Do you know what happens when you type a non-existent URL address. You get an error message that probably looks like this:
Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. If you entered the URL manually please check your spelling and try again.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 404
Not very pretty, right? What is worse is that your readers might get confused and just go elsewhere instead of going back one page in your site. You cannot prevent this type of error from happening. Nobody can stop anyone from typing non-existent web pages in the address bar. Well actually a 404 error can be created in three ways
- A mis-typed URL (or a stale bookmark),
- A search-engine link that is not there anymore, or
- An internal broken link that escaped your notice
What we want to happen is to prevent the display of such types of error messages and replace it with something friendlier and easier to understand. In other words, what we want to do is make our own html file that will become the generic page not found handler that deals with this kind of error gracefully. What are the bare essentials of a custom 404 page handler?
- A link back to your home page
- Most web sites have search enabled, so if you have this feature, put this into your 404 handler
- A link to your site map, if available
So how do we go about making our generic 404 error handler? First, create an actual HTML file that contains all this elements. Save it somewhere below your document root. If you want to save it in a separate folder, then feel free to do so.
The next step is the tricky part and if done correctly should work in a Linux based server. Try to look for the .htaccess file (please take note of the dot before htaccess). If you have one, then we have to edit its contents, if not we have to create one. On a line of its own type something like this:
ErrorDocument 404 /404handler.html
This is all that is needed in order to create a custom 404 page. The entry has 2 parts, first part tells us that if a 404 error happens, load the html file that is described in the second part of the line. If a page not found error happens then load the file named 404handler.html. Simple eh?
Next, we will talk about a few tricks to make your 404 page really work. If you type a link to your site map, make sure that you provide the absolute address. While using HTML this link should look like this:
<a href=”http://www.yoursitename.com/sitemap.html”>Site Map</a>
When your visitors do something that leads them to a page not found error, they will see something they will understand, and that is one more visitor you keep in your site.
Behind domain names such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com are numbers called IP addresses. These numbers provide three important functions:
- Identification of all computers that are connected to the internet. Domain names such as google.com are translated by special servers called DNS (domain name servers) into numeric identifiers such as 74.125.45.100
- It is also an address, meaning it indicates the computer’s location on the internet
- Addresses are the information used by the bits of information (packets) flowing in the internet to move from one computer to another. This function is called routing.
The designers of the internet decided that IP addresses will be a 32 bit number or 232. This means that there are 4,294,967,296 unique addresses available. The current implementation of internet addressing is called IPv4 (IP version 4). However, due to various historical reasons, less than 4.3 billion addresses are actually available and the number of routable IP addresses is rapidly decreasing. It was already recognized in the 1980’s that address depletion will be a significant problem for the internet and was foreseen that by 2010, the effects of address depletion will be strongly felt.
One way of alleviating network address depletion is to use shared web hosting. Web sites on shared hosts use the same server along with hundreds of other sites. These site all have the same IP address. Some important internet services are not available to sites that are running on shared hosts such as SSL (secure sockets layer)
Web host providers also provide dedicated web hosting where only one website sits on the server. The IP address of the server is not shared by other sites and this makes it possible to implement SSL on this kind of site.
When you are operating an e-commerce site, you must be able to process credit card transactions in a secured manner. This is where SSL is useful but this option is only available to dedicated web hosting. SSL uses some form of cryptography. Important information such as credit card numbers are encrypted using implementations of well-known and very secure encryption algorithms such as the Blowfish as well as its successor called the Advanced Encryption Standard.
Merchant accounts use SSL to process credit card transactions. If you operate a site that is shared by hundreds of other sites, the owner of an e-commerce site may opt to use an electronic shopping service that is hosted on some other site like PayPal. This is something that most on-line shoppers avoid because they do not want to be taken to another site just to close the deal.
