Design Your Website For Traffic

Design your site for traffic :

What better way to start the new year than with more traffic to your web site. Web traffic is a critical part of your internet business and it is imperative that you design it to bring you the most amount of traffic possible.

 

 

Designing your site for traffic includes offering good content, easy navigation and a logical flow. Additionally you must also build your site to draw traffic from the search engines because if you can obtain high search engine ranking, you can enjoy free traffic.

It's important to note, however that good ranking won't do you much good without a well designed site and a well designed site can't bring you visitors if no one knows it's there. Both high ranking and good design need to work together.

How do we pull all this together? Let's take a look.

Design your site for traffic : A word about Design

A huge mistake I see many website owners make is that they get caught up in making their site cute. They love the little animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds. What they fail to consider is that these things are worthless if you
don't offer good content, easy navigation and a logical flow.

First of all don't try to be everything to everyone. Design your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don't confuse your readers with links all over the page. Design a logical flow.
Lead your viewers to where you would like them to go. Leave plenty of white space and keep your pages organized. Clearly state at the top of your pages what you are about and what you would like your viewers to do.

Secondly, I don't recommend pop-ups. I find that the majority of internet users find them annoying. The demand for pop-up blockers is a good indication that viewers don't want to see them.

Thirdly, offer good content. Provide information on your site that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information that they might not get elsewhere. Write reviews regarding your products. Write newsletters and articles and most importantly offer something of value for free. Give your viewers a reason to come back. It will also build trust in you.

Design your site for traffic : Traffic builders

Good search engine ranking can bring lots of visitors to your site. It often takes a few months to rank well but the payoff is lots of qualified traffic. While it's not practical to depend solely on search engines for traffic it can complement your other advertising campaigns nicely. Aiming for high search engine placement is always a plus. Keep these in mind when developing your site for the search engines:

 

Design your site for traffic -Domain names

Choose a domain name that has your site keywords in it. For example, if you're a site about pet care, try to include the words "pet care" or words related to pet care in your domain name if you can.

 

Design your site for traffic -Keywords

Keywords require research and there are several tools to help you out in this area. Here are my favorites:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

I suggest focusing on only one keyword or keyword phrase per page of your website. This may not seem like a lot but if your site has 20 pages you can focus on 20 keywords. Each page should be considered a landing page for your site.
If you have proper navigation on your pages it will easily allow viewers to see everything you have to offer.

Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your page as well as in at least one header phrase. Also work the keywords into the body of your text as often as you can without sounding redundant.

Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in your page description tag. Many search engines no longer look at the keyword tags but I recommend using them and including the plural forms as well.

 

Design your site for traffic - Alt Tags

Search engines don't index images, therefore any text on your site that is presented in image format won't get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, fill in your ALT tags with
your keywords. This will boost your keyword frequency and help your site achieve better ranking.

Design your site for traffic - Linking

Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to your site, so it's important to establish quality, related links. This can be accomplished in a few ways. One way is to establish reciprocal links with other like sites. When exchanging links be sure to include your keywords in your site title.

Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be sure it is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative. I also recommend that the site's index page have a Google PR rating of at least one. This ensures that the site is not being penalized by Google. If it is a penalized site then you could be penalized as well for linking to it.
Include a 'tell a friend' and 'bookmark' script on your site. This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of all return to your site.

 

- Include a Site Map

Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how it's organized, where it is located with respect to other information, and how to get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible.

Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots. This can increase your chances of becoming indexed because a site map allows the search engines to easily visit every page of your site.

A site map works best if you include a link to your site map in the navigation of every page on your site.

Finally, don't let your site become stale. I have found that my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add new pages to my site and keep the content new and fresh. Follow these tips and 2005 may be your year for traffic.

website optimisation rankings Search engine optimisation services are designed specially to make sure that your web site reaches both its target audience and creates massive return on investment (ROI). We work hard to reach the highest ranking possible using the latest search engine algorithms.
Service Includes:
Web site analysis and recommendations.

Targeted keyword research.

website Optimisation of Home Page (up to 3 keywords)

website Optimisation of other pages (1 – 2 keywords)

Creation of meta tags (title, description, keywords).

In short website optimisation rankings will audit your existing online visibility and then research the keywords and phrases that are specific to your business. We will then craft the optimised code for each individual page on your site and load it into your web site.

website optimisation rankings appreciate that success can only be achieved when a customer's web site can truly demonstrate return on investmen.

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A Beginners Guide to Web Hosting And Other Web Hosting Tips

What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ?store? the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ?data center?. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting? There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

To continue, go to A Beginners Guide to Web Hosting article.

NB: A lot of other great web hosting services articles are available at http://web-hosting.info-and-tips.com

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Improving Your Conversion Reduces the Need to Constantly Promote Your Sites
I just got off the phone with Michael Fortin, one of the top copywriters and conversion experts on the web.

We were doing a teleseminar for our members on conversion and testing for website owners wanting more out of the traffic they already enjoy, rather than constantly having to promote their sites to support low conversion rates. Specifically, we were talking about all the things you can do to test different "calls to action."

A call to action is anything you are trying to get people to do on any particular site or page of a site. It could be buying a product or service, getting people on an announcement list or newsletter, or getting people to click on your advertising links.

Most web publishers are so happy when they finally have a site up that they consider their work done and get right to marketing it. Once the traffic rolls in, they enjoy whatever sales or clicks they get and try to make more money by driving MORE traffic to the site.

Then they start building another site. And another. And another.

This is a disturbing trend that is creating a massive amount of waste. Both in resources and time. Especially when it comes to niche publishers who are building massive networks of sites on different topics in order to capture emails, generate advertising revenue, sell affiliated products and services, or to build their lists to generate backend sales to their subscribers.

The waste is generated when people are in too big a hurry to build more sites, add more products, and get more traffic to sites that can convert sometimes 1000% BETTER than they do now.

They are moving at a hectic pace, in this scenario, to build build build, when their income goals can most often easily be met without so much waste.

One example of waste is when someone builds a content-dry site that has nothing but Adsense and some links on it. People hit that kind of site and can't wait to find a reason to leave. The thinking is, "Great! My 'click thru ratio' is sky high! I am getting almost everyone to click on my ads!"

But here's what's happening in reality: you are working VERY hard to get traffic to such a site, only to "burn" it on a 35 cent click! No email capture, no followup, and most importantly no desire on the part of the visitor to EVER see your site again!

Would you rather have someone come through your site and click immediately on an advertiser's link, never to return? Or would you rather have someone come to your site, read some great content, sign up for your list and not click on ANY links that first time?

I will take scenario #2 any day of the week. And I won't have made a single penny off of that person with that initial action. But I will in the future!

If you have a site that you constantly test and tweak for performance (beyond its ability to repulse your visitors into clicking on an advertisement just to get to a QUALITY site) then you have a real business.

You can test and track SO MANY variables to make a site more profitable than it is now. Every site on the web can perform better than it does right now. Every single one!

The people who understand this never stop testing their calls to action to get their visitors to do more than something that results in a one-time action.

Traffic is the most expensive thing on the web both in the time it takes to get it and the resources you have to use up for each and every hit.

The traffic you have now might be all the traffic you EVER need on a daily basis to make a killing with your site. You will never know until you test and track everything about your site.

The headlines, the offers, the opt-in forms, the guarantees, testimonials, bullets, adsense placement, followup... In short, every webmaster on the net has a lot of work to do on every site they own if they really want to reap the kinds of profits their sites are actually capable of pulling in.

Most people get a site up and are happy with the sales or clicks they get and move on. NO! You are leaving so much money on the table thinking you are done with a site right after you put it up.

That site is the worst it should ever be! Wasting another domain fee, hosting fee, bandwidth and the costs associated with getting traffic to a brand new site before you have optimized your current site for the very best conversion it can pull is NOT good business practice.

I know people who have literally thousands of domains. And one thing I can guarantee you is this: They are making a pittance, even if they are making $60,000 a DAY, in comparison to what they COULD be making with far fewer sites and more testing and tweaking of that smaller group!

And Fortin seems to agree. He is going to be at my seminar in New Orleans September 9th - 11th, 2005 to expose everyone who attends to just how much money they have left on the table over the years because they have never tested different aspects of their calls to action.

It is enlightening, as well as depressing to find out how much money you COULD have made all this time had you tested from the beginning!

But the point is, you cannot go back to get all those lost subscribers, sales, or clicks. You can only start testing today to capture more money from each site you own. Thereby alleviating the need to have a massive network of sites all performing at half their potential or much less!


About the author:
Jack Humphrey is Managing Partner at Content Desk. He is also the author of Power Linking 2005, now in its 4th edition. http://www.power-linking-profits.comTo learn more about the profitable niche publishing industry, check out http://contentdesk.com/mardigras
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How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
Information Outlook

Summary

This is the second of three articles. Part 1 appeared in the August issue of Information Outlook.

Search engine optimization and marketing covers a wide range of activities, many of which are similar to what a reference librarian, systems librarian, or market researcher does. Although the focus is the World Wide Web, many of the tools that are used have broader applications for special librarians.

Internal corporate processes. Web analytics tools measure and analyze corporate sales, customer preferences and problems, viable products and channels, and other issues that may provide answers for questions received by special librarians.

Competitive intelligence/market research. Keyword research, Web site saturation and popularity tools can provide information on a company's competitors: how they are marketing on the Internet, what they are spending on online marketing campaigns, how they are pricing their products.

Legal issues. Who Is tools can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Link Popularity tools can show who is deep-linking to your site. Log files, in conjunction with Who Is tools, can tell you who may be committing click fraud on your paid placement campaigns or spamming your e-mail servers.

Back end knowledge of how Web sites work. These tools can show you what may be keeping search engines from indexing your site and can highlight customer service issues.

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SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES

Web site saturation and popularity tools show how much presence a Web site has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity).

If your company wants to generate leads from Web site traffic, you need to understand your organization's Web presence, particularly in relation to that of your competitors. Generally, the more Web presence you have, the easier it is for people to find your site; that is, if those pages contain the keywords people are looking for and if they rank high enough in search engine rankings for people to see them. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Pay attention to this so you can learn the number of sites that are linking to yours, which is very important. Knowing where your site stands in these two areas can give you a good idea of what you need to do to improve your Web presence.

Many tools measure various aspects of saturation and link popularity. My favorites are Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.

Link Popularity + (http://www.uptimebot.com) shows much more than its name implies. It measures the number of back-links (incoming external links to your site); linked domains (all pages that link to any page in your domain, including internal pages); pages of your site that are indexed; and pages that contain your URL in the Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Hotbot, MSN, Teoma, Lycos, AOL, and Alexa search databases. (See Figure 1.)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Once you register (it's free), you can also see overall Google page rank, the number of pages you have at each Google page rank, and whether your site is listed in the DMOZ Open Directory, one of the major search directories. Page rank is one indicator of a page's popularity and authority. Registration lets you do mass reviews of up to 16 domains and have the results e-mailed to you. (See Figure 2.)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

This has become one of my favorite tools, because it provides one of the most comprehensive snapshots of Web presence as far as the number of search engines it covers and the type of information it shows. The one area it doesn't cover is competitor comparisons. When I need to do a competitor comparison, I use the Top 10 Google Analysis and Marketleap tools.

