Webcraft Webmaster Services

Domains that have been registered and never dropped are called "Aged Domains". These domains normally sell for more than a new one because they have been around for a while. They're usually out of the Google Sandbox and for those who are looking for aged domains with a history, it can help them make a living online or raise credibility in their niche markets simply because if the domain has been around for years, it appears that they have as well. Aged domains can also be found on forums like DN Forum.com and simply by typing in the keywords "Aged Domains" into the search bar you can easily locate domain auctions that include these older domain names. I have purchased dozens of domain names for R500.00 or less that were anywhere from 5 - 10 years old. Just based on the age alone I was able to flip these domain names for over 5 x what I paid. For instance, one domain name I purchased was never used, meaning it had never featured a...

Nelson Mandela Tribute - Madiba, Tata Mandela, Rolihlala - http://madiba.mg.co.za --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com

Between the rising growth of social media adoption, its proponents are already making brave predictions about social media replacing as search engines as a primary source of information for consumers and business buyers. While research does tell us that the rise of social is swift and growing, it simply hasn't evolved half as much as to provide the answers that one looks for while putting up a query in search engine. You can ask for a restaurant recommendation on social network but when it comes to finding out actual data about the restaurant's location, physical appearance and reviews, search engines is what comes to mind. Search and social work together, but by no means one replaces the other. my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can be done today." Regards Gerald Crawford Stellenbosch South Africa Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile) E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws --- This email is free...

THINGS ARE EASY NOW! And it all begins with wordpress (and a little help from me). Here a a couple of reasons why your web guy doesn't want you to learn WordPress. 5 Reasons Your Web Guy Doesn't Want You to Learn Wordpress image wordpress logo simplified rgb I love WordPress. 1. Money. He doesn't want you to know it is cheaper to learn wordpress and do it yourself than to pay him/her to do it. They want their industry to live in a shroud of mystery. No one knows what they do but them. Bogus. You can create, maintain, update, change, and market your website without the help of a web designer. 2. Time. Which is money. Someone please tell me the turn around time from when you have an idea to when it is implemented by your web guy. Oh and how much does it cost? 3. You might learn how they were duping you in the first place. Your web guy doesn't want you to know what you can really do with your website. I am telling you…YOU CAN DO ANYT...

Now that you know how important anchor text is to your rankings, I'm sure you will want to pay more attention to it in your SEO efforts but you don't want to go hog wild and create tons of anchor text backlinks all with the same keyword phrase or you might find that your efforts don't yield the results you want. Here are some things to consider: 1. Vary Your Anchor Text - We all know that Google prefers it when people link to you naturally and when that is the case, they don't all use the same anchor text. So, when you are linking to your site from your articles or web2.0 properties you want to make sure you don't always use the same phrase as well. Using your target phrase in about 50% - 60% of the links is probably a good idea. 2. Links From Relevant Pages - For the best results, you want your anchor text backlinks to come from pages that are related to your topic. This is what would happen naturally if people were linking to you and...

Bloggers and website owners use anchor text naturally to point to other pages on their website as well as pages on other sites that they find relevant to what they are blogging about. You've probably even done this yourself when writing a post where you referenced another post on your site, an affiliate product or even a post on another site. Usually a blogger will use a phrase that indicates what the page is about in the anchor text, as opposed to a url, so that the sentence reads correctly. The anchor text in these links helps both the visitor and the search engine spiders figure out what the 'linked to' page is about. my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can be done today." Regards Gerald Crawford Stellenbosch South Africa Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile) E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

Search engines use anchor text to help them figure out what the hyperlinked page is about. So, as you can see, getting anchor text backlinks with relevant phrases in the anchor text is pretty important if you want the search engines to rank you for a particular keyword phrase. In fact, anchor text is such an important factor in ranking a page that pages can rank for a keyword phrase even when that phrase does not appear in the url on the page! There are several cases where this has happened, but perhaps the most famous is where the Adobe Reader download page ranked number 1 for the search term 'click here' for many years even though those words were nowhere on the page. So many people had linked to that page using the anchor text 'click here' that it got to the number 1 spot without any on page SEO for the term. Search engines place a large importance on external anchor text (links coming in from other sites) and some importance on internal ...