When a website gets notorious for hosting malware, pornography or other offensive content, the IP address of that site is banned or red-flagged by search engines. When the offensive site is located on a shared server, it will be unfortunate for the other sites sharing the server because their content will become red-flagged as well. Dedicated sites will never have this problem
A great advantage of dedicated sites is greater control of the server which goes all the way to complete access to the operating system of the server.
Another important service available only to sites on dedicated web hosts is VPN or virtual private networking. Implementing VPN requires SSL to operate properly. VPN is a great feature for companies who need a geographically widespread, secure environment for a shared, read and write access to documents and folders over the internet.
When the successor of IPv4 called IPv6 starts to become the dominant addressing scheme, network address depletion won’t be problem anymore. IPv6 is a very, very big number (2128), it has been estimated that up to 296 addresses are available to entire human population (6.5 billion) living 1996. IPv6 has been designed to address several shortcomings of IPv4 of which mandatory network security has been seen to have the most impact for e-commerce sites. Whether this will impact e-commerce on shared servers still remains to be seen.
When you start a new website there are two major things that you would want to think about before choosing a web host, bandwidth and storage space. The bandwidth is basically a representation of how fast your website will load and the amount of information that is loaded with it. The storage space is the amount of space you will avail of when getting a web host to accommodate all your web page information.
Usually when you look for a web host, the most attractive option is to get one with the most storage space. There are many web hosts out there that offer unlimited space for your website. However, you must be careful in taking these offers and read the fine print that is involved in their service. More often than not, the monthly fees that you will pay your web hosting company may come with extra charges for your unlimited space or even get your website suspended for using too many resources.
There are several advantages and disadvantages to getting unlimited web hosting. Some of the advantages of unlimited web hosting are:
- In terms of storage space, you will never again have problems in thinking about what to put in the web host server because there is unlimited space! So whether you want 100MB pictures to load, or huge databases to put online, this should fit in the unlimited storage space that your web host will provide for you. What you may not realize is that 99% of the websites in the world will never use nearly enough storage to even have to think about storage space.
- You can test out all the different applications, content server managers, database programs, and other cool and useful engines and applications that you can use in your website without having to worry about removing stuff whenever you update your site. You can simply store everything there and not worry about the space it will take up.
There are also disadvantages to the ‘too-good-to-be-true’ offer of unlimited web hosting and these are:
- The offer may just be too good to be true. Web hosts may offer these great perks of using unlimited space, but eventually the space will run out at some point. Technically, unlimited storage space is impossible to have on any given server. Web hosts just offer it because they don’t expect you to use up more than the expected utilized space that is assigned to you.
- Bandwidth may not be too fantastic on a website with unlimited space. Remember, you usually have to pay for bandwidth depending on speed. When they offer unlimited web hosting, it doesn’t necessarily mean unlimited bandwidth where your webpage would load in less than 2 seconds! There is a limit to bandwidth just as there is to storage space.
So, when shopping for your next web host, don’t be taken in too easily by the unlimited web hosting services offers. Inquire about what the word “unlimited” covers and what exactly their in-house services, technical expertise, and standard procedures are that would cater to the security, back-up, and proper maintenance of your webpage space. It is better to pay for good technical services and proper processes than to pay for unlimited web hosting that only offers lost of space but little of anything else.
McKremie Web Hosting is now offering a free domain name with the purchase of any of our 12-month or 24-month web hosting plans. This is not a limited time offer; this will be part of our standard options going forward. The free domain name applies to the following extensions:
.com
.net
.org
.info
Most of our new customers are starting a website for the first time. This will help them by saving about $10.00 per year in domain registration fees. This is all backed by our 24/7 US-based customer support. If you are not failure with out web hosting features here is a small list:
- 24/7 US-Based Customer Support (Phone & Email)
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee
- #1 Control Panel – cPanel
- PHP, CGI, Ruby, Perl, MySQL
- Unlimited E-Mail Accounts
- Wordpress
- Drupal
- Ruby (RoR)
More feature can be found here: http://www.mckremie.com/hosting.php
A zombie computer usually is part of a computer network (or botnet) that has already been compromised by hackers with their malware. Because of such an intrusion into the system, hackers can initiate attacks from the zombie computers onto any website of their choice. By doing this, the zombie computers attack the targeted website making the traffic on it so extreme that the website itself becomes inaccessible.