Top 10 Google Analysis (www.Webuildpages.com/tools/internet-marketing-google.htm) provides the top 10 search results for a keyword on Google, along with the ranking of the base URL. This makes it a great competitive intelligence tool. (See Figure 3.)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The results also show the number of pages indexed by Google and Yahoo; the number of backlinks for the reference URL and for the domain as a whole from Yahoo, Google PageRank, Yahoo Web Rank, and AllInAnchor (query words in anchor text of links pointing to the site); body keyword density (ratio of keywords to total words); and link keyword density (ratio of keywords in links to all links).

This tool is a good indicator of the overall standings of your competition on the two major search engines and provides information about what gives them their rankings (keyword density, number of links to the site, number of links with keywords to the site, number of pages indexed, and page ranks). By analyzing the key characteristics of the top 10 sites for a keyword, you can get a good idea of what it takes for the term to rank well. (See Figure 4.)

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

To use this tool, you need to have a Google API code, available free from Google (www.google.com/apis). The API code lets you run a limited number of specialized searches on Google.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Marketleap offers a suite of free SEM tools, including the Search Engine Saturation Validator, the Link Popularity Analysis, and the Keyword Verification Tool. (See Figure 5.)

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

The Search Engine Saturation Validator (www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm) shows the number of pages that several top search engines have in their databases for your Web site and the sites of up to five competitors. The search engines covered are AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo. I use this tool primarily to see how the site I'm optimizing compares with specific competitors on the number of pages indexed by the search engines. In general, the more pages a site has indexed, the greater the opportunity to be found by searchers. (See Figure 6.)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

What I like most about the Link Popularity Analysis (www.marketleap.com/publinkpop) is its ability to choose competitors with whom to compare link popularity, along with the ability to see the link popularity for 25 other Web sites in a company's industry category. If your company's industry isn't included, you can choose General, which shows the link popularity for 25 companies across a number of industries. What you get back is how your site compares with others in your industry on link popularity on the AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. (See Figure 7.)

The tool shows your presence on the Web in terms of number of pages in each search engine's index that contain a link to your site, including your own Web site. Another valuable component of this tool is that it gives you an idea of whether your link numbers make your company a major player on the Web:

* Limited presence: 0-1,000 references.

* Average presence: 1,001-5,000 references.

* Above-average presence: 5,001-20,000 references.

* Contender: 20,001-100,000 references.

* Player: 100,001-500,000 references.

* 900-pound gorilla: 500,000+ references. (See Figure 8.)

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Needless to say, there are very few 900-pound gorillas. In some niche industries, there may not be any sites that come close to having this many total "references" across all the major search engines. (Note: "Total" data are inflated, because they include the total of all links for the six search engines, which means many duplicates. Nevertheless, the total is a good relative indicator of what it takes to be a top site.) The General Industry category lists 14 gorilla sites; the top five are listed in Figure 9.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

By looking at the sites linking to your site, you can get an idea of the volume and quality of pages linking to you and who may be referring traffic to you. Once you know who is linking to you and the part of your site they are linking to, you can examine the areas of your site that are performing well and those that aren't. By checking out competitors who are outperforming your site, you can see who is linking to them and figure out what you need to do to improve your visibility. (See Figure 10.)

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Marketleap's Keyword Verification Tool (www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm) provides a quick way to see if your site ranks in the top 30 keywords through keyword verification. Many studies have shown that the vast majority of people don't look beyond the first 30 search results. You may have numerous pages indexed with plenty of links pointing to your site, but if you're not ranked in the top 30 on keywords that people use to search for your products and services, you're not visible. The Keyword Verification Tool covers AlltheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, Google/AOL, Lycos Pro, Hotbot, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo. (See Figure 11.)

Thumbshots (http://ranking.thumbshots.com) lets you compare the top 100 results for a term on two different search engines or compare two different terms on the same search engine. You can highlight a particular site to see where the site ranks on both search engines. (See Figure 12.)

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

The output is visual, with lines connecting pages that rank in the top 100 on both search engines or keywords. Pages from your site are in red, and those of other sites that have pages on both sides are in blue. Hover your mouse over any of the hundred circles and see the URL, rank, and, if available, a thumbnail image of the page. The text output includes the number of overlapping links and number of unique links. (See Figure 13.)

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

The comparisons also show how little duplication there is on the Web--there are usually very few connecting lines between search engines. In a search on "retail displays," only 15 pages ranked in the top 100 on both Google and Yahoo.

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

I like this tool because it shows you where your site is ranked along a 100-dot line for a phrase on two search engines or how it ranks for two different phrases on one search engine. I use it more for seeing how two different terms rank on the same search engine than for search engine comparison, as there are other tools to do that. I've used it most often for demonstrating to clients the success of using one phrase over another in their site's content. (See Figure 14.)

Link Desirability

The next two tools are designed to help you determine the "desirability" of having another site link to yours. Not all links are created equal--some can even hurt your search engine rankings. Generally, a popular site that contains a few relevant links will be a better site to seek a link from than a "link farm" site that is nothing more than a collection of links. Although Google's PageRank is considered to be an important indicator of the link popularity of a site, I don't give it much weight when I'm looking for a site from which to request a link. Instead, I look at whether the site is a good fit for the one I'm marketing, and whether a link on that site would benefit both sites. (See Figure 15.)

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

One tool, Link Appeal by Webmaster Toolkit (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml), calculates the desirability rating of a link on the URL you specify. The calculation includes factors such as page rank, number of outbound links, and overall percentage of links to HTML. It is intended as a guideline for evaluating whether you should ask for a link on a certain page or not. (See Figure 16.)

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

The Class C Checker (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/class-c-checker.shtml) allows you to check whether two domains are hosted on the same Class C IP range. Links from sites that are not on the same range as your site are thought to give more weight. (See Figure 17.)

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

Search engines don't like duplication in search results, so having a different IP address can help separate sites that are located on the same servers and may share databases or programming elements. Because EBSCO hosts many sites, I use Class C Checker more for the latter purpose than for link popularity. (See Figure 18.)

[FIGURE 19 OMITTED]

Other Ranking Tools

While the following tools aren't strictly SEM tools, I find them very valuable in my work.

The main Google search engine doesn't number results, which can make it difficult to figure out where you rank on a particular term. But Google Results (www.google.com/ie?q=&num=100&hl=en) gives numbered results. A disadvantage is that it only shows title and URL information, so identifying your site among the results can be difficult (unless your site name is in the title). I generally do a search on the main Google search engine and use the browser's Find option to see if my site's URL is in the top 30 or 100 results. If it is, I make a note of the title, then go to Google Results and redo the search. I check to see my site's numbered ranking. This is a lot easier than trying to physically count search results on a screen. (See Figures 19 and 20.)

Google Dance (www.google-dance-tool.com) has two uses. The first shows how you rank on the various Google servers; the second presents numbered results. I use this tool primarily for numbered results, unless I've discovered that I'm getting vastly different rankings when I search on a term within a short period of time. (See Figure 21.)

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

Froogle (www.froogle.com) is Google's shopping search engine. It allows companies to add their products to the site free of charge. I use Froogle in two ways: to expand a site's listings on the Internet and to illustrate price comparisons. Because Froogle is free, it is the simplest way for an e-commerce company to get all its products listed online. And because Froogle results sometimes appear at the top of Google results, it's a good way to get a site to show high in rankings if it doesn't do so organically. Currently, Google is generally not allowing new sites into top-ranked positions for at least six months after launch. (See Figure 22.)

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

Froogle is valuable in price comparisons because it helps me understand where my clients' pricing is compared with that of their competitors. You can do price comparisons on the other shopping search engines, but the only Web sites you find on those are companies that pay to be on them. All our e-commerce clients who meet the requirements for Froogle are added to it when ESWS redesigns a Web site. (See Figure 23.)

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 23 OMITTED]

Figure 9

Marketleap Top 5 Most-Linked-To Web Sites

Most-Linked-To Web Sites Number of Links

Yahoo.com 51,624,212
Mp3.com 26,652,540
Amazon.com 24,213,964
Microsoft.com 18,340,881
CNN.com 10,777,438
RELATED ARTICLE: How to use keyword saturation and popularity tools

1. Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity can help you identify some of your online competitors and determine how you compare in the terms you use to describe your products and services.

2. If you get a question about why your company Web site isn't performing as well as a competitor's site in search engine rankings, the Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Search Engine Saturation tools can illustrate why--or show why your site is doing well.

3. Librarians often spend a lot of time explaining to people why it is important to use more than one search engine in doing research. Thumbshot is a good tool to graphically show the lack of duplication in search results.

4. The Google Dance tool is good to know about if two searches for the same phrase return different results. Use it to see if Google is in the midst of updating its index.

5. Use Google Results or Google Dance for a concise list of numbered search results.

6. Froogle and the other shopping search engines are an easy and effective way to find out what your competitors are charging for your type of product and how your pricing compares. Because Froogle is a free service, it has a broader range of companies to compare with. However, Froogle also has a smaller percentage of visitors, so it may not be representative of all shopping visitors.
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Q&A: A Few Things You Need to Know About Site Architecture

by Stoney deGeyter

Website architecture is one of the most important aspects of creating a search engine friendly website. Below are just a few questions I was asked recently on the topic of navigation, site structure, site maps and pages site.

If I have a relatively small [site] with a flat/linear file structure and each page has links on it to every other page that the spiders can follow does it benefit me at all to have a site map?

If you only have a five to ten page site where every page is of equal value to the rest then a site map is unnecessary. However once you get beyond that, or begin having pages that are sub-pages of a section of your site it's a good idea to create a site map. Even if all the pages are represented in the navigation the site map will help the user know what information your site contains without having to go look for it.

One primary benefit of the site map is that it gives the visitor a birds-eye view of the entire site. In most instances, the navigation itself won't accomplish this, though it can depending on how it's laid out. But even still, if the visitor looking for a site map does so because they perceive an inability to find something that your site should have. It provides them with a complete picture. They know if they cannot find it on the site map then there is no need to keep looking through the rest of the site.

If I have a relatively small site is there any benefit for ranking by having a silo or pyramid structure rather than a flat structure? Do the spiders always prefer silo structures or does it only make a difference if the site if it is over a certain number of pages and if so what is that number?

I think in this case you defer to the visitor over the search engine. Organize your pages in a way that makes sense and will help the visitor easily find the information they are looking for. There is nothing wrong with silo-ing your site structure, even for small sites. Just make sure you're not adding additional layers for the sake of adding layers. Create a structure that makes sense from the visitor perspective. If you do that then it will make sense from the search engine perspective as well.

Do the robots really produce a 404 error if they can't find a robot text file on my site and should I make one just for that reason even if its a small site that otherwise wouldn't need it?

Anytime a search engine comes to your site (at least those who honor the robots.txt protocol) will search for the robots.txt file. Generally, not having a robots.txt file won't hurt you in any way but I do recommend adding one anyway.

Without the file in place the search engines can interpret that any way they want. Mostly it will tell them that your site is either completely open or forbidden. If you have the file in place you are letting the engines know that you have made a definitive declaration of what they can and cannot do in regards to spidering the site.

I have heard that pages should not be more that 100 or 150 k. Is that true? Does it affect ranking besides obviously affecting download times? Is k the same as kb (I know I could probably figure that one out)? How can I tell how big my pages are?

Its always best to keep your code as streamlined as possible. I don't think there is a hard and fast rule anymore as to how big a page can be, however if the engines are finding pages that have significantly more code than content then it very well may have a negative effect. Large pages with lots of content generally won't be a problem, but if the content to code ration is skewed too far toward code, then that represents an issue that's worth fixing. If too many of these pages exist on your site then its highly likely that many of your pages won't get fully spidered and/or many pages of your site could be left out of the index.