What Is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the hyperlinked text you see on a webpage. It is the visible words that you can click to take you to another page. Anchor text html code looks like this: <xmp><a href=" http://www.yoursite.com ">Your Anchor Text</a></xmp> On most websites, you typically see this as blue text that is underlined and when you click on it with your mouse, you are taken to the corresponding url. my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can be done today." Regards Gerald Crawford Stellenbosch South Africa Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile) E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

Content Planning and Structure Planning how you will structure any WordPress website build and how you will make use of different content types is crucial to the site's success. By taking the time to consider your options at the beginning, you will save time, headaches and possibly money too. It's tempting to jump straight into installing WordPress and firing up a code editor, without taking the time to consider what the site should contain. Avoid that temptation. Keep in mind that a website's success depends on its content, so you need a very solid understanding of what content will be displayed on the site, how it will be structured, and how users will interact with it. Four questions to help you structure your content: Some clients will not have given much thought to the site's content yet, whereas others will have a detailed content plan. Either way, there are specific questions you can ask that will help you work together to ensure ...

QR codes are 2-dimensional codes that you can create and print on documents such as marketing materials and even business cards. Then using a QR scanner app on a handheld phone, the customer can get more information directly on their handheld device (perhaps taking them directly to a Web page). You might use QR codes to provide more product details or even coupons and discounts. my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can be done today." Regards Gerald Crawford Stellenbosch South Africa Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile) E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

No matter how smart you fancy yourself to be, no matter how much you think you know your demographic, humble yourself each month and do some homework. Trends change, and depending on your industry, trends can literally flip-flop overnight. Many marketers use their intuition, or trusted hunches, to make key planning decisions. If you don't have data to back up what your gut tells you, any efforts you launch could be a complete waste of time and money. To that end, here are some easy and helpful ways to get inside the minds of your customers: Within every customer base are a handful of vocal, socially prominent users. Follow your top fans, engage with them socially, and study what common threads you see among these users. Read top industry blogs and news sites for you niche, and draft content marketing strategies around current key issues and ideas. Every time you're ready to draft new content, Google the topics, and study not just the popularity...

Publishers cannot directly control off-page ranking factors. These factors include inbound links, social channel activity and online customer reviews. Inbound Links: When other sites link to yours, your website shows up higher in search results. You can measure how many inbound links you currently have at www.opensiteexplorer.org . Once you collect this data, consider taking these actions: . Scan your highest-authority inbound links for opportunities to create more similar links. . Scan your competitors' highest-authority inbound links. Can you get those links too, or do they provide ideas for getting similar links? . Inbound links from non-profit (.org) and education (.edu) sites are especially valuable. Do you have any? Should you have more from your friends and partners in these realms? Build your inbound links gradually. Google algorithms will notice a quick accumulation of links and may penalize you. Get your staff on board with the idea of...

On-page search ranking factors are those that are entirely within the website publisher's control. In other words, it's the content you place on your webpages. Content: You must keep your content fresh with regular updates on all pages. When other sites link to yours, your website shows up higher in search results. You can measure how many inbound links you currently have at www.opensiteexplorer.org . "Evergreen content" was a trendy term in the SEO world for a while, which meant certain content can be relevant and timely year after year, so you can utilize it over and over. For example, every winter you likely post information about your winter tire specials and vehicle winterization services, so why not just flip the same information up there and be done with it? This is a lazy approach to marketing. Put some thought and effort into all of the information that goes onto your website and you will see the results, such as longer page ...

Tips for Launching Your SEO Program Assess Your Website Platform - One of the most important aspects of a strong SEO program is the ability to understand the flexibility of your website. Often we start working with a firm that has a beautiful website and high aspirations for SEO only to discover the website platform they are using is very rigid and will not allow them to make many, if any, changes. So the first step is to determine the platform your website is built on. Generally there are three categories under which website platforms can be classified including; flat file website, HTML coded, open source content management systems (CMS), and proprietary (closed source) CMS. So as not to get lost in the technical details, generally speaking, the easiest systems to work with are open source CMS; examples include Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. These systems are easily customized and are built to be SEO-friendly. The most difficult systems are proprietary CMS ...