LiveJournal, Twitter and Facebook have been victim websites of such attacks. One such example is when the malware “Koobface” was launched by a cyber-hacker which initiated attacks on Facebook and started to spread to other social networks. The way Koobface works is that false messages are sent over the network through compromised user accounts which encourage other users to click on links that lead them to sites where malware will attack their accounts.
Not everyone can be a victim with the right advice. So if you don’t want to be the next one, you can heed some words of advice to keep you away from such hacker attacks. First, always practice caution. Don’t click on any links that look suspicious when you are logged into your social networking account. No matter how tempting the banner offer, restrain from clicking and just do your usual safe activities that you are sure of on your webpage.
Second, make sure your personal information is well guarded and that your settings on your social networking account provides you with the maximum security. Try not to post personal information on your profile to prevent identity fraud.
Third, your password on your account should ensure maximum security for your account. Pick a password that also contains numbers so that the password strength is high. Avoid using the same password for more than one site where you are a registered user.
Fourth, always update your antivirus software and make sure the signatures are up-to-date. Make sure your PC is equipped with an internet security program that can detect in-the-cloud threats before they can even enter you local system. Also install appropriate software updates on your system to keep your system well protected against the most recently released malware online.
Fifth, keep yourself updated on the most recent malicious software that is attacking computer systems. Read the online news like PC World and other sites and forums that can give you a clearer idea of what to look out for in threats and how to handle them.
Print Screen key
The Print Screen key is often abbreviated to prt sc. For MS Windows computers, pressing the print screen key copies the entire screen to the keyboard. The alt-print screen combination copies only the selected window to the clipboard.
Command-shift-3, Command-shift-4
There is no print screen key on a Mac, instead users can use the command-shift-3 combination to save copy of the screen to a file. The command-shift-4 combination enables a user to save a portion of the screen to a file
Jing Project
Created by TechSmith, Jing Project is freeware and works for both Mac and Windows. With this nifty piece of software you can even make a record video of onscreen action aside from snapping a picture of your computer screen.
Grab
This application is created by Apple for the Mac OSX. This application can be located in the Mac Utilities folder which is under Applications.
Skitch Beta
Made for Macs, this app can capture a chat moment on your screen, snap a website, and share the image with your network friends. Record your everyday onscreen activities for quick filing and documentation.
Little Snapper
This is a paid application which lets you snap, collect and share your onscreen images. Created and distributed by RealMac Software.
iGrabIt
Made by Hidden Valley Software, this screenshot tool was made for Macs wherein you can capture whatever is displayed on your PC screen and save it as an MOV file.
Fireshot
This is a Firefox extension created by the Mozilla Company. This can take entire screenshots of both the visible and non-visible part of the webpage.
iShowU
This is a real time capture made for Mac by ShinyWhiteBox. It can instantly record movies and has USB camera support.
SnagIt
Probably the best screen capture software for Windows computers. It is available as a 30-day trial download. It is easy and very intuitive to use.
CaptureWizPro
Another screen capture utility for Windows computers available as a 30-day trial download. It is capable of capturing the entire contents of scrolling areas, drop-down lists, tool tips, mouse pointers and screen savers.
XnView
XnView is freeware that is a fast multiple format image browser and converter. It is capable of reading more than 400 graphic formats. Aside from screen capture, it also does slide shows and supports WIA and TWAIN devices.
ScreenHunter
Another well regarded and free screen capture software for Windows computers. The application is able to capture a full screen, an active window, the client window, or a rectangular area. User can set any function key (F1 to F10) for hot-key or delayed capture.
IrfanView
IrfanView is a simple, fast and free software that is capable of doing multiple image editing tasks like cropping, batch conversions, create panoramas and of course, screen capture.
