If you want to go straight to the optimization tips look for these: ++++++++++

This is based on a newsletter e-mail from SEOlabs (which I don't remember signing up for) which turned out to be really good. This is in my own words, but the idea is the same.

When I first got into webmastering I had no idea what I was doing, I didn't really have a foot to stand on since I did not even understand html. I wanted traffic and exposure, trying to force the issue by submitting my underdeveloped sites to any url submission that was possible and got nowhere fast. This was for various reasons for this, but it didn't matter it was only practice.

Anyway, my second real attempt http://www.topfunwebsites.com I approached with a lot more patience and few other proactive efforts, which I will also discuss. Without trying to state the obvious I tried to make a decent site with content as my primary objective. When I was happy with the progress, rather than rushing out and begging for the search engines to think about finding me, I submitted to respectable link places like Zeal and JDS's GIDTopsites and a few other minor directories I knew. I continued to build my site and checked Google and Alltheweb using the link function e.g. link:www.topfunwebsites.com waiting for the links to appear. Finally, they did appear and only then, did I begin to submit my urls to the search engines and now the site is increasing in popularity at a linear rate.

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Alexa and Google Toolbars. The majority of the net savvy internet crew have one of these or both in their posession. These are an absolute godsend to the webmaster and browser alike.
First the Alexa Toolbar is great for telling you how your and other sites are fairing up to each other in terms of popularity and sites that are similar or compare to others. For example while typing here, I can see that desilva.biz is ranked 192,746 in the world according to Alexa and I can see 28 sites that link to here if I wanted to. If there were any reviews of the site I could check them out or make them:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/wr...rl=desilva.biz.
As I said on some sites you see similar recommendations in the toolbar. The webmaster can choose to add up to 20 they find worthy of linking to and would be a good way to affilliate with one another.
You must note that the Alexa toolbar knows what you are doing where and for how long. For a webmaster, this is fantastic since they are promoting their own rank by working on their site etc. and clicking on the links out of and into the site will start to show up through time.

The google toolbar is a little different as by default it doesn't install the advanced settings without you saying so. It will probably have some information sent to Google, but what a webmaster really needs to do is turn on the advanced functions to see the page rank of a site and be capable of voting for a site, which I do use occasionally when I remember. If the site appears in DMOZ, it will also tell you which category it is from. I'm not sure why this is an advanced function maybe someone can tell me.

If you have your website as your homepage then this is a huge thumbs up from a user to the website and is recorded down. That's probably one of the reasons Yahoo is still so powerful.

Now finally, Looksmart bought a company called Grub that is a distributed crawling client that allows a webmaster to add their urls to be crawled whenever they want as well as doing others with their spare bandwidth. Its still pretty buggy, but its worth checking it out especially if the Wisenut search engine starts to become popular. It also actually seeds sites existing in DMOZ and Zeal so the usefulness of these is great if you don't want to be the one having to do the crawling. Check it out at http://www.grub.com.

In conclusion of all that I have said, the basis for my argument is that my new site is doing progressively well in the SERPs and the major difference between the two approaches of my sites is that I have been using the Google toolbar (Only installed the Alexa very recently) throughout. The design and content of the new site is far better and it is larger which may have some effect on the site, but Freshbot (The Google bot that updates sites regularly) has been all over my website a lot of the time. Google may have some sort of thing in the toolbar which tells the server what the CRC of the page is hinting at freshbot to check it out, or it might be the fact that I have continually updated the pages so who knows.

Rob

Alexa...
I don't give Alexa much thought, not before, not now. I certainly don't have any intention to install their toolbar thingy either! I suppose it has it's uses but I just don't get it - yet.

I bet that the ONLY reason why desilva.biz is on the top 200,000 (like you say) is because you have the toolbar on your browser and you visit here often.

This GRUB.ORG though is VERY interesting and I hope you keep us up-to-date with the latest.

....hmmm, what is CRC?

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

Taken from webopaedia:

CRC

Abbreviation of cyclic redundancy check, a common technique for detecting data transmission errors. A number of file transfer protocols, including Zmodem, use CRC in addition to checksum.

Loads of information here about it and how it works if anyone is interested.
http://www2.rad.com/networks/1994/err_con/crc.htm

Zmodem, Xmodem, Ymodem, kermit, FidoNews...I miss those BBS days. :-?

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