Typically when referring to file size someone might say 150k when they mean 150 kb. However if they say it's 150k kb then that suggests its 150 thousand kb. Just about any web file manager such as dreamweaver can tell you how big the page is. If the file is saved on your computer you can also look at the file size through windows explorer. When considering page size, search engines generally are just looking at the code, not necessarily at any additional downloadable items on the page (images, flash files, etc.)

I use iweb to make my site and it is limited in some things that it can do. It uses iframes to inset html content (or you can mess with it yourself). The way I understand it the frames are actually an entirely separate page that is imposed on top of the page you put it on. I have heard frames are bad for search rankings are these frames the same as iframes.

I don't have any experience with iweb so I can't answer any question in regards to that. Traditionally frames are not a good way to go for a site, but there are many ways to have the benefit of frames, without actually having frames. For one, if you need separate scrolling areas, this can be accomplished with CSS. For another, if you want to have one file for navigation instead of putting the same navigation code on every page, the use of server side includes (SSI) is the way to go. Includes allow you to create one file then globally include that file throughout the site. Update that one file and every page that pulls the include file in shows the updated information.

These questions are just a drop in the bucket of what you need to know regarding site architecture and navigation. But I do hope you they provided you with some valuable insight. I have answered a number of other website architecture questions in the past that will give you even more information on this topic. You can also check out my architecture checklist.

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Eric Peterson Podcast with Eric Enge
Transcript of Podcast with Eric Peterson

The following is a written transcript of the September 4, 2007 podcast between Eric Enge and Eric Peterson: Eric Enge: Hello listeners, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Eric Peterson, the CEO of Web Analytics Demystified, and we plan to talk about what organizations need to do to be successful in web analytics. You can see the Web Analytics Demystified website at www.webanalyticsdemystified.com. Hello, Eric

Eric Peterson: Hello, Eric. How are you today?

Eric Enge: I am doing great, how are you doing?

Eric Peterson: Excellent, thanks very much.

Eric Enge: Hey, it looks to me like things are going well for Web Analytics Demystified at least as an external observer. Can you talk about how things are going?

Eric Peterson: Yes, things have been going really, really well. I am tremendously excited about having my own company, about being able to pick and choose my own clients, and can really start to do some of things for the web analytics community that I've wanted to do for years. And, I have just been either time limited or limited by what my employers really wanted me to do and where they wanted me to focus. So, at just about 100 days into it now, the decision to leave Visual Sciences and start Web Analytics Demystified Incorporated has been just great. So, thanks for asking.

Eric Enge: Sure, I noticed since you mentioned the thing that you wanted to be able to do serve community that you didn't do before. One of those things was that free analytic survey that you put out there not too long ago.

Eric Peterson: Yes, and I am about to do a second round of that. I plan on doing those surveys twice a year, one time looking more at attitudes, which was the March survey. And then, in September we are going to look more at tool usage. That's the kind of thing that none of my previous employers, certainly not Jupiter Research, would have said go ahead, spend your own money, conduct research, do the analysis, write this up, get it edited and put it out there for free. Nobody would have ever given me the ability to do something like that, but I have always wanted to do that. At Jupiter Research, I wanted to focus more on web analytics and more of the kinds of problems that people at ground level, like real practitioners, have. But, I had a research program, and not to say anything bad about Jupiter Research, because it was a good research program, but, I can now make those decisions, let's focus on this; let's look at that. And, it's very, very satisfying as I am sure you know at Stone Temple.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. One of the things I saw in that survey is that you came to the conclusion that people who use the free web analytics tool are less likely to dive in and get the deeper value out of the analytics experience. Is that a fair assessment?

Eric Peterson: I have a second piece of free research I put out titled the problem with free analytics.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Eric Peterson: The data suggested that companies who primarily using free web analytics solutions were not really taking advantage of the technology the way they could. More adhoc usage of analytics as opposed to regular programming, a regular program for conducting analysis, employees to manage that or a process streaming approach, certainly companies deploying free solutions were less likely to be paying people to manage those solutions. So, some of the really important things, right, you know this, I know this, Eisenberg and Sterne and Barbie and everybody knows this, that you have to dedicate people. You have to have somebody whose responsibility it is to do web analytics, and that just didn't shine through in the data. So, I speculated that this may result in a very substantial number of companies who are not really getting the benefit; that was the essence of that report.

Eric Enge: Right. And, it doesn't mean that somebody couldn't use a free analytics tool and get the benefit. It just suggests that there is a correlation between those who do use one and don't pursue that level of benefits.

Eric Peterson: Exactly, so not only does it not suggest that you can't be successful with free analytics tools, it doesn't say anything about the value of those free analytics tools. I think of Google Analytics as being the prototypical free tool, and I think Google Analytics is great. I use Google Analytics; I get a lot of value out of Google Analytics. Certainly there are things that I don't like about it, and I fill the gaps there with other web analytics tools. But, it's not about the technology itself, it's not about the tool, and not even really so much about the people.

It's how the people are using the tool, you have to be committed to doing this, you have to be committed, you have to have every intention of using web analytics tools whatever you have, to better understand your audience and better understand your online marketing efforts. It's really that simple. Some people didn't take it that way; some people said that I was bashing free tools. Some people actually said that I was bashing for free tools, but again it comes down to reading the documents and really thinking about what the data says, what the data can tell you about how people are using the tools today.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, I took it the same way that you've just expressed it, but yes you had to dig in a little bit to make sure that you were really reading the whole document. Well, let's dive in a little bit. One of the things I have seen you write about or do presentations on is, it seems like a lot of organizations dive into analytics, and then assume that a continual improvement process will be sufficient. But, I have seen that you made the argument that it's not sufficient, can you explain that?

Eric Peterson: The continual improvement process is sufficient if it is truly a process. What I have seen and I talked about this in San Francisco a little bit at the Emetrics Summit, and I have been talking about it since then. What I have seen is that there are still a fairly substantial number of companies that seem to nod their heads, they bow their heads yes, yes we get it when you talk about continual improvement, but they haven't gone so far as to implement the actual process part of the continual improvement process. One of the most important things to continual improvement is having a testing platform; right is that AB testing or controlled experimentation or multivariate analysis, whatever you want.

Just having the ability to run parallel tests is fundamental to continual improvement done right. And, there are still a lot of companies that haven't deployed those kinds of technologies, maybe they are doing things in serial, but maybe not. I think a lot of times web analytics stops for companies when the reports have been generated, and they don't take it far enough. They don't get to analysis, they don't take analysis to multivariate testing; they don't do the processes behind web analytics. And so, I think that maybe there is not a limitation in understanding, but there is a limitation in use.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what about the management process used that are necessary to take this a step further?

Eric Peterson: Well, the management process used, and I wrote about this fairly extensively in a white paper, again a free white paper that I provide at webanalyticsdemystified.com, talking about the role that management needs to play. It's real common and certainly at Jupiter Research I experienced this and also at Visual Sciences, it's real common to go in to a situation where a company has spent significantly on web analytics tools technology, but don't have a named, assigned senior owner. Right, a Senior Vice President or a Vice President or an EVP or somebody whose responsibility includes web analytics, who includes making web analytics actually successful in the organization and deriving positive return on investment from Omniture or WebTrends or Corematrics or Visual Sciences or whatever they have got, and their people. There are series of management processes that often get forgotten and it's unfortunate, because where you end up is with well-intentioned, well-meaning, right people actually doing web analytics, but nobody is taking advantage of their analysis. Nobody is actually taking it to continual improvement, and taking it to the next logical step of let's do something with this data.

Eric Enge: All reports and no action?

Eric Peterson: Very common, very common: all reports and no action. It's actually, I don't if you attended the Web Analytics Association Webcast that I did last week, but I have just started talking about something called RAMP. I have always been looking for what is the most memorable; what is the most simple way to communicate, how to be successful with web analytics? And, I think it is this, ramp is resources, which is technology and people, ramp is analysis, ramp is multivariate testing, and ramp is process. You take first letter of all those, you get a clever little acronym, because everybody wants a ramp that goes up and to the right.

But, it's all of this, and it's management buying into the RAMP, and it's IT buying into RAMP, and it's analytics and it's everybody saying we can use web analytics and website optimization ecosystem of technologies to be very successful in the online channel as long as we are committed and as long as we have a roadmap, as long as we understand what we are going to do, when we are going to do it, and why we are going to do it. But, the evidence of that, the ability to be successful is everywhere, you know that, it's your clients, it's my clients. It's Jim Sterne's clients, and Semphonic's clients, it's all the vendors' case studies. The evidence for being successful with analytics is absolutely overwhelming, so it's not the technology, and it's not the people that are holding everyone back. It's really I think about the process and about being well-intentioned, and really trying to make this stuff work.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you can think of it as creating a data driven culture?

Eric Peterson: Creating a data driven culture or creating a data driven culture within a larger culture. Talking to Tom Davenport a little while ago and asking him if companies are not data driven from the top-down; are they just doomed, are they not going to be able to compete on analytics? And, what we eventually came to is you can't compete on analytics, but you can compete on web analytics at the microscopic level. So, one department, one group in the organization, will you be more successful if the whole organization is data driven? Probably yes, but it doesn't mean that if you are not data driven from the top-down, you can't be successful with web analytics. It just means you might have to work a little bit harder to not be led by the data, but to use the data to your advantage.

Eric Enge: Right. It's interesting to think about if you are dealing with the person who is currently not particularly sophisticated, and that's probably the wrong word. But, just not knowledgeable in the area of analytics at this point, and they are getting into the RAMP, and thinking about it for the first time. They are looking at a real investment, there is the buying of the tool; there is building up the organization with all the people. It's the cultural thing as it needs to happen and as Avinash Kaushik, famously said that the tool should be 10% of your cost, and the people 90%, and whether you agree with those numbers or not, you are really looking at taking a big step. It's fascinating to me, because you and I are both seeing what the returns are when you do that successfully, but how do you go about educating someone who doesn't have the knowledge and background as to what they can hope to get in return for their investment?

Eric Peterson: That's an excellent question, it's an excellent question. It's something I have been talking about a lot more lately. It really is how you get to it. Web analytics is hard, right. But, I don't know, we should probably have discussed this before we started recording the call, because I don't know how you feel about this. But, I think the web analytics is hard, right. I have a presentation where I go through 20 different examples from the vendors and from authors and even stuff that I have written and stuff that Avinash has written, and stuff that Google; a bunch of stuff from Google that says web analytics is easy, web analytics is easy, Google Analytics makes web analytics easy.

I don't think that's right, I think web analytics is hard, and I think the assumption that web analytics is easy or it is supposed to be easy is actually hurting our industry. Its hurting individual practitioner's ability to communicate to the large organization what has to be done to take advantage of web analytics. When you walk in the door and you say this is easy, we are all going to get it. Then when inevitably people struggle with definitions, when they struggle with data inaccuracies, when they hear about cookie deletion; when they see these new archaic terms, when they look at these interfaces, they think to themselves well this supposed to be easy, but this isn't easy for me.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: I think the recognition that web analytics is hard, and it's something that requires an investment of time and energy and resource is how you get organizations to buying into it. You put together processes, how are we going to educate managements in the organization about what you can and cannot do with web analytics. How are we are going to educate senior managers about the terms, the definitions that they need to know to take advantage of the reports that they are getting, and more importantly to take advantage of the analysis that they should be getting? If so it's easy, and it's going to be a slam dunk for you. I don't think you are going to give it the attention that it deserves. Again, this goes back to the free versus fee conversation we had moments ago. If web analytics is easy, I don't really need to spend Avinash's $90, right it's easy. So, we will just all be able to pick it up, right?