PhotoScape
This is often downloaded free software for various image editing tasks. According to its maker, PhotoScape is a capable image viewer, editor, batch editor, animated GIF creator, file print, file splitter and screen capture.
Gmail is currently offline, for some reason or another and tons of people use it for business and personal. Try and remain calm as I’m sure Google is working on getting it up as I type this. It’s amazing to see how people on Twitter and Facebook freak out about Gmail being down.
Most common statement; “I thought it was just my account”
When this happens people panic and feel like something is wrong on their end. It’s not! Gmail is really down.
Here are some screen shots of some of the Tweets we found.
Here is some great advice from a tweeter that if everyone is so worried then they should invest into their own domain names. If you have your own domain name and hosting you can set-up your emails to go through your hosting account.
Update: People have tweeted that Gmail going down *could* overload other services like Twitter and Facebook.
It didn’t take long and Twitter is “Over Capacity”
Update from the Google Blog: (link)
Bloggers are looking for the best value web hosting available. For a long time, shared web hosting was the only option available for individuals looking for a cost-effective way to have an online presence. Shared web hosting is possible because one server box is able to host hundreds of different web sites. The cost of maintaining and administrating the server is shared among the hosted sites. Likewise, shared hosting implies that each site is allocated a portion of the server’s resources. When there is a surge in web traffic to one of the sites sharing server space, it is usually the administrator’s option to temporarily make unavailable the site receiving increased traffic.
A cost effective alternative to shared web hosting is grid hosting. A grid is composed of over the counter computers connected to a network. One notion of the grid is scalability. Grid hosting is highly scalable simply because the computers comprising the grid are essentially stand alone units. The network operating system is responsible for handling out tasks to each member computer. Each member of the grid contributes to the completion of the grid’s overall task.
When the network load approaches grid capacity, all it takes is just a flip of a switch to bring additional computers to life thus scaling up the grid’s output.
Grid hosting is able to handle traffic surge gracefully. Behind the grid are possibly thousands of commodity hardware assigned to do specific tasks like serving email, providing web services and database querying. Increased load due to spikes in web traffic are simply distributed to the grid members.
The main difference between shared web hosting and grid hosting is scalability. Shared hosts have fixed capacities. It is somewhat ironic that popular sites on the shared host are punished and may face temporary unavailability of web content. There is no such thing as fixed capacity on grid hosting. An unknown site on a grid host may consume fewer resources. Over time, the same site may gain popularity but the site is allowed to increase its utilization of the grid’s computing resources.
Because of scalability, popular sites served by a grid host are allowed to consume more computing resources. Popular blogs on grid hosts won’t be taken down no matter how often they get slashdotted or dugg. Of course such sites may get higher monthly billings but the increased cost of hosting a popular site is always justified by the value of having a continuous online presence.
- In 1996, Americans spent an average of 30 minutes a month surfing the World Wide Web.
- The average American Spends 27 hours a month online, this according to Nielsen’s Three Screen Report for the 4th quarter of 2008.
- The Web was invented in 1989 by a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee
- It is just one of the many services that operate on the Internet. Other services include e-mail, newsgroups and FTP.
- The Internet, in turn, was created by ARPA to connect computers of various researches geared towards regaining technological over Soviet Russia after the Russian space program successfully launched the Sputnik satellite. It was on October 29, 1969 when 2 computers from UCLA and SRI International got connected thus realizing what the internet became later, the ARPANET.
- The first proposal for a “large hypertext database with typed links” was written by Tim Berners-Lee on 1989 but generated little interest
- Berners-Lee saw the Web as a network based means of sharing information that works on any computer running on any OS
- The first Web site was built at CERN. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research and is located at Geneva, Switzerland.
- A NeXT computer was the world’s first Web server
- The first Web server software was CERN httpd
- The first browser, also invented by Berners-Lee was called the WorldWideWeb. The first successful build was released on December 25, 1990
- Mike Sendall was Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN. He approved the purchase of the NeXT computer where Tim wrote the beginnings of the Web.
