terms of money and effort.

A perfect automated search engine in the current scenario is one that crawls the web quickly and gathers all the documents to keep them up-to-date. Plenty of storage space is required to efficiently store indices or the documents themselves.

The magnitude of data that has to be handled on the ever-growing internet includes billions of queries daily. The indexing system of a search engine should be capable of processing huge amounts of data by using the space most efficiently and handling thousands of queries per second. The best navigation experience should be provided to the users, in the form of finding almost anything on the Web, excluding the junk results with the use of high precision tools, which is the main problem users’ face.

The anatomy of a search engine includes major applications such as crawling the web, indexing and searching.

Web Crawling

Search engines of today depend on spiders or robots, which are special software, designed to continuously search the web to find new pages.

Web crawling is the most important aspect of a search engine and is the most challenging. It involves interaction with thousands of web servers and name servers. It is performed by many fast distributed crawlers. They keep getting information regarding lists of URLs they need to crawl and store, from a URL server. The crawlers start their travel with the most used servers and highly popular pages. Each crawler keeps hundreds of connections open at one time in order to retrieve web pages quickly. The crawler has to look up the DNS, connect to the host, send a request and receive a response. It does not rank the web pages but retrieves copies of all the web pages and stores them in a repository by compressing them, to later index and rank them based on different criteria. Everything from the visible text, images, alt tags, other non-HTML content, word processor documents and more are indexed.

Crawlers usually visit the same web pages repeatedly to ensure the site is a stable one and that the pages are being updated frequently. If a certain web page is not functioning at some point, the crawlers are usually programmed to go back later to try again. However, if it is found that the page is either down continuously or not being updated frequently, they stay away for longer periods of time or index it slowly.

Crawlers also have the capability of following all the links found on the web pages, which they visit as an when they find them or visit them later.

Web Indexing

Every result that is found by the spider is sent for indexing, to ensure speed in finding relevant documents for a search query. Indexing is performed by the indexer or the catalog and the sorter. This is like a huge book that contains a copy of all the web pages that the spider finds. When the web page changes, then this book is also updated automatically.

The indexer does a host of jobs, such as reading the repository, decompressing the compressed documents and parsing them. Basically, the function of the indexer is to allow information to be found as easily and quickly as possible.

The repository where the crawler stores the web page details contains the complete HTML of every single web page. All the documents are stored in the repository, and each and every web page that is available on the Web is given a unique doc ID number, which is assigned whenever a new URL is collected from a web page.

The indexer extracts all the information from each and every document and stores it in a database. All high-quality search engines index each and every word in the documents and give a unique word Id. Then the word occurrences, which some search engines call “hits,” are checked, recording all the words, including their placement in the document, their font size and capitalization.

Parsing

The indexer also parses out all the links in each and every web page and stores their information separately in another file, including where the links are coming from and pointing to, as well as the text of the link. After the parsing is done, the indexer segregates these hits, performing the initial sorting, thus creating a forward index that is partially sorted.

Then the file containing the links is read and converts the relative URLs into absolute URLs and turns them into unique doc Ids. It also enters the anchor text associated with the doc IDs into the forward index. Then a database of links is created, which are pairs of doc IDs. This database is used to compute the Page Ranks of all the documents.

Sorting

The job of the sorter is to take the forward indexes, which are sorted by the doc ID and sort them again by word Id to generate the inverted index. This process is done one index at a single time and does not require too much storage capacity. Parallel sorting process is done using multiple sorters. Since these indexes do not fit into the main memory, the sorter subdivides them into smaller groups based on the word Id and doc Id and then loads each group into the memory, sorts it and writes its content.

Page Rank

Page Rank is thought of as the value of a web page based on the user behavior. This is usually determined by a search engine based on the number of visits to a web page or group of pages as well as the number of pages pointing to a web page and even the page rank of the pages pointing to it. Page rank has other extensions too and weighed by the link structure of the web.

Searching

The final step is searching, which means providing the best quality search results for queries. The query is first parsed, then the words in the query are converted to word Ids, search is done for information in the doc list for every word, the doc lists are scanned until the words in the search query are found, the page rank of those documents is computed and then all the documents that have matched by page rank are sorted and the results returned to the users.

The major issue that users face with some search engines is the poor quality of the results returned by search engines, which consume a lot of time and is frustrating.