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: It's not easy.

Eric Enge: Yes, I agree completely. I mean it's like I could spend a dollar, and maybe I will get $2 back, or I can spend $10 and I am going to get $50 back. Well, getting yourself to spend the $10 might be harder to do or take little more thought upfront, but I really think the web analytics situation is like that. The ROI grows as the expense grows assuming of course that the expense is being spent in a smart way, but I think the ROI grows as you ramp up the effort.

Eric Peterson: Yeah, I agree. But, it's about getting people to ramp up the effort and having the right expectations.

Eric Enge: Alright, did you mean to use your acronym there by the way?

Eric Peterson: That's what I want, RAMP, right let's RAMP it up. It is an important thing; I got some comments back from the WA Webcast which I will be making freely available through webanalyticsdemystified.com. I think towards the end of next week, thanks to the good graces of the folks of the WAA. One of the comments I got back was I saw this in the Yahoo group that Peterson wasn't talking about anything groundbreaking or revolutionary with RAMP. And, I am not, we all know this.

The problem is we are very insolated little circle of individuals, the web analytics blogers, the people that go to Emetrics, and we need ways to take web analytics out to the masses, to everyone in the organization and people outside the organization. So, RAMP is one way to do that, right it's not to simplify it so far that it makes it useless, but to communicate it more effectively. And, multivariate testing, right you don't get to continual improvement done well until you get good at multivariate or AB testing, I mean this is just the reality of it. So, feel free to talk about RAMP all you want.

Eric Enge: Sure. So, another thing I noticed is that you are really into detailed diagramming of every part of the process, and maybe you can talk about why you feel that's so important?

Eric Peterson: Yeah. I don't know that I am a huge proponent of pedantic diagramming of everything. I don't know that I am that big a proponent of getting up the pens and papers or SmartDraw or Vizio or whatever in diagramming everything. But, I am trying to convey with this point that there has to be more attention paid to the detail, because people say we have web analytics integrated into all of our campaigns and page deployment processes, web analytics is the strategy part of our business. And then, I say okay well, so that means that you never forget to tag a campaign and you never forget to tag a new page and you haven't deployed Web 2.0 Applications, such as Ajax or Flash, or a podcast, or an RSS feed, that every time you deploy something new there is always analytics baked into that, right. I say that to companies and I get this funny look back, and then somebody in the back then goes no, actually we forget to tag campaigns all the time, and we just launched a brand new Ajax application and it doesn't have any tracking in it at all.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Peterson: And, I say it's because it's not part of the process. You have not diagrammed web analytics into the process; you have not considered the importance of web analytics. And, so then it comes in at the 11th hour, and then you fall behind, you get busy and it just drops out. I mean how frequently does web analytics drop out of sight or campaign or content deployment process, it is still very common. So, this diagramming is simply an exercise, this is something that I go out and do with Web Analytics Demystified clients.

We sit down and we say let's talk about how you deploy a new campaign, let's draw out all the steps and look at where measurement should be, and let's talk about whether or not it's there or not. Simply the act of creating those maps, of creating those checklists gets people to think more carefully about the value of measurement and how measurement has to be in there. So it's, I mean it's not an end, it's a means to an end. This diagramming is something that, you do a couple of diagrams you get the gist of it, you say yeah, yeah, we have to remember to do web analytics, we have to remember to insert measurements into these processes. So, it's not something you have to do forever, you don't need big binders, process binders for your web analytics integration, it's everything else you do. But you just, you have to think about it that way and I found that to be the best tool for getting my clients and my customers and my friends to think about it.

Eric Enge: Right. What I find is in terms of, if somebody rolls out a new section of a site or like you say an Ajax application or something like that, what happens in a lot of companies, is that somebody goes and tries to pull the data, and that's when they find out the analytics is missing.

Eric Peterson: Data is not there, I mean I just stop counting the number of times in sort of the explosion of Web 2.0, which I think is great. I mean I think Ajax and all of this stuff is fascinating, I love my iPhone. I spend more time then is absolutely necessary on the FaceBook application on iPhone, I am really into Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies, but they need to be measured, right. It's not responsible to create these measurement black holes, and I just stopped counting the number of times I would sit down with companies and say hey, this is a great Ajax application, this is really engaging. How do you measure visitor engagement with this? And, they go well, we are not really measuring that much, and I go well, at least you are measuring like the conversion rate, i.e., the people are using this application to complete the critical conversion process, right? Then they go no, we are going to hope to back that in and like the third version of it or something like that. And then, I am just sitting there staring at them. I am like okay, I am the guy who wrote 3 books on analytics, are you just admitting to me that you spent $200,000 building this cool Ajax application, and it's got no measurement in it. I mean it's so uncomfortable conversation there for a couple of seconds, and then we move on.

We start to talk about how do you measure Web 2.0, how do you bake the tagging or the click tracking or whatever you need into it while it's being developed, and test that that works and think about, what do we want to know? You don't need to know everything, you don't need to know every drag and drop and zoom and click and all of that stuff, but you need to know some of it. How do you know what you need to know in advance? And so, in some ways Web Analytics 2.0, which is the subject of my longer talk at Emetrics in Washington this year, Web Analytics 2.0 is a lot like Web Analytics 1.0 was, years ago. We are going to have to relearn a lot of these things, only more money is being spent and more peoples' necks are on the line now.

Eric Enge: Yeah, ultimately you expect that the tracking mechanisms will follow the way that people make money on the application in some fashion. So, that's the thing that absolutely must be measured, right?

Eric Peterson: Yeah. No, I agree. The funny thing is people ask me, the Wall Street guys specifically will ask me who else is out there, like who is going to just do a great job of measuring Web 2.0 stuff, like Ajax. So I just, don't think it's somebody from left field, I think that the Website Optimization ecosystem of technology is right. This is Web Analytics Technologies, Customer Experience Management Technologies, Voice of Customer Measurement Technologies, the forsee Results and Tealeaf's of the world. I think the stuff we need is already out there, it's just about using it the right way. I think it's just about understanding how the technology should be used, what you hope to measure and how you hope to use that data. I think it's really that simple, it's just it's not playing out that way.

Eric Enge: Indeed. So, can you summarize for us then what are the keys to success in Web Analytics today?

Eric Peterson: Yeah, sure. First key to success is to recognize that web analytics is hard, right. It is hard; it is something you are going have to work out. You are going to need people, you are going to need resources; you are going to need time and money. Web analytics is not easy, and when people tell you that web analytics is easy you should question their motivation, are they trying to sell you something? Are they trying to sell you on something, do they want you to buy a book or read a blog or something like that? Web analytics is hard; the second thing is RAMP; resources, analysis, multivariate testing and process. You've got to have all four of these things and you got to have, you got to understand how all four of those outputs or inputs work together to drive your businesses success. Resources' is technology and people, analysis is the desired output, reports are just reports, right. Reports are only good if you know what they are telling you, but analysis and recommendations is the desired output from Web Analytics projects. Multivariate testing we've talked about a fair amount, process we've talked about a fair amount. You have to consider all four of these things to build a ramp that will ultimately increase the success of your online business.

Eric Enge: Well great, thanks for taking the time to talk to us Eric.

Eric Peterson: Absolutely. Thanks for asking me Eric. I wish you all the best at Stone Temple and I got to say man, I am really, really enjoying the podcast and the interviews that you've been conducting up there, just great stuff this global interview. You've really managed to grab onto an idea and talk to some really great people, and then cover some great information. So, I want to just say I very much appreciate that.

Eric Enge: Well, then thank you and I am pleased to have you in the list of those people I've been able to talk to.

Eric Peterson: Excellent.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

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Confirm Your Site's Availability with a Site Monitoring Service
You've invested time, money and numerous other resources to ensure your website is profitable. Have you taken all the necessary steps to protect your investment?
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Transfering Page Rank from an Old Site to a New Site
When moving from an old to a new website it is extremely important to consider the old sites existing organic search engine position. If the correct strategy is not undertaken then the old sites position in the search marketplace could be dramatically compromised. We spen a lot of time during the Search Engine Optimisation process, [...]
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Transfering Page Rank from an Old Site to a New Site
When moving from an old to a new website it is extremely important to consider the old sites existing organic search engine position. If the correct strategy is not undertaken then the old sites position in the search marketplace could be dramatically compromised. We spen a lot of time during the Search Engine Optimisation process, [...]
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Top 8 ways to promote new content on website
This post is very important for your web marketing professionals. You can follow this tips for more and more revenue earning.

After months of rebuilding your website - adding great content
filled with profitable, keyword-rich copy (all due to Dr Ken Evoy's
excellent 5-day Affiliate Masters e-mail course, no doubt) - your
site is now ready to be uploaded to the Internet!

But how do you go about promoting this new content?
Well, you need a plan!

===== Side Bar =====
It's easy to receive Ken's 5-day Affiliate Masters e-mail course!
Just send a blank e-mail to mailto:tamsshopping101@sitesell.com
and get day 1 of this great course in your inbox TODAY!
===== Side Bar =====

WEBSITE PROMOTION PLAN

Yes, you need a website promotion plan! And you need a schedule
for that plan. And once that schedule's finished, you need another,
long-term plan - site promotion is never over! Some of the
activities that you should plan to do are listed below; you
can probably think of others, more relevant to your site: do!

===== Side Bar =====
For a long-term plan, and some long-term activities, read my
article called Promote Your Site Every Day!. You can find it :
http://www.shoptour.co.uk/webmaster-promote/promote-your-site.shtml
===== Side Bar =====

1: TELL YOUR E-MAIL SUBSCRIBERS

Tell your e-mail subscribers! This is an easy first step to take,
to promote a site redesign (or new pages on your site). Subscribers
have been expecting an announcement, anyway, because you've been
referring to the redesign in earlier newsletters (haven't you?).

This is your best opportunity to really go into detail about all
the great ways your site has improved, and all the new benefits
your subscribers will find. You could even (cheekily!) run a
competition to encourage subscribers to visit your site, and
find those inevitable bugs, before the rest of the web does!!

===== Side Bar =====
If you don't run a newsletter, this is one (of many) great reasons
why you should! Listbot, Topica, e-circle are just a few services
that provide free, ad-supported, newsletters:
- http://www.listbot.com
- http://www.topica.com
- http://www.ecircle-uk.com
===== Side Bar =====

2: TELL YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY, ANYONE

Tell friends, family and others who are (legitimately) in your
address book. Make your e-mail personal, and friendly. And better
still, just talk about how your site now benefits or involves them.
That is, just discuss:
* your new link to their site
* your promotion of their affiliate program
* their new article, now on your site

Even busy friends and family, need to be 'encouraged'! Always focus
on benefits, but *get them* to visit!

3: TELL THE NEWSGROUPS

Tell the newsgroups about your new site, but only do this if you
are a regular contributor. Simply announce your site - check
that site announcements are allowed, first! - with a few good
reasons why members should visit! Better still, contribute to the
newsgroup, and simply leave your URL as part of your 'signature'.

A great place to find suitable newsgroups is
- http://www.deja.com/usenet/ (now http://groups.google.com)

4: WHAT ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES?

DON'T just blast your new pages to all the search engines /
directories! This may seem like spam to them, and your new pages
(or even your whole site) may get banned. This is because some
search engines need to be told about new pages, others don't. And
directories generally just like to know about the main page on your
site (unless you've just added a lot of content on a completely
different theme).

