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LED Digest 2485: The Importance of Fresh Content Print E-mail
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List Moderator:                       Published by:
Adam Audette                          LED Digest
adam, led-digest.com     http://www.led-digest.com
..............................................
September 5, 2007                   Issue no. 2485
..............................................


            .....IN THIS DIGEST.....


======= NEW ====================

        <Moderator Comment>
                ~ Update

        --== Adding Content: Free Money ==--

                ~ Michael Linehan
"No kidding on the 'free money' concept.
Here's what I mean..."


==== CONTINUING =================

        --== Designing for AOL ==--

                ~ Martyn Gay
"...the caching system may also compress
images to AOL's .art format..."

                ~ William H. Thompson
"The issue your client has brought to your
attention is present on other browsers..."

        --== Submitting Sites - How Often? ==--

                ~ Steve Pronger
"FFAs are a complete waste of time."

        --== Ecommerce Sites - PCI Compliance ==--

                ~ Dan Eskelson
"We have had excellent results with HostGator
regarding PCI Compliance."


=========== NEW ==================================

<Moderator Comment>

I've been wanting to follow up on the discussion here of late about
the LED name. Thanks for the constructive feedback, everyone, both
here and off-list. Some great food for thought. For now I think
we'll keep things status quo, but with an eye to changing the name
in the future. I think we should make a change for a couple
important reasons:

1) To better reflect the LED community and the diversity of
discussions produced here;

2) To gain more exposure and hopefully more subscribers;

So with that in mind, maybe something that'll happen in the future.
Then again, maybe not :)

Frankly I just don't have the time to make a change like that now --
there's too much going on at the moment. I'm busy trying to launch
the audettemedia.com site (getting close) and doing Internet
marketing full time now for about 20 clients.

If you want to know more, hit me up off-list and we can chat
sometime.

Hope things are well,
Adam

-----------------

From: Michael Linehan
Subject: Adding content = picking up free money

No kidding on the "free money" concept.  Here's what I mean. I
thought of a way to explain the importance of adding content, that
will, I hope, inspire you to enthusiastic implementation. Because
adding content to your site is SUCH as easy thing to do that it just
about amounts to picking up free money.

With almost all of my clients, from one-person businesses to
substantial corporations, it's a struggle to get any decent quantity
of that so-very-important content to add to the site.

We all know content addition gives a critical boost to search engine
rank.  We all know it provides a reason for inbound linking - again
boosting rank as well as bringing people directly. But a third way
in which content is important is, I think, less well understood.

For one client, about 50% of their incoming traffic was represented
by just four phrases. The other 50% was represented by nearly two
thousand distinct phrases!!!  And most of those phrases were used by
just one or two searchers! Individually, each phrase was of trivial
importance. But the cumulative effect was huge.

Could a one-page site hold those?  Obviously not. Nor could a
twenty-page site.  To utilize the power of this phenomenon, you need
to have a substantial site where an enormous number of phrases
occurs both within each page and in the cross-connection of pages.

So simple. Almost any business owner can do this. No technical
knowledge, special software, design ability or programming knowledge
required. The addition of content then gives you a very, very easy
way to attract a potentially huge number of additional prospective
clients.

Many clients say, "Well, how much content do I need to add?", which,
essentially, translates to, "How little can I get away with? Because
I really don't want to do any."  I suggest that the more useful
attitude to adding content is, "Wow!  This is so exciting.  Let's
add as much content as possible, as regularly as possible."  Content
addition represents an extremely simple, non-technical, low-cost way
any site owner can dramatically improve their website results.

I suggest that the effort is so little and doing it is so easy that
if you don't add content, and continue to do so regularly, you're
metaphorically walking past free money. (And if that content is
professionally written, with effective marketing messages, so much
the better.)

Michael Linehan, Marketing Alchemy
www.marketing-alchemy.com


======== CONTINUING ===============================

From: Martyn Gay
Subject: AOL browsers

> My question, how can I 'use' AOL on my machine to see
> what the problem is and fix it? I know you can do a free
> month with AOL, but I'm nervous about being able to get
> rid of them afterwards.
        - Nancy Cardinali, LED Digest 2484
        - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1895/190/

Nancy,

You can download AOL's browser from here.
http://downloads.channel.aol.com/browser

You don't need to install the full suite of AOL software, or change
your internet connection.