A high-quality search engines returns quality and relevant results. Besides the quality of the results, it has to be designed to be able to scale to the growing size of the Web, by using storage efficiently. A search engine has to ensure that the huge number of documents can be crawled, indexed and searched with little cost.

Veveo Inc. is a company that has just beta-launched its video searching vTap. This is a free service and is designed to enhance user experience on broadband enabled phones. The company claims that it has huge listings of web videos much more than any other video portals.

As everyone knows, although the latest smart phones come with big screens and have the capability of bringing video to life, finding a video that plays the format compatible with the smart phone is a tough task and most people give up because of the effort and time involved.

The main advantage of v-Tap lies in its ability to find videos even using phones and TVs. Although the videos on vTap are from several different sites and these online videos are in various formats that do not play on phones, Veveo converts the original video format into a format that can stream and play on a particular phone.

This application is said to work on Windows Mobile, Nokia N-series, and many different handsets from manufacturers such as Sanyo, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG and Samsung. The fact that they also have a version that works on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch makes it very appealing to the younger generation.

One wonders how Veveo is able to provide this free service. They say they are looking at making profits from licensing this technology to content providers and hardware companies. Although this service can function on any data connection, in order to play videos that are smooth without any breaks while waiting for data, it would be better to use either a Wi-Fi or 3G wireless service. This will ensure that users have an uninterrupted and enjoyable video watching experience.

Veveo is being hailed by analysts for its thoughtfulness in addressing a problem that needed a solution. They have given the phones what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live have given the desktops, with their special video search modes.

Things are totally different when it comes to phones, where these kinds of search tools were not available. It was a raw point with people, because the excitement of having found something they wanted to watch, evaporated, with it usually not being available in a video format that is compatible with their particular handset.

Most of the web video is in Adobe Flash, which is not available on most handsets, even on BlackBerry, iPhone and most of the Windows mobiles. To satisfy this need, people mostly rely on their wireless carriers, such as Sprint TV or Verizon V Cast, although they are expensive and do not provide too many choices.

Even if one is willing to manage with what is available on YouTube, the experience of browsing from a mobile is worse than using a computer. The iPhone does have a YouTube application that makes browsing and searching the site easy, but access is given to very few videos.

Veveo manages to do this using a process that takes video from the web and converts it to a format that will work with the player installed on the handheld.

In order to get vTap on a phone, the user needs to sign up at the Veveo website first. Veveo then sends a mobile text message with the link. Once that link is clicked, the software is downloaded and installed on the handheld. After vTap is loaded, the user needs to enter the search term to get a list of related videos. There is also a wonderful option to turn any search into a feed, which means videos related to that search will automatically show up in a list as and when they become available. There are also other preprogrammed channels available, such as sports, entertainment (TV show clips and movie trailers,) and news content.

The only limitation is that since vTap reformats videos retrieved from other sites, it cannot do this with sites that block Veveo from reformatting its content. If some sites need some other proprietary player to be installed, vTap will not work on those sites.

The advantages of Veveo far outweigh the limitations and the next thing that Veveo intends to do is to embed its technology in Internet-connected TVs and other gadgets. This may be viable at a later point of time, but for now, for people who would like to give mobile video a try, vTap is certainly a worthy bet.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL compete with each other to improve their online mapping services, which have become an important part of local search websites.

Google is the unbeaten leader in web computing software delivered over the internet and literally runs inside a browser. However, many browser applications cannot do all those things that the powerful PC-based software can. Google has been trying to close that gap and finally achieved the fruits of its efforts.

Google said that third party developers can now use the programming interfaces to Google Earth, which is their 3-D visualization software. This will enable developers to embed Google Earth on websites.

Google Maps is currently being used by thousands of websites that have created applications, to be able to do various things like pointing the place where a crime has taken place or showing the various apartment rentals in various cities and even showing the path of airplanes in flight. These sites will now be able to improve on those applications with better visualization software from Google Earth. Developers will also be able to make use of Google Earth’s 3-D imaging, to create new applications to run on their sites. These applications will be embedded in the websites and will be accessible through a browser, and they will work even if users have not installed Google Earth on their computers.

However, users who want the full spectrum of features and data that is available on Google Earth, will still have to download the software onto their computers.