Search engine policies change regularly, so find out from others by
visiting a search engine forum, or asking someone you consider to
be an expert. An excellent place to find search engine advice is
http://www.searchengineforums.com [HELP! and New Member Forum].

(So what did *I* do? I just submitted one new page to the major
search engines. This page has links to all of the other new pages,
too, so the search engine spiders should eventually index all of my
new content. I visited searchengineforums first, obviously!)

5: DON'T FORGET PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINES!

Add more keywords to your various pay-per-click accounts. This is a
great way to make new content available, quickly. (You just have to
wait for keyword-approval by the pay-per-click administrators).

Choose profitable keywords (high demand, low supply), identified
when you began creating new content. But, as you pay for each
click, it's important that you only get clicks from your potential
customers; so choose your keywords, title & description carefully.

===== Big Side Bar =====
Don't know what Pay-per-click search engines are? They are search
engines, like GoTo, that allow you to choose how highly your site
ranks for a particular keyword. So you make a bid on a keyword. And
if your bid is highest, your site features highest on that search
engine's ranking, for that keyword. And for each click your listing
generates, you pay the amount that you bid to the search engine.

Pay-per-click search engines are proving to be an excellent way to
get extra traffic. Especially when you consider that results from
GoTo, the main pay-per-click, feed into highly-placed sponsored
links on many of the major search engines.
===== Big Side Bar =====

To learn much, much more about pay-per-click search engines visit
this excellent site: http://www.PayPerClickSearchEngines.com/

6: FIND OTHER PROMOTION SOURCES

Search engines are not the only way to promote your site. There are
webmaster resource sites, freebie sites, and even Britney Spears
fanclub sites, all of which depend on new content! You name it,
there's a site resource dedicated to it!

So use your favorite search engine to discover these resources,
and check out their linking policy. Then, if possible, get a link!
(You may even want to visit some of the links on the resource site,
and get links from those sites too!)

With some persistence, this should bring you a lot of well-targeted
traffic. (Free Sites, for example, get most of their traffic from
one such resource: The Free Site - http://www.thefreesite.com )

7: WRITE AN ARTICLE

Writing an article (like this one) is a great way to promote your
new content. There are so many sites willing to accept articles,
and so many editors willing to publish them in their newsletters.
Just write about your new content (but not about your site), making
it interesting and informative to a general audience. Then, in the
author-byline, refer to your new content, and provide a link to it.

For example, I found a great site, Find Sticky, just from reading
an interesting article about sticky content, written by the site's
webmaster. I enjoyed the article and checked the author bylines to
see who wrote it, then visited his site - http://www.findsticky.com

===== Side Bar =====
Don't know how to write an article? Just write about what you
actually do, and the sites that you visit. Then read a few good
articles on 'how to write an article', and compose away! It *isn't*
difficult, and it can be very rewarding (not least because of the
contacts you make with those that actually publish your articles!)
===== Side Bar =====

The following sites accept free articles for publication:
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.marketing-seek.com
http://www.certificate.net
http://www.web-source.net
http://www.theukmarketer.com
http://www.MakingProfit.com/articles

8: GET VIRAL

Viral marketing is that elusive creature that can literally,
*literally* create a STAMPEDE of traffic to your site; just on the
continued recommendation of others. Think Am-I-Hot-or-Not? or
Hotmail or Hampsterdance or ICQ or Napster...!

So how do you go achieve viral marketing?

Simple! Come up with a completely original, innovative, easy-to-
use, easy-to-talk-about Wow!-of-a website... OR

Try one of these more common easier-to-achieve approaches:
- allow visitors to create virtual greeting cards on your site
- create free ebooks that include content (or articles) from your
site, and then heavily promote the free ebooks
- put free e-mail on your site
- put 'recommend-this-site' links on your site
- etcetera

Back to the article from Find Sticky. I actually found that article
in a newsfeed from Moreover! It seems that if you write articles on
a weekly basis, then it's possible to get your articles syndicated
via Moreover. So, with no effort from you (apart from writing
regular articles) you can get a link to your site (and your
article) on hundreds, even thousands of other websites!
http://w.moreover.com/site/publishers/index.html

As for Moreover - the newsfeed company - a link to their site goes
on *all* syndicated content. Clever, eh!?

~ ~ ~
Viral marketing brings more traffic to your site than any other
method! But it's a lot easier talking about it than doing it!

BONUS: WRITE A PRESS RELEASE

Writing a press release is a good idea, but only if your site
redesign *is* newsworthy - and only you know that! - your release
will be pretty much ignored, otherwise. If you insist on writing a
release, why not submit it to PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com). They
check the releases before submitting them to interested parties.
They'll reject your release if it isn't properly written (or
newsworthy). They do all of this for free, too!


CONCLUSION:

You've worked so hard on developing your website further, with new
content or a site redesign. And now you need to work just as hard
to promote this new content! So get a promotion plan, and work
through it, and then continually promote, promote, promote!

Enjoy your journey

About the Author

Steve Nash is webmaster of http://shoptour.co.uk - a new-look UK
shopping directory: find shopping sites quickly AND save money. He
also edits a newsletter called Promote! Promote! Promote! Subscribe
by sending a blank e-mail to mailto:pppromote@getresponse.com
Full Article

Optimize Online Lead-Gen for Offline Sales
Better technology and persuasive planning will not only increase lead generation, but also measure and optimize it.
Full Article

Cyber-democracy or cyber-hegemony? Exploring the political and economic structures of the Internet as an alternative source of information
Cyber-democracy or cyber-hegemony? Exploring the political and economic structures of the Internet as an alternative source of information
Library Trends

ABSTRACT

Although government regulation of the Internet has been decried as undercutting free speech, the control of Internet content through capitalist gateways--namely, profit-driven software companies--has gone largely uncriticized. The author argues that this discursive trend manufactures consent through a hegemonic force neglecting to confront the invasion of online advertising or marketing strategies directed at children. This study suggests that "inappropriate content" (that is, nudity, pornography, obscenities) constitutes a cultural currency through which concerns and responses to the Internet have been articulated within the mainstream. By examining the rhetorical and financial investments of the telecommunications business sector, the author contends that the rhetorical elements creating "cyber-safety" concerns within the mainstream attempt to reach the consent of parents and educators by asking them to see some Internet content as value laden (sexuality, trigger words, or adult content), while disguising the interests and authority of profitable computer software and hardware industries (advertising and marketing). Although most online "safety measures" neglect to confront the emerging invasion of advertising/marketing directed at children and youth, the author argues that media literacy in cyberspace demands such scrutiny. Unlike measures to block or filter online information, students need an empowerment approach that will enable them to analyze, evaluate, and judge the information they receive.

**********

According to figures provided by the U.S. Census Bureau (2001), more than half of school-age children (6 to 17 years) had access to computers both in school and at home in the year 2000 (57 percent). With some 17 million children using the Internet in some capacity, including email, the Web, chat rooms, and instant messaging (Silver and Garland, 2004, p. 158), the Census Bureau estimates that 21 percent use the Internet to perform school-related tasks, such as research for assignments or taking courses online.

While these statistics underscore the growth and popularity of the Internet, particularly in schools and educational institutions, concerns have grown about the "safety" of using computer-mediated communication technology. Since the Internet became a mass medium in 1995, parents and schools have approached online content with reservation. As such, politicians, educators, child advocacy groups, and, most importantly, the computer industry, have been vocal advocates for patrolling the Internet and censoring certain kinds of illicit or objectionable content. Beginning in the late 1990s, Federal Trade Commission member Christine Varney summarized the emerging concerns about online safety:

All of us agree that children's online safety concerns are real and
pressing and that we must support the involvement of parents
raising children in this new, digital age. We understand that we
must all work together--industry, law enforcement, educators,
advocates--if American families are to realize the potential of this
new medium for enriching the lives of our children and fostering
their future success. (Rubin and Lamb, 1997)
Starting in 1997, an Internet/Online Summit was held in Washington, D.C., to enhance the safety and benefits of cyberspace for children and families. Key political figures, such as former vice president Al Gore and former attorney general Janet Reno, joined parents, as well as politicians, law enforcement officials, and educational administrators, to launch a national public education campaign, "America Links Up: An Internet Teach-In," designed to help Americans understand how to guide kids online (Rubin & Lamb, 1997).

On October 21, 1998, former president Bill Clinton signed into law the "Children's Online Privacy Protection Act" (COPPA). This measure was enacted by Congress on April 21, 2000, to "prohibit unfair or deceptive acts or practices in connection with the collection, use, or disclosure of personally identifiable information from and about children on the Internet" under the age of thirteen (Grossman, 2000). Along this trajectory, Congress passed the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and the Neighborhood Internet Protection Act (NCIPA) in December 2000, which required schools and libraries that receive federal money for Internet connections to adopt Internet safety policies in 2001. The proposed safety measures include usage agreements for proper student use of this medium, audit-tracking devices to supervise student Internet perusal, and software filtration devices designed to block inappropriate sites in schools (Trotter, 2001).

In 2002 the Bush administration proposed a "National Strategy to Secure Cyber Space," offering security recommendations for U.S. citizens, businesses, and organizations using computers (Carlson, 2002). Since then the Federal Trade Commission has offered testimony before special committees and the House of Representatives about online pornography through a series of "law enforcement actions against fraud artists whose deceptive or unfair practices involve exposing consumers, including children, to unwanted pornography on the Internet" (Federal Trade Commission, 2004, p. 1).

In addition to these federal initiatives, many states have measures designed to protect children from online predators. In Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott added more investigators to the Texas Internet Bureau to keep kids safe from those who use online means to prey on children. As Assistant Attorney General Sparks explained, "The Attorney General wants the public to know that he's tasking people with patrolling the Internet and trying to make it safe for kids; the down side is that more and more children on a daily basis are getting online and on the Internet and as every additional child gets on, that's one more potential target" (quoted in Ochoa, 2003).

Likewise, educators have expressed concerns about online information overload. According to one school administrator, accessing the Internet in schools is less predictable: "If you used to bring your class to the school library, you pretty much had a sense of what was available for the children to research; now you have no idea ... they are going to hit sites that are appropriate and sites that are inappropriate" (quoted in Shyles, 2003, p. 176).

Despite a commitment to online "security" in schools, libraries, and homes from so many constituents, few recommendations have materialized into solid strategies or funding initiatives. Almost all of the proposed solutions and policies ignore the more relevant question of how private computer companies, Internet service providers, corporations, and governments stand to gain financially and politically by deciding what kind of information will be "censored" and what kind will be promoted. In fact, it could be argued that the Internet content "crisis" dominating public policy and mainstream media coverage has produced a cultural climate ripe for the commercial exploitation of parents and educators. In this article I argue that such a discursive trend manufactures consent through a hegemonic force that overlooks the invasion of advertising or marketing strategies targeted at young people online. By examining the rhetorical and financial investments of the telecommunications business sector, I contend that the mainstream articulation of "Internet safety" invites parents and educators to regard some Internet content as value-laden (sexuality, obscene language), while disguising the interests and authority of profit-minded commercial enterprise (advertising and marketing).

What is more, the democratic potential of the Internet as a means to accessing alternative information and perspectives otherwise absent from the mainstream media continues to be threatened by the consolidation of increasingly powerful global media giants, such as Time Warner and Microsoft, which have much to gain from controlling the content Internet users access at home or at school. Consequently, an examination of the political and economic forces on the Internet is necessary for librarians and educators interested in understanding the benefits and limits of the Internet as a means of alternative communication.