- The first Web browser was already capable of downloading and displaying movies, sounds and any file type supported by the operating system. The concept of stylesheets was already in place when the first browser was released.
- The first browser was also the first editor for creating web pages
- WorldWideWeb was programmed with Objective C
- The first browser could already open http:, news:, ftp: and browse local file: spaces
- The World Wide Web took advantage of things already available on the internet like TCP/IP and DNS. TCP/IP took shape way back 1973 through the work of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. DNS was created in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris and his friends. In fact, before the Web, email was already using TCP/IP and DNS.
- Hypertext came out as an idea way back in 1945 by Vanevar Bush. The term hypertext was actually coined by Ted Nelson
- Hypertext is implemented in the Web as links in the browser window. Links are references to text that the user wants to access. When a link is clicked, the referenced text is displayed or bought into focus. The World Wide Web is the most extensive implementation of hypertext but it is not the only one. A computer help file is actually a hypertext document.
- What Tim Berners-Lee did when he invented the World Wide Web was to figure out a way to use hypertext and connect it with DNS and TCP/IP so that links found in other computers can be displayed in the browser.
- The website of the world’s first web server is http://info.cern.ch/
- The URL of the first web page was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Although this page is not hosted anymore at CERN, a later version of the page is posted at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
- A screenshot of the world’s first browser running inside Tim Berners-Lee computer can be seen at this page: http://info.cern.ch/NeXTBrowser.html
- In December 1991, the first institution in the US to adopt the web was the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). True to the Berners-Lee vision, it was used to display an online catalog of SLAC’s documents.
- The first browser that made the web available to PC and Mac users was Mosaic. It was developed by National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) led by Marc Andreessen in February, 1993. Mosaic was one of the first graphical web browsers and led to an explosion in web use.
- Near the end of 1992 there were only 26 web servers around the world. In October 1993, the number of web servers worldwide grew to 200.
- April 30, 1993 is an important date for the Web because on that day, CERN announced that anyone may use WWW technology freely.
- Marc Andreessen started Netscape and released Netscape Navigator in 1994. During the height of its popularity, Netscape Navigator accounted for almost 90% of all web use.
- The first International Conference on the World Wide Web was held in 1994 at CERN.
- It was also in the Conference Dinner in May 26, 1994 where the first Best of WWW awards were given. It was by pure coincidence that the jazz band that played during the awards was called “Wolfgang and the Were Wolves”
- The best overall site for 1994 was NCSA’s web site.
- Microsoft released Internet Explorer on 1995. This event initiated the browser wars. By bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system, by 2002, Internet Explorer became the most dominant web browser with a market share over 95 percent.
- The latest entry to the browser business is Google Chrome on September 2008
- As of July 2009, Microsoft Internet Explorer accounted for 67.68 percent of all browsers used. Mozilla Firefox was used by 22.47 percent of all users.
- The browser wars refer to the battle for dominance in the late 1990s between Netscape Navigator and the eventual winner Microsoft Internet Explorer. Currently, the browser war is raging between Microsoft Explorer and emerging competitors like Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Opera.
- When Netscape opened for public trading, on the first day, Jim Clark, co-owner, earned $663 million.
- The top thee dominant Web servers according to NetCraft’s July 2009 Web Server Survey of 239,611,111 sites are Apache HTTP Server (113 million sites), Microsoft IIS (56 million), and qq.com’s QZHTTP (30.3 million)
- Apache web server was the first to achieve the 100 million installation milestone. This was achieved on 2009.
- Open source technology dominates the web. The most common software used for webserving is called LAMP standing for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language
- Google has its own web server called the Google Web Server or GWS. As of July, 2009, only 14.2 million sites worldwide use GWS and is the fourth widely used server.
- Apache HTTP web server has been the most dominant server since 1996.
- The development of standards for the World Wide Web is managed by the W3C or the World Wide Web consortium.