Google also says that it is possible to overlay content over the stars, planets and galaxies by using the Sky mode toggle, which lets people build 3-D Google Sky mashups. Google 3-D buildings can also be created with just one line of JavaScript as well as get KML data from the web, which is the file format that is used to display geographic data in a browser.

Currently, this plug-in only works with Windows Vista or XP; however, support for the other operating systems is being planned for the future.

According to Google, they introduced a set of software tools called Gears, a year ago, which help developers in building browser applications, which run like PC-based software. These tools were used by MySpace for revamping its mail service. This provides MySpace users the ability to easily sort and search all their mail messages, without having to click on each and every page to find what they are looking for.

The use of Gears by MySpace is the largest ever attempt to use these tools and it is most successful. Google believes that this will encourage other companies to use Gears to either improve their web applications or even create new applications.

Even Google is planning to use the software tools to make Gmail available to users even when they are not connected to the internet. Google is not giving this project a deadline; however, they do hope that it happens this year.

With Google taking giant strides in the web applications department, the future certainly holds many more exciting improvements for webmasters.

Previously, there used to be a few sites that allowed user comments, such as AOL and Yahoo! The advantage they had was that, when someone subpoenaed the website host, they could get the person’s home address and full name. But that is not the case anymore. Now, most of these websites that allow comments either wipe them out or do not store the details necessary to track down visitors to their sites.

Several users suffer due to this, as malicious posts about them do the rounds which give their full name, attacking their integrity in several ways, such as calling them anorexic, a homosexual, or that they have sexual diseases etc. These things just cannot be shrugged off as this has an enormous effect on the reputation and the mental state of being of the person concerned.

There are very few legal means to compel websites to police message boards. The Communications Decency Act of 1996, has protected these websites from suits concerning user comments for many years now. Their stand is that such sites are similar to public parks and are not considered publications.

According to some lawmakers, these protections are too broad and they are now asking for changes in the law in order to address this growing problem.

The growing dangers of free online speech have been connected to several tragic incidents, one of which is the pitiable case of the 13-year-old who committed suicide in November of last year. This young teen is said to have hanged herself a day after she has been insulted in some way, by a person online, who she made friendship with on MySpace, believing him to be a 16-year-old. Later, investigations revealed that no such youngster existed and it was all the handiwork of a neighbor she had always known but never suspected.

Several students from Princeton are bent on dealing with the situation, using a tactic of shutting down the anonymous gossip online by attacking the core of the business model of such sites. They are organizing huge boycotts of the famous sites online to cut off traffic and in turn the ad revenue, which is what these sites thrive on. Behind this movement is a 20-year-old student from Princeton, who created a new website that asks students to pledge that they will not visit anonymous gossip sites and to stand behind their online statements with all integrity. He says, “This is about changing the way our generation and our culture look at the way we communicate with one another.”

Most of these websites that allow anonymous chats do not charge any fee and their main source of revenue is advertising.

This is being looked at by analysts as a positive move in the direction of controlling the menace of web anonymity.

On the other side of the fence, there are some legal experts and others who believe that unfettered, anonymous speech is essential on the internet. They say that it is not just the principle; it’s the business. Websites such as Amazon.com, MySpace, and YouTube depend on user participation to generate content. Screening or even monitoring users could prove to be impossible and costly for some of these sites. They believe the burden cannot be shifted to website operators and internet is all about free speech.

This debate will continue as long as the unscrupulous elements look at internet as their way of issuing a death sentence (which is what it is) to people they may have personal enmity with or to people they do not know, just for the fun of it.

The general consensus is certainly that websites should provide a way to remove malicious defamatory content in order to protect the rights of their users.

The first thing that has to be done is to get a good idea on whether to pursue a niche market or not. This entails keyword research, which includes coming up with keywords that people are searching for and finding out how much competition there is for that particular keyword.

Initially, it is no good going for generic keywords that have a lot of competition. For example, if you type “Golf,” it is a generic term with millions of sites. If you target your keywords better, such as “Golf balls” or “Travel Golf,” you will find less number of searches but you are aiming at a particular audience in the niche. Remember! It is always better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.