EXPLORING THE MEANS TO FILTERING ONLINE CONTENT

Parental Guidance

As a result of this discourse, a number of solutions have been advanced to ward off illicit content appearing on the computer screens of young Internet users, beginning with parental guidance. CyberTipLine grew out of the 1997 Internet/Online Summit and is currently in operation today. Run by the U.S. government and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, parents can notify authorities of incidents of online child pornography and child predation. Another derivative of the summit's "America Links Up" project is the industry-sponsored "GetNetWise" Web site, which was launched in 1999. The "user empowerment" service, which involves a coalition of numerous Internet industry partners and advocacy organizations, (1) offers parental advice, including information about filters to block sexually explicit material, as well as a variety of tools to help parents and caregivers monitor a child's online activities and find browsers for kid-friendly sites. As one sponsor, AT&T, notes in its promotional material, "Our involvement with GetNetWise reflects our commitment to help users have the best possible online experience" (GetNetWise, 2004).

A more well-known parental guidance initiative, passed in April 2000, was the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In accordance with COPPA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation offers "A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety," which advises parents to "utilize parental controls provided by your service provider and/or blocking software" and "Monitor your child's access to all types of live electronic communications (chat rooms, instant messages, Internet Relay Chat, etc.), and monitor your child's email" (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004).

Other parental guidance measures have been created to address online advertising and marketing as well as issues of privacy. Parent advocacy groups, such as Commercial Alert, Consumer Action, the Center for Media Education, and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, have taken up the cause of parents concerned about online marketing measures targeted at children. For example, Commercial Alert has made requests to the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to require disclosure of embedded advertising in a variety of media and has created a "Parent's Bill of Rights" seeking to empower parents in the face of an aggressive commercial culture (Commercial Alert, 2003).

Proof-of-Age/Shielding Systems

In addition to parental guidance, many online providers and Webmasters have adopted proof-of-age/shielding systems that use credit card access as another means of content filtering. While COPPA sought to protect children thirteen and under, those located in the fourteen to eighteen year range were not covered by legislation. Providing proof of age before being allowed to access the content of a desired online site emerged as a means to address this gap. This system works in the same way that fraud-screening technology works: merchants collect user information at their Web sites for instant age or identity verification. Once online users submit their name, zip code, date of birth, and age, they are checked through an international electronic database of government-issued identifications. This allows site providers or merchants to determine the consumer's identity within seconds. Sometimes additional measures, such as online name signature, are required so that user signatures are bound to a public record.

Proprietary Environments

Another reaction to the discourse of online safety has been the advocacy of proprietary environments, where content is screened by editors into specific categories. For example, the leading Internet service provider, America Online (AOL), provides a blocking service that allows users (ostensibly parents) to limit a child's selected screen name to either a "Kids Only" area, which is recommended for children under twelve, or to a preteen/teen environment, with restricted use of chat rooms or newsgroups. According to the site, "Kids Only" is a collection of educational resources and entertainment areas as well as a preselected collection of child-oriented Internet sites, with AOL staff monitoring of message boards and chat rooms. AOL also promotes the company's "Parental Phone Line" for instructions and advice on choosing and maintaining the settings of this product (the premise here is that the settings are likely to be tampered with by savvy teens and preteens).

In addition to "Kids Only," AOL has aggressively marketed its AOL@School service, which had been adopted by more than 14,000 schools by 2004 (Williams, 2003). AOL@School offers six online learning portals for grades K-5, middle school, and high school so that students can access Web sites that have been preselected by educators as content and age appropriate. The software needed to access the portals comes with AOL's "parental controls" designed to "help ensure a safe, secure, age-appropriate experience" that can include school-controlled email, chat, and instant messaging (AOL, 2004). The popularity of "child safe" proprietary environments has not waned as Web browsers and popular search engines have created their own directories in an attempt to create safe havens for (and develop customer loyalty from) younger online users. Yahooligans' "Web Guide for Kids" is a collection of predominantly commercial links to online games, music, TV, science, news, jokes, "cool pages," arts and entertainment, and sports. Like most commercial proprietary environments, Yahooligans is riddled with advertisements and synergistic ties to commercial media products.

Internet Ratings Systems

For those seeking additional regulatory measures, Internet rating systems offer another approach. Unlike the rating system for television content that is uniformly and centrally organized by the television industry, Internet ratings are not assigned consistently by a centralized group of online content providers. The goal is the same, however: industry self-regulation over government regulation. According to ratings system advocates, many of whom work in the software and computer industry, Internet ratings are designed to make it "safe" for schools and parents to let their children access nonpornographic material without government directives. According to Paul Resnick, chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, which includes AT&T Laboratories and Microsoft, the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) was originally created to allow parents, teachers, and librarians to review questionable materials that they would not want their children to come across on the Internet (Resnick, 1997).

Resnick explains, "prior to PICS there was no standard format for labels, so companies that wished to provide access control had to both develop the software and provide the labels. PICS provides a common format for labels, so that any PICS-compliant selection software can process any PICS-compliant label" (Resnick, 1997, p. 107). Yet unlike uniform rating labels,

a single site or document may have many labels, provided by
different organizations. Consumers choose their selection software
and their label sources (called rating services) independently.
This separation allows both markets to flourish: companies that
prefer to remain value-neutral can offer selection software
without providing any labels; values-oriented organizations,
without writing software, can create rating services that provide
labels. (Resnick, 1997, p. 107)

One of the leading Internet rating systems that uses PICS is SafeSurf, a group that offers ratings along with other tools to help parents and "net citizens" filter online information. One means to achieving its goal is to encourage online content providers to fill out a questionnaire using content descriptors to rate their Web sites. Unlike government- or industry-wide regulatory labeling efforts that may "brand" content, SafeSurf is interested in maintaining First Amendment rights by offering content providers greater latitude to self-rate their Web material. For example, rather than branding content that includes nudity as pornographic, users can distinguish their inclusion of nudity as scientific, sociocultural, artistic, titillating, graphic, or illegal. Once content providers rate their Web sites or directories, they can download the SafeSurf rated logo of their choice. A SafeSurf staff member verifies the rating and sets up the chosen ratings label. Parents and educators can then use PICS compliant software/browsers to read the settings and to use the ratings to filter content that is not desired. As the SafeSurf group explains, "PICS allows content providers to rate their pages and parents to set passwords and levels for their children. Then, PICS compliant software/browsers will read the settings and use the ratings to filter content that is not desired" (SafeSurf, 2004a).

The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) is another international, independent, nonprofit organization that seeks to "empower the public, especially parents, to make informed decisions about electronic media by means of the open and objective labeling of content" (ICRA, 2004). ICRA's dual aims are to "protect children from potentially harmful material and to protect free speech on the internet." Like SafeSurf, Web authors complete an online questionnaire describing the content of their site, upon which ICRA generates a content label using PICS computer coding, which the author adds to his/her site. Parents and Internet users can then set their Internet browser to accept or decline access to Web sites based on the labels and user preferences. PICS is now a standard feature included in Internet software and browsers such as Microsoft Explorer.

Third-Party Rating Systems

While ratings systems are designed to allow content providers to voluntarily label the content they create and distribute, third-party rating systems "enable multiple, independent labeling services to associate additional labels with content created and distributed by others. Services may devise their own labeling systems, and the same content may receive different labels from different services" (ICRA, 2004). In other words, online watchdog groups interested in protecting children from online predators or illicit material can offer their own set of restrictive control tools for material that they deem to be objectionable. One such group is WiredSafety, formerly known as CyberAngels, led by Parry Aftab, an experienced international attorney and author of The Parent's Guide to Protecting Your Children In Cyberspace and A Parent's Guide to the Internet. Lauded as "one of Internet safety's most influential players," (Hill, 2000), Aftab has emerged as a nonprofit leader who has created coalitions with many governmental and nongovernmental agencies, including the FBI's Innocent Images anti-child pornography and exploitation task force. She was appointed the founding American director of UNESCO's global Child Safeline project and currently heads WiredSafety, "the largest online safety, education and help group in the world" (WiredSafety, 2004). With more than 9,000 volunteers worldwide, the group is a coalition of various Internet safety groups, such as WiredKids.org, WiredTeens, Teenangels, and CyberMoms and CyberDads, and their affiliate, WiredCops.org, all of whom patrol the Internet for child pornography, child molesters, and cyberstalkers. Additionally, WiredSafety offers a variety of educational and help services for online users. Some of its volunteers access and review family friendly Web sites, filter software products and Internet services, and post their findings on the Web. The group even has a "Cyber911 help line" that offers net users access to help when they need it online. SurfWatch is another online ratings system designed for parental supervision. It too prevents access to Web, gopher, and FTP sites that SurfWatch's team of "net-surfers" have found objectionable. They maintain an updated list of "not-for-children" Web sites that can be subscribed to electronically.

Commercial Filtering Software and Databases

A more intensive effort to censor "inappropriate" online content has come from commercial filtering software companies (often working in conjunction with powerful Internet content providers and third-party ratings systems). Also known as "censorware," these filtering products, which include Net Nanny, CyberPatrol, Cyber Sitter and N2H2, range in cost from $25.99 to $80 and are heavily marketed to parents, educational administrators, and libraries. Designed to be installed on home or school computers or to work with network routers or firewall, cache, or proxy devices, these products claim to offer safety measures for youth using computers for online research and recreation. Essentially, most of these programs work by using a combination of filtering and blocking strategies, such as the blocking of Web sites denoted through keywords and databases and the blocking of individual Web sites by specific URLs.

One of the first filtering programs--and most commercially lucrative--is Net Nanny. According to its promotional Web site, Net Nanny[R] 5 is "the world's leading parental control software, [and] provides customers with the broadest set of Internet safety tools available today. Our award-winning software gives customers control over what comes into and goes out of their home through their Internet connection, while respecting their personal values and beliefs" (Net Nanny, 2004). Launched in 1998, Net Nanny is a tool allowing parents, teachers, administrators, and librarians to screen incoming and outgoing Internet information, particularly pornographic material. By identifying and blocking various sites and subjects considered inappropriate, the program blocks the Web addresses of known pornographic and illicit sites. Parents can add to the collection of forbidden "code words" used to detect and flag sites. The program works with all major online providers and in email. It can also prevent children from accessing specific files on a PC's hard drive, floppy drive, or CD-ROM. Like audit-tracking software programs, Net Nanny keeps a record of a child or student's Internet perusal, meaning that parents and teachers can check up on the sites that a child has perused.

With all of these features, it is no surprise that Net Nanny's popularity and financial success has led it to offer additional blocking software such as Net Nanny's Pop-Up Scrubber, which blocks pop-up ads, Net Nanny's AdFree, which blocks a range of Internet ads, spyware, and profiling cookies, and Net Nanny's Chat Monitor, which monitors and filters Instant Messaging and other online chat.

Another commercial service, CyberPatrol, works in the same way as Net Nanny by filtering harmful Web sites, newsgroups, and Web-based email. Also commercially successful, CyberPatrol licenses its "CyberLIST" database of site ratings to several additional vendors. Among its ratings categories are violence/profanity, partial nudity, full nudity, sexual acts, gross depictions, intolerance, satanic or cult, drugs and drug culture, militant/extremist, sex education, questionable/illegal and gambling, and alcohol and tobacco. Likewise, Cybersitter blocks sites and subjects deemed unacceptable by Internet users. It offers site lists for automatic blocking and allows parents to have added input in restricting programs, files, and games. According to PC Magazine, Cybersitter offers the strongest filtering and monitoring features, blocking content related to violence, hate, sex, and drugs (Munro, 2004). It also allows parents to choose from thirty-two content categories, such as free email sites, file sharing, wrestling, cults, and gambling, for those interested in added blocking categories. As with other similar products, it lets parents filter and monitor their children's activities without their knowledge and can record both sides of Instant Messaging sessions.