Its a modified version of MS Internet Explorer, but with quite a few
improvements. Its probably a good idea to check with your client
what version they are using - if they are using a very old browser
then its probably very worthwhile to trade up, if only for the
security issues that running old software can entail.

However, even with the same browser, your experience may still
differ than those of an AOL user for the following reasons:

1) AOL users connect to the internet via a proxy server. This
fetches the pages directly from the internet and then serves it back
to the users. This allows AOL to "cache" frequently requested pages
on the proxy server to save having to fetch it from the original
website each time the page is viewed.

This might mean that AOL users aren't always seeing the latest live
pages from your website, but are seeing a cached copy from some
hours ago.

AOL provides more information about this process, and how to have
some control over it.

http://webmaster.info.aol.com/caching.html

2) the caching system may also compress images to AOL's .art format,
to further reduce bandwidth. This can lower the quality of images
that AOL users see. AOL users can turn this functionality off (see
link below) but obviously many won't be aware that they can do this.

http://webmaster.info.aol.com/faq.html#graphics

3) With most user sessions on your website the user will connect
using the same IP address for each page hit. On AOL its quite
possible that the IP you see connecting to your site will change
during the user's session, as they connect via different proxy
servers each time. If you have any form of session management based
on IP address (as opposed to cookies or a token passed between
pages) this will likely cause problems for AOL users. This is only
likely to be an issue if you have a dynamic site, such as a shopping
cart or similar application.

See AOL's explanation
http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html

Regards,

Martyn Gay
ASP Shopping Cart Software
www.cactushop.com


-------- new post - same topic ---------

From: William H. Thompson
Subject: AOL browsers

Dear Nancy ...

This is NOT a unique-to-AOL issue. The issue your client has brought
to your attention is present on other browsers (IE7; IE6; IE5), as
well.

The "white space" issue is present on drlindaberry.com/index.html,
drlindaberry.com/testimonial.html, drlindaberry.com/classes.html and
drlindaberry.com/askdoc.html, but not present on the pages
drlindaberry.com/about.html and drlindaberry.com/links.html (and the
other pages - as far as we examined).

We suggest you revise the code on the three pages having the
white-space issue to conform with the code on the pages not showing
the issue.

William H. Thompson
Principal
The Thompson Group
www.thompsongroupmarketing.com


============ Sponsor Message ===========

Autumn Leaves Must Fall, But Not Your PR

Seasons change. How about your site's copy?
When was the last time you added or updated
your content to make it more end-user useful
and search-engine succulent?

Customers and search bots want fresh meat.
www.GetWebContent.com/LED, we deliver the beef.

============ Sponsor Message ===========


-------- new post - new topic ---------

From: Steve Pronger
Subject: Site submission

> Does anyone have any information... on what the
> maximum frequency amount of submissions to
> Regional Search Engines and/or FFAs is allowed?
        - Terry Smith, LED Digest 2483
        - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1894/190/

Hi Terry.

0. As in, zero. Never.

Submit your site to a few paid-for-review directories. Establish a
few good quality links. The engines will find you. If you're still
having problems (unlikely as long as your site nav is SE friendly)
open a Google webmaster account:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview

Create and submit a Google site map:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Submitting to search engines is a largely a thing of the past. Not
necessary. By all means submit to relevant, local non-spidering
engines if you believe they will drive traffic, but once you are
indexed resubmitting should not be necessary. With the major
engines, once you are indexed, resubmitting achieves nothing. FFAs
are a complete waste of time.

Steve Pronger
http://www.stevepronger.com

[also for reference, here's the official sitemaps.org site again:
http://sitemaps.org -adam]


-------- new post - new topic ---------

From: Dan Eskelson
Subject: PCI compliance

> It's time for me to step up from my third party eCommerce
> solution to hosting my own eCommerce Software, which
> requires that I become PCI Compliant... Can any of you
> recommend a hosting company that has demonstrated
> the ability to pass daily PCI Compliance scans?
        - Brian Butki, LED Digest 2483
        - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1894/190/

We have had excellent results with HostGator regarding PCI
Compliance. They have remedied several compliance issues on my
shared  server.  Our site is monitored daily by ControlScan, who
initially pointed out the problems.

Dan Eskelson
http://clearwaterlandscapes.com


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The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers.
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