If you want to hit the top of Bing's rankings for your chosen keywords, here are the best ways to score a high ranking: * First and foremost, make sure that social tactics are a huge part of your marketing strategies. A heavy presence on * Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and related sites is a must. * Be a heavy Facebook user, as opposed to Google+. Leverage your fans, and encourage social signals (Likes, comments, etc.) * Test your keywords specifically against the Bing audience. What will get you high rankings in Google will likely be different in Bing. The smaller audience also means less competition for your keywords, so you're more likely to do well using more popular selections on Bing than on Google. * Bing is a stickler for error free XML sitemaps. Make sure yours have zero 404s, or the Bingbot might ignore the whole thing. * The Bingbot is also big on Robots.txt files. If your site doesn't have one, it risks being completely ignored by Bing. ...

Grand Flagallery - powerfull media content plugin. It provides a comprehensive interface for handling image galleries, audio and video. http://wordpress.org/plugins/flash-album-gallery/ my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can be done today." Regards Gerald Crawford Stellenbosch South Africa Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile) E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

By identifying your best content, you quickly learn two things: 1. Which pages are most worth promoting. 2. How you can improve on your future content. But how can you identify your best content? With this article, I'll avoid weighing in on which metric in particular is most important (be it sales, pages per visit, etc). Instead, the focus will be on how to interpret your analytics without relying on "most" as an indication of "best." For example, a page that results in more sales may simply be doing so, because it has more visits. That says nothing about whether it's the piece of content most worth promoting. This is going to be an advanced article, involving spreadsheets and standard deviations, so it might not be for everybody. I'll try to keep it step-by-step and fairly easy to comprehend but, even then, it's worth asking how much time you want to invest in analytics, as opposed to outreach and other activities. ...

Marketing online is serious business, and without tools that support your mission, your campaigns don't stand a chance. While you could wade through the massive volume of marketing tools currently available in this dynamic and fast-paced space, we aim to simplify the process by presenting you with today's best suite of products. You already know about must-haves like WordPress, Google Analytics, and SEOMoz - keep reading to find out what modern tools you may not be aware of that can literally change your business life for the better. #1 - KISSmetrics KISSmetrics takes an innovative approach to site analytics. Instead of tracking vanity metrics (think pageviews, time spent, bounce rates, etc.), KISS looks at the data that actually impacts your revenues. Relatively speaking, this revolves around people, i.e. your customers, and how they interact with your site. KISS highlights important figures like conversion rates, lifetime customer values, churn ...

WordPress is a great platform to build a small business Web site, but you must stay on top of security measures. As some of you know, my blog was recently hacked by a bot looking for weakness in my WordPress and/or plugins. Hackers left thousands of spam comments with embedded links, all of my plugins were stripped from the site, and it wasn't working very well. It was pretty much a nightmare and there was no easy fix. It was tough for some of my readers to find the forms to submit to be a guest on #SmallBizChat or to be a guest blogger. I learned a lot about WordPress in this process that I think you all could benefit from. Here are 6 steps to keep your WordPress blog safe and secure. Do regular maintenance. Just like with your car needing an oil change, your WordPress blog should have a basic tune-up regularly. Make sure you are using the latest version of WordPress and keep your plugins up-to-date too. It's easy for plugins to create a conflic...

1. It is more affordable than other forms of advertising - just a normal text message fee. 2. You can reach out to people anywhere. You are not limited to your physical area, but to wherever the mobile phone is you are trying to reach. 3. The response rate is higher than with a flyer or classified advertising. 4. The mobile device is a personal item belonging to only one person. You can, therefore, target your marketing more precisely to that person or a group of people like him. 5. The mobile device has joined the wallet and keys as something you always take with you. This means that you can reach your customer anywhere, at any time and that they will read your message almost instantly and act on it. 6. It is easy to pay from a mobile device as payment processors are built into them. 7. You can track the payments back to the mobile number which means you can create a profile of your customer and his buying preferences. 8. You can accurately measure...

Now that 80% of the world's population own a mobile phone and four out of five consumers shop using their smartphone, jumping on the mobile marketing bandwagon sooner rather than later is a strategy webmasters cannot ignore. Mobile marketing is not just trundling along - it's going at breakneck speeds and is only going to get faster! Mobile Marketing is the Future With the way mobile technology is advancing, consumers will become more reliant on their handheld devices to do their shopping. Indeed, mobile marketing is the fastest growing industry EVER! According to Monetate Ecommerce quarterly, the growth of consumers using their mobiles to shop is steadily growing each quarter and has almost doubled from Q1 in 2012 to Q1 in 2013. Analysts estimate that mobile marketing will outstrip fixed internet access next year. The simple fact of the matter is that the world is going SoLoMo - consumers are shopping socially, searching locally and using mobile de...