Joining in the mix of filtering software providers is N2H2 (acquired by Secure Computing in 2003), a company endorsed by eTesting Labs and the Kaiser Foundation as "the most effective and accurate" filtering program and extensive database of objectionable Internet sites (N2H2, 2004). It offers two product lines: Sentian, which is geared toward helping businesses manage their employee Internet access, and Bess, a popular program and database adopted by many schools and endorsed by the American Library Association to help schools and libraries meet CIPA rules for young Internet users.

With so many companies vying to be the best provider of filtering software, it is not surprising that Microsoft would venture into this area by offering its own industry standard Internet filter aimed at regulating youth-directed online content. AS part of its monopoly on the Internet browser software Internet Explorer (which accompanies its Windows platform), Microsoft has also implemented a filtering system that can be configured to block or log all data transfers, including World Wide Web pages, newsgroups, types of messages within any newsgroup, Internet Relay Chat, or Internet hosts known to have objectionable material for children.

QUESTIONING THE VIABILITY OF ONLINE "SAFETY" INITIATIVES

Although some of these Internet resources and restrictions make sense for certain schools depending upon the age group and grade level of Internet users, there are some problematic areas within each method that should be cause for concern. The main underlying difficulty raised by these "quasi-solutions" is that they narrowly define what is "inappropriate," relegating most objections to issues of nudity, sexuality, trigger words, or adult content. This focus neglects to confront the invasion of advertising or marketing strategies directed at children. In many respects, Internet commercialism seems to be a more serious concern, but one would never guess this considering the ad-strewn and content-compromised "solutions" to appropriate Internet content.

First, although child-directed advertising might not be as blatantly offensive, it certainly fosters "values" that, at present, are not considered objectionable to most governmental, parental, and commercial watchdog groups. Although the first tenet of media literacy explains that all media are constructions, the problem with advertising and marketing strategies is that they are so much a part of our social landscape and our everyday life that they appear to be natural. Subsequently, the conceptualization of what is inappropriate for children or students only helps to sustain the interests of a commercial system through the omission of advertising; advertising is omitted and thereby deemed appropriate. Just as parents, educators, and anticommercial groups, such as Commercial Alert, have protested the commercial imperatives of satellite-delivered school programs such as Channel One, a company that offers schools free satellite equipment in exchange for a captive audience of students forced to watch its daily, advertisement-driven programming, and the computer equivalent ZapMe!, which tried to turn "the schools and the compulsory schooling laws into a means of gaining access to a captive audience of children in order to extract market research from them and to advertise to them" (Commercial Alert, 2000), we need to be equally circumspect about the amount of advertising and marketing proliferating on "Kids Only" sites and via kid-safe filtering software (Schiffman, 2000).

Moreover, sustaining an Internet-based market economy whereby consumer software programs and proprietary environments become the antidote to inappropriate material is directly at odds with democratic means of dealing with these issues through public discourse, political action, and critical media literacy skills. Most of the products previously analyzed are produced and distributed by profit-making and publicly traded enterprises, such as the media conglomerates Time Warner, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. Obviously, it is good business to create and sell blocking software products or to offer third-party rating systems that decide--for parents, educators, and librarians--what is in their (both children/students and the company's) best interest. In a self-fulfilling business transaction, reports of inappropriate content as well as media and political hype about the Internet as an "unsafe environment" lend credence to, or create a functionalist need for, such products. As stated earlier, advertising is overlooked as "inappropriate content" because it is part of everyday consumer culture, unlike pornographic and hate sites, which exist beyond the boundaries of what is deemed "good" for children and teenagers. As Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971) has noted, hegemony works within the terrain of everyday life and requires the consent of audiences--or in this case, parents, educators, and librarians. Hence, the commonly employed rhetorical elements that create paranoia about Internet content within the mainstream attempt to reach the consent of parents and educators by inviting them to see some Internet content as value-laden or problematic while camouflaging the interests and authority of a profitable computer software and hardware industry.

Although serious discussion about government regulation goes beyond the purviews of this study, several concerns must be raised regarding commercial software programs. First, the decision to block some sites over others is a very subjective decision. The problem with this kind of regulation is that some groups and individuals might attempt to censor material (under the guise of concerns for "safety") that threaten their own political and/or religious agenda. Dependence upon commercial Internet service providers and related filtering products limits the democratic principle of the free flow of information and puts commercial enterprise at the helm of online navigation, a troubling fact given that corporate culture can often be extremely conservative and self-serving when it comes to making censorship decisions. In one instance, America Online was charged with using filters to block out several Web sites associated with "liberal" political organizations. One of the top stories featured in Censored 2001 was AOL's liberal blacklist, whereby sites for the Democratic National Committee, Ralph Nader's Green Party, Ross Perot's Reform Party, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Safer Guns Now were labeled as "not appropriate for children" (Phillips & Project Censored, 2001, p. 111). Ironically, the youth filters did not prevent access to nudity or to conservative groups, including the National Rifle Association. Designed for America Online by the Learning Company, an educational software company owned by Mattel, such filtering programs confirm suspicions about the process of labeling and omitting Web sites according to political and economic interests.

This kind of censorship raises flags about the capabilities of large media conglomerates to limit access to material deemed politically at odds with commercial interests. Inasmuch as Disney was in a position to rebuke the distribution of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's political documentary produced through Disney's Miramax film division, large multimedia conglomerates are poised to censor content that is politically or economically damaging to their enterprise.

Second, some of the trigger words used to block Internet sites might be legitimate subjects for research. For example, the often-cited example of an Internet user not being able to access research on breast cancer or sex education (if these words were denoted as trigger words) is indeed troubling. As PC Magazine reviewers of Cybersitter 9.0 explain, "Cybersitter errs on the conservative side; by default it may block sites you would deem okay" (Munro, 2004). A telling example of this problem is offered in an article featured in Electronic School Online. Author Lars Kongshem writes,

CYBERsitter yanks offending words from web pages without providing
a clue to the reader that the text has been altered. The mangled
text that results from this intervention might change the meaning
and intent of a sentence dramatically. For example, because
"homosexual" is in the list of CYBERsitter's forbidden words, the
sentence, "The Catholic church is opposed to all homosexual
marriages" appears to the user as, "The Catholic church is opposed
to all marriages." (Kongshem, 1998)

Likewise, Karen Schneider, a librarian for the Environmental Protection Agency, has led a filtering software assessment project involving more than thirty librarians around the world. She has found that filters "are not reliable and they're hard to maintain" (cited in Gebeloff, 1999). In one example, recipes using "chicken breast" were blocked due to sensitive word triggers. Rob Gebeloff, author of Screening Zone: The Trouble with Net Filters and Ratings, continues to problematize the use of all types of "censorware" programs by pointing out numerous gray areas in judging content. He asks:

Do you want your kids going to Web sites that discuss birth
control? What about AIDS education? Or what about the
exploration of Mars? [A recent New York Times article pointed out
that one filtering program blocked out every Web site with the
word "sex" in it, including a site that had the word
"marsexploration" in it's title]. So clearly, if you're going to go
with filtering, be prepared to make tough calls. (Gebeloff, 1999)
Peacefire--a group critical of filtering software--explains, "We have always felt that filtering software is not only ineffective, but also a violation of the trust between students and staff... Unfortunately, most of the censorware companies block anything controversial, not just pornography. I find it very discouraging that this includes information like suicide prevention, safe sex, and gay youth resources" (g. Jenkins, quoted in Kongshem, 1998).

Third, students and computer hackers have already found flaws with such programs and have managed to acquire information from sites that have been blocked. When product evaluators at Consumer Reports tested over nine different Web content filters, including AOL's parental controls, they discovered that, although AOL offered the best protection, as much as 20 percent of easily located Web sites containing sexually explicit content, violently graphic images, or promotion of drugs, tobacco, crime, or bigotry slipped through the filters. In fact, "Net Nanny displayed parts of more than a dozen sites, often with forbidden words expunged but graphic images intact" (ConsumerReports.Org, 2001).

Fourth, there is an inherent conflict of interest when the main advocates challenging the government's attempts to protect children from online predation and pornography are the very same groups that seek to profit directly from a "free marketplace" of online smut. In its June 2004 press release, SafeSurf applauded the Supreme Court for its ruling in the Internet pornography case Ashcroft v. ACLU "because the High Court concluded that Internet filtering solutions, such as those originally proposed by SafeSurf over nine years ago, are a better way to proceed than the government restrictions imposed under the Child Online Protection Act" (Jules, 2004). As the chairman of SafeSurf, Ray Soular, exclaimed, "This decision has revealed that the High Court has seen the wisdom in protecting the Internet from governmental censorship and in enabling parental discretion through an intelligent filtering and labeling system. Maybe now, Congress will focus more attention on what has become known as the 'Safe Surfing' method of protecting children online" (Jules, 2004, emphasis added). Yet the court's wisdom is more the result of intense lobbying than constitutional insight. SafeSurf has been lobbying Congress about the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act since its implementation, arguing its case before the Congressional Commission on Child Online Protection (COPA) in July 2000,just a few months after COPA's passage.

Gebeloff addresses this conflict of interest in his critique of net filters and ratings for Money Talks:

I once had a chance to interview Gordon Ross, the fellow who
designed Net Nanny.... I asked Ross how he, with his background
in computer systems, comes up with the list of bad words and
unacceptable Web sites that his program blocks. Basically, he told
me, it started from a list he put together and then evolved over
time to reflect feedback from users. "And we have a disclaimer
saying we're not liable for the list." (Gebeloff, 1999)
This leads Gebeloff to deduce the ironic disposition of this practice: "We don't want the government to be our censor, so why should we turn the job over to a computer programmer from British Columbia? The answer, of course, is that we shouldn't, but that's what happens when a parent buys filtering software, installs it, and then walks away from their child's machine" (Gebeloff, 1999).

With laws mandating the use of various forms of censorware to meet government regulations like CIPA, and liability issues at school, the library, or work, it is no surprise that the marketplace of ideas has increasingly channeled its financial resources into for-profit filtering products. Companies easily win over school and library administrators by guaranteeing adherence to government legislation as well as liability protection and parental approval. For $14.95, SafeSurf markets Safe Eyes as an effective tool that "uses the N2H2 website database which has been proven time after time to be the most accurate database available ... In recent tests, both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Kaiser Family Foundation found N2H2 to be the best" (SafeSurf, 2004b). Official endorsements from prominent governmental, industrial, and educational groups are an added selling point, such as N2H2's official stamp of approval from the American Library Association for meeting CIPA rules.

As for the pervasiveness of filtering products, a poll conducted as early as 1998 at the Technology + Learning conference revealed that 51 percent of surveyed teachers, technology directors, school board members, and other educators had adopted some form of censorware for all or some students in their district (cited in Kongshem, 1998). Another poll conducted in 2000 by MSNBC.com found that "many users rely on an Internet service provider, or ISP, to do the filtering for them. The big names in this market are America Online, The Microsoft Network, Mayberry USA, Rating-G Online and Getnetwise.com. Filters that are popular with Christians and conservatives include Family.Net, Integrity Online and Hedgebuilders.com" (Nodell, 2000). With no centralized board or groups to review the practices of these filtering companies or ISPs for their effectiveness or appropriateness, it is easy to see how those seeking to meet the needs of their schools, libraries, work, or homes turn to various programs without clear indication of their validity and reliability, especially institutions pressured to have some "safety plan" to meet CIPA legislation or issues of liability.