- The W3C was founded in October, 1994 and is headed by Tim Berners-Lee
- The need for standards arose when the web gained popularity, various vendors were making different versions of HTML thus making web pages incompatible with each other. The primary mission of the W3C is to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards.
- The first White House website was launched during the Clinton-Gore administration on October 21, 1994
- Even though worldwide is a valid English word, WWW is spelled World Wide Web not Worldwide Web. For a while there was a hyphen in the name: thus World-Wide Web. The hyphen caused a lot of confusion for people who were not so grammatical. Tim Berners-Lee decided to drop the hyphen.
- WWW is often abbreviated to W3. Another way of abbreviating World Wide Web is to use Web.
- However, the author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams once said that WWW is the only abbreviation he knows that takes longer to say than what it actually stands for.
- Contemporary media uses the words World Wide Web and Internet interchangeably. However they are not one and the same. The internet is the hardware and software infrastructure used to connect computers while the World Wide Web is just one of the services running on the internet
- The “www” part of a website (www.google.com) is optional and is not required by any web policy or standard.
- Computers who are connected to the internet all have IP addresses. By using this addressing scheme (called IPv4), each computer in the internet is capable of reaching up to 4.3 billion other computers.
- Despite IPv4’s 4.3 billion unique addresses, it is forecasted that by 2011, the address space will be consumed. A newer scheme called IPv6 is slowly replacing IPv4 in some countries. IPv6 has the capability to address 2128 computers. To give perspective to this very big number, the world’s population of 6.5 billion people as of 2006 can be given 295 unique addresses.
- The blue colored links on a web page is just a browser default although way back on the days when monitors only had 16 colors, blue was the darkest color that did not affect text legibility.
- As of August 22, 2009, the most popular website according to Alexa.com and Ranking.com is Google.com. Next is Yahoo.com
- Google is named after googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeroes. According to Google’s web site, their name reflects the company’s mission to organize the vast amount of information out there in the World Wide Web
- The supposed reason for Google.com’s sparse homepage was that its owners did not know HTML well enough that even the first versions of the homepage did not contain the submit button. The only way to make Google start searching was to hit the Return or Enter key.
- Although Google and Yahoo are today’s top search engines, they certainly were not the first. One of the earliest search engines, Gopher Search Engine, was already working since 1991.
- Gopher was another application working on the internet and was an alternative to the World Wide Web. The main reason for its present day obscurity is that web browsers are much more user friendly and, unlike Gopher, are able to integrate text and graphics
- The oldest, still working .com website belongs to symbolics.com. It was registered way back March 15, 1985.
- Vice President Al Gore’s misinterpreted statement about taking the initiative to create the Internet was one of the main causes of his defeat during the 2000 presidential elections.
- Al Gore was credited by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf as the first political leader who recognized the importance of the internet.
- The number of hits returned by Googling “internet” is 1.6 billion.
- If you Google “sex”, the number of hits is approximately 637 million while “money” returns 913 million. It’s kind of reassuring though that “love” returns more than 1.4 billion hits while family has more than 1.1 billion hits.
- The business of web hosting in 2009 is estimated to be almost 51.2 billion dollars.
- The largest market is in Asia with a value of 15.7 billion
- By 2014, the value of web hosting is forecasted to be more than 73 billion dollars.
- Intel’s rival chipmaker AMD estimated the number of internet users in January, 2009 to be 1.4 billion.
- Vint Cerf coined the term internaut to refer to any technically capable professional user of the internet.
- All three letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names.
- There is a race to register generic and sellable domain names. This practice is called domain name speculation and is the intent of the owner to sell them later for profit. Recent domain names that have been sold for a million dollars include business.com and sex.com
- 1 million domain names are registered every month
- Domain name speculation using the names of famous people is considered cybersquatting and could be a violation of intellectual property laws in some countries. Bruce Springsteen, Kevin Spacey, and Julia Roberts, all have at one time been victimized by cybersquatters.