If your site is hosted on a server with various other URLs, Google may ding your rankings. It is now recommended that you have your very own dedicated server, so as not to be affected by the mistakes others make. Ensure your caching and compression tools are in top shape, with adequately fast response times. Most importantly, monitor your site's stability and note any significant downtime; if you're down for more than 24 hours, search engines will notice and likely penalize you. Stability is critical. my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can be done today." Regards Gerald Crawford Stellenbosch South Africa Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile) E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

If you really want to see your SERPs plummet, create a user-interface that's confusing, convoluted, and slow to load. Page speed does in fact matter, as does intuitive navigation. Studies show you have less than 3 milliseconds to establish engagement and trust with a new visitor. This means the site needs to communicate what it is, and in a clear manner, quickly.   If your site doesn't pass this test, Google will notice eventually. More importantly, so will your users. If you're not doing a decent job of guiding visitors down the ideal path, your conversion rates are surely reflecting this failure.   Next, clock the speed it takes for your site to load. Many argue the validity of a fast loading site; the fact is, even if only a small percentage of pages are affected by this stat, it's foolish to have a sluggish site from a user perspective. Aim for a score above 90, and you might see an increase in rankings – but you will surely see a dro...

No matter what size your business is, everyone knows the value of developing a web presence. But like most investments, online marketing can be risky and expensive, especially if you're a small business with a tight advertising budget.   Investing in online marketing doesn't have to be a gamble; there are plenty of marketing strategies that are cheaper than you think, and plenty of businesses have succeeded using inexpensive tactics.   Marketing doesn't have to be difficult, either – in our digital age, there's an abundance of tools to measure and focus your marketing efforts. It's easier than ever to gather valuable information and quickly switch up your campaigns.   If you're willing to be proactive and get involved in the industry, you don't need a large advertising budget to market your business successfully online.   Start Small   There are plenty of tools on the Internet that are free or less expensive than the...

As with everything in this world, quality trumps quantity. What you're after are targeted links and referrals full of visitors that are truly after what you offer. Your marketing strategy no doubt contains a myriad of efforts to generate these quality visits. To really be a player in SEO these days, these campaigns should involve the following:   * Organic search * Paid search * External links, from articles, bloggers, news sites, etc. * Press releases and other PR efforts * Social signals from Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, etc. * Local map listings * Online advertising * Direct traffic via offline strategies   Yes, organic search still sits at the top of the list above, but if it's your sole focus, you'll definitely waste your efforts. Failure to consider the other factors means you'll experience just a smidgen of your potential success.   Pay attention to your analytics so you can understand where your site is...

According to Wikipedia, advertising is a form of communication for marketing and is used to encourage, persuade, or manipulate an audience (viewers, readers or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to continue or take a new action. More simply put, advertising is letting people know about your business and showing them you have the solution. Advertising began thousands of years ago when ancient Egyptians started carving out announcements and notices in steel. Now, we have so many forms of advertising, it can be hard to choose which mediums to use. Online marketing has taken the business world by storm. Some of the standard online advertising strategies consist of banner ads, newsletter ads and website link exchanges. These methods can be effective, but you need to get out of the box and find new and clever ways to advertise your business. Below are 10 fun and creative ideas that could breathe new life into your advertising success: 1. E-Mail Sigtag B...

When most people set out to write PPC ads, they simply lay fingers to keyboard and begin to rattle off whatever they want to tell customers. If it fits into the allotted space, the ad copy is uploaded and run without too much thought. I've always been astonished that PPC copywriting takes place with such a nonchalant attitude, considering how vitally important it is. After all, if you can't get people to click your ads, nothing else you do will matter. Your campaign will come to a grinding halt. One of the most overlooked elements in writing PPC ads is the audience. While you hear the marketing command to "Know your target customer" often repeated, what you might not consider is how those customers actually behave while interacting with your ads online. For instance, is yours a passive or active audience? Passive Behavior Put yourself in your customers' shoes for a bit. Take an imaginary trip over to Facebook. What are you do...