Accordingly, it is no surprise that filtering producers and marketers stand to gain financially by lobbying for nongovernmental solutions to censorship, as well as a deregulatory media environment allowing telecommunications firms to continue to merge and expand their online assets and streamline Web content. MSNBC's interest in polling Internet user preferences for filtering is not purely for newsworthiness given its partnership with Microsoft. The same is true for AOL Time Warner. What is more, in addition to cornering the market for libraries, schools, and homes, many of these companies have ventured into the work environment. As MSNBC.com reporter Bobbi Nodell explains, "many filter companies are moving into the corporate market, which is booming because employers are concerned about workers 'wasting time' on the job and want to keep them from shopping, checking investments and playing games ... the corporate market is expected to grow from $60 million in 1999 to $500 million in 2004" (Nodell, 2000).

Confirmation of this trend can be found with Net Nanny. Looksmart, a leading business firm in online search technology, recently acquired Net Nanny for approximately $5 million in cash and stock in April 2004. Indeed, in their ability to promote and streamline commercial content (while limiting "inappropriate" sites), monitor Internet user habits, profile users for direct marketing purposes, and market products to users, filtering software products can be considered stepchildren of the highly lucrative commercial search engines, which became the most lucrative Web properties in 2003 due to their increasing ability to promote commercial Internet content. As LookSmart CEO Damian Smith stated in 2004:

This acquisition is both strategic and prudent for LookSmart ...
Strategic, because integrating our search technology into Net
Nanny provides a stronger product for their users, while also
providing LookSmart with a desktop platform froth which to launch
high margin search and paid listings applications. Prudent, because
Net Nanny is expected to produce positive margin contributions for
LookSmart in 2004. (LookSmart, 2004)
In other words, this partnership, along with MSN funding, will allow LookSmart to apply its tracking and marketing capabilities to Net Nanny's software and related proprietary environments. As the company explains to its shareholders, such a partnership "will enhance the leading online filtering software and provide high-quality proprietary search traffic for LookSmart."

While filtering technology continues to thrive in the Internet's "free market" system, and as Web content continues to grow exponentially, the profits for filtering technology continue to expand commercially. Net Nanny's acquisition by LookSmart makes clear that one of the leading "protectors" of illicit online content is poised to become a predator of tracking and marketing to today's Internet users as it shifts its mission to "high margin search and paid listings applications" (LookSmart, 2004). With substantial profit predictions for filtering companies expanding their business within the corporate market, the goals to protect Internet users, including children, are becoming further marginalized at a time when schools, libraries, and businesses are becoming increasingly dependent upon filtering technology.

To make matters worse, "the Internet's status as an open forum for ideas" has come under attack since 2002 with a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling that shields cable companies from having to open their networks to smaller competitors and civil liberties and consumer advocacy groups (Wolverton, 2002). As Karen Charman (2002) explains, "without public policies mandating open access," cable will monopolize broadband width, denying access to other Internet Service Providers in order to capitalize off of hyper-commercialized services that make it easier to buy products. Troy Wolverton (2002) of ZDNet news explains that "lack of competition among cable Internet providers could be a form of censorship ... even if they don't completely block Web sites, cable companies could slow access to them to the point that they become all but impossible to reach ... while they could speed access to their own sites and those of preferred partners." Subsequently, if "the Internet content accessed by K-12 youth is patrolled by capitalist institutions, rather than by the government, educational institutions, public libraries or communitarian groups, it will inevitably become more difficult 'to turn the one-way system of commercial media into a two-way process of discussion, reflection, and action'" (Thoman, 1998, p. 3). As Resnick explains, no matter how well conceived or executed, any labeling or blocking system will tend to stifle noncommercial communication since the time and energy needed to label will inevitably lead to many unlabeled sites: "Because of safety concerns, some people will block access to materials that are unlabeled or whose labels are untrusted. For such people, the Internet will function more like broadcasting, providing access only to sites with sufficient mass-market appeal to merit the cost of labeling" (Resnick, 1997, p. 106). This form of censorship is a serious problem as the possibilities for a decentralized and openly available information network will once again be delimited by a top-down capitalist hierarchy where nondominant, noncommercial, or alternative sources of information will remain peripheral.

Finally, information filtering does not prepare students to learn how to analyze and evaluate information once they are no longer using the Internet within an educational setting. This point has gained momentum as media literacy educators, librarians, and scholars have been grappling with the need for solid media literacy curricula that include a critical and analytical approach to learning with and about online communications technology (Fabos, 2004; Frechette, 2002; Paxson, 2004; Tyner, 1998).

TESTING CONTENT CONTROLS FOR CYBER-CAPITALISM

The hegemonic impulse of online safety profiteers becomes clear when we take a look at some ratings organizations, online proprietary environments, ISPs, and databases recommended by parents, the government, educational institutions, and the industry. First is SafeSurf, a rating organization that claims to be "dedicated to making the Internet safe for your children without censorship." Through an information database of objectionable sites, a proprietary environment for children, and safety tools for parents, SafeSurf believes they "will enable software and hardware to be developed that will enable more effective use of the Internet for everyone" (SafeSurf, 2004a, emphasis added).

My skepticism about claims that "everyone" benefits through SafeSurf's methods developed when visiting the SafeSurf home page, where I reviewed their policies, claims, and method to create an environment that is child tested and parent approved. What first drew my attention to their Web site were the various advertisements centered on the page. One ad displayed a large colorful rectangle for Card Service Online, "the leader in online real time credit card processing," featuring Mastercard, Visa, Discover, and American Express. Directly under it was an ad for Child Magazine, on sale at the reduced price of $7.95; its pitch: "One year for the price of a bottle." Beneath this was a bold advertisement link to "Update Microsoft's Internet Explorer to support SafeSurf Ratings." Combined, these ads validated my forewarning about the interconnections between powerful computer firms, such as Microsoft, and blocking software products.

My findings led me to presume that more advertising would emerge on the SafeSurf Wave link, which offers Kid's Wave, a list of "top sites" purportedly "devoted to educating and entertaining children." On the Kid's Wave front page, I was informed "There are great places to take your children online." Below was a grid of partial listings of SafeSurf-approved sites by category. The first category was the "favorite site of the month," which was Squigly 's Playhouse. By clicking on the cartoon graphic, my hypothesis was reaffirmed: the unfolding visual displayed a large color advertisement for Disneyland with moving graphics and a photo of the Magic Kingdom. The flashing text read "[frame 1: photo and text depicted Disneyland Resort] To really enjoy yourself here; [frame 2: photo of Mickey Mouse described as 'the Disneyland Trip Wizard'] Pick up your custom schedule here."

In case the ad was overlooked, each separate clickable Kid's Wave link for an activity or game was infused with the Disney Resort campaign. For instance, the "Squigly's Games" page had another large, flashing, color ad for Disney at the top that read, "[frame 1: photo of Mickey Mouse] Are you the Ultimate Disney fan?; [frame 2: photo of Goofey] Click here--enter to win"; on the bottom, a three-frame flashing ad targeted at parents read, "[frame 1 ] You know what you put on your card; [frame 2] but do you know what he put on your card? [picture of a crowd with a man circled in red] ; [frame 3] Find out with your free credit report online." Other pages, like "Squigly's Writing Corner" or "Brainteasers," featured separate Disney ads as well as credit card ads (presumably targeted at parents, but also at a new generation of consumers).

Disney, it seems, is a frequent advertiser on filtering software products. In addition to selling nonsoftware products, such as $40 embroidered golf shirts, Net Nanny's Internet Web site had an advertisement for Disneyland featured on its front page. Most troubling, however, is that advertising clients are also the sponsors of Net Nanny content. Among its "safe-sites" for kids were "fun" links to Disney, Crayola, and Kids Channel. Under the category "Education" was a Colgate "Kidsworld" link with prominent product advertisements for Colgate toothpaste. Describing its mission in philanthropic terms, Colgate Palmolive Co. purportedly maintains the Internet site "as a service to the Internet community." A closer look at the page proves otherwise. First, I had to type in my first name and specified password of the day, "toothpaste," in order to enter the "No Cavities Clubhouse." There, I was greeted by "Dr. Rabbit" who appeared in his clubhouse holding a toothbrush and Colgate toothpaste. Although this Web site offered "interesting oral care facts, games, and stories aimed at raising children's awareness of oral health," I could not get away from Dr. Rabbit and his Colgate endorsement no matter what activity I clicked on. Moreover, in spite of its "intention" to adhere to the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) Guidelines for advertising on the Internet and online services, my name and email were still requested so that the "Tooth Fairy" could send me an email message--no doubt carrying her Colgate toothpaste and brush in cyber-flight.

Although not nearly as plastered in advertising as SurfWatch or Net Nanny, CyberPatrol's Web site unquestionably catered to/partnered with commercial Web sites, including Disney's Internet empire of kid-targeted Web addresses. A recommended "safe" site was "Toy Story Games," a game developed by Disney based on its Toy Story movie. Not surprisingly, Disney's home page was saturated with child and adult-directed advertising. Although the advertising contained here was "2nd level," meaning that I had to click on the recommended sites before being inundated with ads, the sites contained on the page remained uncontested as child appropriate.

As evidenced within these kid-designated Web sites, the far-reaching clutches of advertisers are rendered invisible in the discourse or underlying rationale of Internet protectionism. While children are deemed to be impressionable when it comes to sex, pornography, adult content, and nefarious language, concerns about manipulative advertising campaigns go largely undetected within "kid-safe" Internet domains.

CONCLUSION

Media literacy scholar Len Masterman's explanation of critical autonomy, to "develop in pupils enough self-confidence and critical maturity to be able to apply critical judgments to media texts which they will encounter in their future" (1985, p. 24; emphasis added), does not fit within the logic of commercial filters and the self-regulated corporations attempting to control and streamline Internet content. As Elizabeth Thoman (1998) clarifies, "the media have become so ingrained in our cultural milieu that we should no longer view the task of media education as providing 'protection' against unwanted messages." Hence, a learning model of awareness, analysis, reflection, action, and experience leads to better comprehension, critical thinking, and informed judgments.

Contrary to filtering mechanisms designed to censor or reduce student exposure to "inappropriate" Web sites and online information, a much better approach toward new information technologies is to go beyond teaching students about how to use computers, email, Web browsers, etc. First and foremost, the goals of media literacy must go hand in hand with computer training and online access through the instruction of critical skills by which students learn to discriminate all types of information. While there are hazards to over-regulation and under-regulation of the Internet, educators and librarians have an important role to play in developing online media literacy initiatives so that students can become discerners of the types of information they need. The goals for taking media literacy to the Internet must go beyond the critical evaluation and use of information to include an analysis and understanding of the impact of political and economic forces that drive and control much of the Internet. Within a "media literacy in cyberspace" model, the issues of ownership, profit, control, and related effects are essential to helping students formulate constructive action ideas that will lead to their own Internet choices and surfing habits (Frechette, 2002). As PICS chairman Paul Resnick (1997) admits, "no labeling system is a full substitute for a thorough and thoughtful evaluation." In the end, if the power of Internet content labeling, ratings, and restrictions are left to a third party or profit-making companies, then educators, librarians, and parents need to lobby that they serve the public interest rather than private commercial interests.
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