- 100 percent of the top 10000 family names are already registered as domain names.
- In 1996, Yahoo’s front page did not include email. It was only in the 3rd quarter of 1996 when the first webmail site Hotmail was launched. The webmail service that came to be known as Yahoo Mail was launched much later on October 2007.
- According to AT&T vice president Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of video is uploaded into YouTube every minute. This was on April 2008. On May 21, 2009, YouTube receives 20 hours of video every minute.
- YouTube’s bandwidth requirements to upload and view all those videos cost as much as 1 million dollars a day and growing. The revenues generated by YouTube cannot pay for its upkeep.
- The bandwidth consumed by YouTube in 2007 is comparable to the entire bandwidth consumed by the whole internet in 2000
- There is a company named Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment, a manufacturer of metal machine tubes and pipes. Its website, utube.com often got overloaded by traffic meant for YouTube. The website was later renamed utubeonline.com
- The contents of most of today’s active websites are stored in databases which are largely invisible to search engines. Termed the Deep Web, it contains data such as book prices, airfares and other stuff that will never surface unless somebody queries for that information.
- The Deep Web and all that hidden information is what prevents search engines from giving us a definitive answer to simple questions like “How much is the cheapest airfare from New York to London next Thursday”?
- The size of the Deep Web has been estimated to be 400 to 550 times larger than the searchable web
- In a recent survey conducted by security specialist Symantec of the 100 dirtiest websites, 48 percent feature adult content
- Around 75 percent of the music that is available for download has never been purchased and it is costing money just to be on the server.
- Of the 13 million music files available on the web, 52,000 tunes accounted for 80% of download.
- Naked women make up 80 percent of all the pictures on the internet
- By 2012 it has been said that there will be 17 billion devices connected to the internet. In most of Asia, mobile phones are leading the way to internet connectivity
- The maker of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, born 1984, is said to be the youngest self-made billionaire
- He is the 321st richest person in the US
- Zuckerberg lunched FaceBook in his dormitory room while still in Harvard
- The online population of Facebook, 250 million users worldwide, and MySpace, which had 100 million accounts by 2007, are bigger than the populations of many nations worldwide
- On April 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of monthly visits
- It took the Web only 4 years to reach 50 million users. Radio took 38 years while TV made it in 13 years.
- Amazon.com was formerly known as Cadabra.com
- Bit torrents, depending on location, are estimated to consume 27 to 55 percent of all internet bandwidth as of February, 2009
- Blogger Kyle MacDonald who through a series of trades over the Web, managed to get a house from a paper clip.
- After the deed to the house was signed in MacDonald’s name, his girlfriend accepted his proposal and the engagement ring was made from the original red paperclip.
- Mahir Cagri achieved internet fame by way of his endearing use of broken English in his website. The banner of his site reads “This is my page….. Welcome to my home page!!!!!! I kiss you!!!!!”
- It was estimated that 1 of 8 married couples started by meeting online
- An image search on Google for “241543903” will show heads in freezers
- It is said that there are 5 porn pages for every single normal page
- Typing “the” in Google search results in 11,360,000,000 hits. In October 2004, the number of hits was 5,890,000,000
Just because you have a website for your business doesn’t mean you have branded yourself online. You may even have a web presence and rank for some keywords via the search engines but online branding is much more than that. In order to become a well know brand you must dominate a majority of these seven areas.
Video
One of the best ways to get maximum exposure online is to get a video to go viral. Creating an interesting or funny video can grab the attention of people everywhere. People love to watch videos on Youtube and the funnier the better. One suggestion we give is to create a parody and integrate your product or service. Including your brand name in the title, description and logo at the end of the video. As the video goes viral and spreads your business name and logo can reach further than most advertising can.
Videos are relatively cheap to produce you just need to put your thinking cap on. Once you create a great video you can leverage social media websites to help spread your video.