After you have chosen your niche, choose a few more keywords specific to your niche. Now time to check on your competition. What are the keywords and phrases they are using? Right click on “view source” and look at the META description tag (you will find it at the top.) Are these keyphrases helpful to you? Narrow down your list. Search on Google with the keyphrases you are planning on using and see if any similar sites are coming up. If they are, you are on the right track. Some of these keyphrases will be used on your site in the content and some will be used as links.

To do well with your website, it is important to be high up in the search engine rankings. Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong. How many times have you gone to the 3rd page of Google search results when looking for something? Most people click on the first few results only.

The question you should be asking is, “What have the other sites done to reach the top?”

Start at the very beginning and take a look at the design of their sites, including colors that have been used and the template. The idea is to see how the site layout is and do one better than them.

But that’s where the importance of looks end. You would find that many an ugly site is at the very top. There could be several reasons for this, such as great information or good back links. Look at the content the other sites are providing and ensure you do better.

Now that we have our keywords ready and we have created the design of our site, the next step is to bring traffic to the site. A great looking site without traffic is no use?

This can be achieved through on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization includes incorporating keywords in the text, title, meta tags and headings. If you notice in the source, some of the top sites do not do this and you can rest assured, your site will fare better.

Off-page optimization makes a world of difference between a top page rank and a low ranking page.

One method is getting other websites in your niche to link to your site. The more links there are, the better the ranking. It is not just the number of links, but the page rank of those sites linking to you is very important.

Take a look at the top ten sites in the same niche. Try and find out the techniques they used. Make a list of these sites.

Now take one of those top sites and type link:http://www.sitename.com/. Instead of ‘sitename,’ you should type the actual name of the site. With that, you will be able to see the sites that are linking to your competitor’s site.

You will have to find out the page ranks of all these sites. You can download the Google tool bar for this. If the page ranks of the sites linking back to your competitor’s site are not too high, you have a chance of being up there.

I know it all sounds complicated. But when did anyone say that being the top site is easy? Going through the whole thing a few times will register better.

In simple words, a complete website can be built along with great back links, just by observing what the competition is doing.

That is because, it is a tough task deciding on the kind of domain name that catches people’s attention.

There are a couple of ways to go about this. One is using the keyword method and the other is branding.

The keyword method involves keyword research, where one searches for a domain name that is rich in keywords, on the niche that is being targeted. They say that Google loves keyword rich domains.

For example, if you are planning on setting up a website on weight loss, the first keyword rich name that comes to mind is obviously something like weightloss.com, which would obviously be taken already. So, you will need to search for other keywords in the same niche.

Short keywords are the most favored for domain names as they are easy to remember, but we cannot always get them. Try to choose a domain name that reflects the problems faced by the niche, such as easyweightloss.com etc. Although, this is not a short and punchy name, something like this that is longer but describes “what’s in the box,” works wonders too.

A domain name should be something that people can remember, whether it is a short or a long one. It is very difficult to remember something like, “kckfc,” unless it represents a well-known brand. Not everyone uses bookmarks to remember sites. It helps to have an easy to remember and easy to spell domain name. Just because the original spelling is not available, many people end up using mis-spelled domain names, which do not do much either.

An easy to remember domain name also entails having a .com extension, only because people are used to that. If your domain is easy to remember but without the .com extension, people will type the domain name in and type .com, they will be taken to some other site. You do not want that to happen. It is not that all other extensions are bad, but only that when choosing a name, preference should be given to a .com.

The second method of coming up with a good domain name is branding, which means giving the website a name that has nothing to do with what the website is about, but people will know it all the same, such as sites like Yahoo and Google.

A brandable domain name should look interesting with a good pronunciation. It may not be descriptive but can be very effective all the same. Once a brand is known to people, they will associate it with your website. Branding is tougher to pull off as a lot of marketing needs to be done.

If you have noticed, domain names with hyphens or numbers are cheaper. The reason behind this is because they are inconvenient for people to type. It is very easy for people to forget the hyphen or numbers and it is highly advisable to avoid them as far as possible.
The above factors may be important in finding a good domain name, but at times it is difficult to find one which fits the mould. There is no need to be discouraged if this happens, just go ahead and pick a name that suits your need. There are several websites on the net which do not comply with all the factors given above, but they are well known with lot of visitors.

Having a good domain name is one thing but promoting the site and making it well known is something else.