Social Media
Some people think social media has become the biggest thing since sliced bread and they are right. On the World Wide Web there has never been a better time and better vehicles to promote content. Websites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx and Twitter can become powerful tools to help reach people faster than ever before.
Videos are good but some of the most popular websites launched with interesting articles and graphs and those can work well too. Remember that the content has to be great or your efforts won’t get any traction on the social media websites.
Once you have created great content you will need a Social Media Marketing expert or enthusiast to help promote it. On social media websites like Digg and Reddit if the average person submits great content it’s a waste of time. In order for your content to take off you will need someone that has good connections for each of these websites.
Domain Name
What’s in a name? Everything! If you really want to separate your online business from the millions of others in your niche then you need a name that will stand out. Find yourself a unique domain name that can be branded. Too many online business owners go for name with their main keywords in them.
Example:
www.dogtoys.com
www.webhosting.com
www.shoes.com
While these are some great domain names and can make for gaming the searches engines a little easier, that’s all their good for. If you truly want to build a strong brand online you need to separate yourself from the keyword domain names. It is extremely hard to brand a domain like Shoes.com, as customers will get confused with other websites:
Shoe.com
Shoes.net
Shoes.org
Tips: Domain names are very cheap when you find the right name be sure to purchase as many of the domain extensions as you can. As a general rule of thumb we buy the following extensions; .com, .org, .net, .info, .us, .me and .biz.
Search Engine Rankings
Ranking number one in Google, Yahoo and Bing can help your company become a brand. Often searchers see the first few rankings as market leaders within that specific search. Ranking at the top of the search engines can carry more benefits than just leads and sales. 42% of all searchers click through to the website that is listed at the number one position. Ranking for this gives you much more visibility and free marketing. Bloggers will blog, tweeple (people that use Twitter) will tweet about your website and other webmasters will list you as a resource.
When you’re just starting out, establishing your brand via search engine rankings can be hard to achieve. Most websites will not rank well until after years of trust and lots of organic looking links. You can learn about search engine optimization yourself through places like SEO Book or you can hire a reputable Search Engine Marketing firm.
Adwords / PPC
One of the quickest ways to have a web presence in the search engines is to use Pay-Per-Click Marketing. In PPC you pay to have your website listed in a box market “Sponsors” on the search results pages.
PPC can be used to get your name out there while people are searching for related products or services. If you have a big enough budget you can do what some of the car companies were doing a few years back. A few of the big auto makers made ads and choose every keyword they could. For about a week no matter what you were searching for online you would see an advertisement for their new car.
Communities In Your Niche
In every industry there are a handful of successful blogs and forums. This is where people in your niche are looking for some type on information or like to contribute themselves. These communities are perfect for getting your brand name out there.
Become active as much as you can. If it’s a successful blog you could make useful comments on as many post as you can. This works out best when you are the first person to reply to a blog post. Same thing with community forums, people join these places for help so be helpful.
If you have a decent advertising budget you may want to consider banner advertising. While banner ads don’t convert very well for sales it can however get your name and logo out in the community. Just make sure the banner is in a place where everyone is going to look. Banner ads on the side bar of most website will get ignored by the majority of the readers. Sometimes you can get advertisements within articles or on the center of the page.
Blogging
One of the best ways to create an audience is to give them a reason to keep coming back. Creating a blog on your business domain can increase keep readers coming back over and over again. I recommend you add a blog as a sub-domain or a folder.
Example:
http://blog.yourdomains.com
http://yourdomain.com/blog/
Just starting a blog is not good enough you need to give people a reason to come back often. Ideally if you can schedule blog posts for every day you will have a much better chance of growing your readership. Your goal for your blog should be to become a leader within your industry.
If your content is good it will attract people to talk about you, mention you on their tweets and even blog about you. Creating great content will give you free advertising ever time someone links to your website or mentions a blog post of yours.
Advertising itself is not marketing and building a brand is not a one step process. You will need relentless pursuit of each of these seven steps in order to become a true online brand.
