Links are still an important criteria for positive web page rankings for most search engine algorithms. They are more direct in their weighting compared to other ranking criteria such as on-page keyword use and clicks in the SERPs. Attaining good links with weight can be time consuming requiring adequate research, permissions and use. Making your content stand out, attracting users to link to you is the best proactive method for gaining relevant links to propagate the link weight in your ranking score for the Search Engine (SE) algorithms. WebPaws.com will help you identify content that attracts link-backs and propogate your messages into the social media realm to increase your company’s overall web presence.

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Top Social Media Websites

The below list represents the top 25 Social Media Websites in the world sorted by Alexa ranking which roughly represents the popularity of website for the last quarter of 2009. Google PageRank is also listed for weighting of popularity.

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Instant Web Presence – Limited Time Offer – FREE Website to the first 10 responders!*

Get Your Free Custom Designed Website* by WebPaws.com

We will provide you a standard available domain name of your choice and then build you a three page website with a “Home” page, “About Us” page and a “Contact Us” page*.  Click here for more details and get your website today!

* To recieve your free 3 page website and domain, all you need to do is pay for your first year of web hosting upfront.

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To properly put the date and time into a MySQL date field, you need to put it into the format of:

yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss


Here is some code to do this in classic ASP for input into a MySQL table:

Dim testdate, testmonth, testday, ISODate
testdate = Request.Form("frmField5")
testmonth = Right(Month(testdate),2)
testday = Right(Day(testdate),2)
ISODate = Year(testdate) & "-" & testmonth & "-" & testday & " " & hour(testdate) & ":" & minute(testdate) & ":" & second(testdate)


The ISODate variable is in the correct format to insert in a MySQL UPDATE or INSERT SQL statement. Below is an example SQL string to UPDATE a date field in a MySQL table:

UPDATE myTable SET thisdate = 'ISODate' WHERE myID = 'thisID'


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My preschool daughter asked me how to say the number 999,999,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  She was referring to general numbers and not scientific nomenclature, so I was thinking million, billion, trillion, but what comes after that? Quadrillion?  Yes, but then what?  So I did some research on large numbers, the “illions”, and found it quite fascinating.   As a matter of fact, there is a number named Googol, which has 100 zeros, e.g., 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Back to my daughter’s question, the answer is nine hundred and ninety nine octillion, nine hundred and ninety nine septillion.

Here is a handy list of large numbers and how they are named:

Million has 6 zeros  1,000,000

Billion has 9 zeros  1,000,000,000

Trillion has 12 zeros  1,000,000,000,000

Quadrillion has 15 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000

Quintillion has 18 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000

Sextillion has 21 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Septillion has 24 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Octillion has 27 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Nonillion has 30 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Decillion has 33 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Undecillion has 36 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Duodecillion has 39 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Tredecillion has 42 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Quattuordecillion has 45 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Quindecillion has 48 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Sexdecillion has 51 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Septendecillion has 54 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Octodecillion has 57 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Novemdecillion has 60 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Vigintillion has 63 zeros  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Googol has 100 zeros  10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Centillion has 303 zeros (except in Britain, where it has 600 zeros)  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

And lastly, a Googolplex has googols of zeros.

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Selling your products on the internet requires many factors to produce desired results:  such as great products, a good business model, supporting customer service, etc, but the key at the page level is providing very good communication about the  product.  Product descriptions should  inform, persuade and lead your customers to a sales transaction, which make them very powerful selling tools.  Listed below are several suggestions to increasing the time on page and time on site via well crafted product descriptions.

1. Educate: Educating your customers about your products provides additional value while you are teaching them how this product can improve their life, work, etc.  RadioShack does a good job of this with their Research library.
2. Use Persuasive Emotional Imagery: Let your customers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell your products through descriptions that create powerful images in their mind.  Understanding some basic psychology will help you in crafting your copy to show/describe what is important to the user (your targeted audience) to aid in persuading them to choose your product over your competitors products or even the same product but described differently.
3. Include a Call-to-Action: Don’t forget to add a call-to-action in your product description copy.  It is one thing to talk about your product, show great images, talk about its practicality, usage, benefits, etc. but if there is no way for the visitor (potential customer) to go the next step, you have failed in your endeavors to sell your product.  Put an action button such as “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” near the image or main product title.  You can also include a “Send me More Information” or “Call for More Information” link to
4. Focus on benefits, not just features: It is frustrating to listen to a salesperson rattling off useless specifications and features that you either don’t care about or don’t understand.  Focus on the unique benefits of your product. Instead of saying “This radio has over 100 presets” you can show the benefit that this radio can hold All of your favorite channels in memory. Another example, instead of saying “This handheld has blue tooth technology”, say that this handheld allows wireless updates, syncing and hands free usage.  Features are important, but should not be the focus, putting them in a table at the bottom of the page or in a separate page linked in the main product page can be a good idea.  Also allowing potential customers to compare features of similar items is a useful tool to helping the customer make a good choice.
5. Proofread Thoroughly: There’s nothing more embarrassing than being told by a customer that your product description is erroneous or contains typos. Make sure your descriptions are proof read by someone other than the original copywriter.
6. Use Customer Reviews: Allow your customers to describe or review your products. The information they provide will be very valuable to customers considering a purchase. Visitors may trust a user generated review even more than your own product descriptions.
7. Brevity is Good: Don’t overwhelm your customers at the outset with a huge, novel size product description.  Using a JavaScript enabled “Read more” link to hide or show additional product information will lighten the page, keeping focus on the crafted message of images key text and other key product describers.
8. Interactive Visual: Adding a product video or flash presentation will add a new dimension to the users experience, if done well, may enhance the customer’s understanding and interest of the product to help encourage a positive choice for purchase.  The video should show the product in use by a user highlighting it’s unique benefits, enticing the viewer to want this product because of its uniqueness in functions/benefits/features/productivity/time savings/etc.

Using most or all of these techniques will help to retain the customer on your product page a little longer.  This not only increases the Time on Page statistic but also the amount of information the customer is taking in on the product page which increases the likelihood of a sale, our ultimate goal.

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Maintaining databases can be a chore, but knowing the appropriate SQL to do the job can save hours of time. Here is a tidbit regarding changing a select string of text within a specific field of a table in a MySQL database. You can edit 1000s of records with this one query:
UPDATE table SET field = REPLACE(field, 'text to be replaced', 'replacement text');

In this example, the table name is “table”, the field to find the text in is named “field”, the rest should be self explanatory.

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Anchor Text: the meat of links, the nervous system of the Web

Anchor text is the visible text that is anchored to a hyperlink (web link on a web page).  This is important because the internets primary purpose is to display pages and link them to other pages of relevant content to enhance your browsing experience.  There are many kinds of links, but the primary static text/image linked links are the most common and found on most every web page on the internet.  Further examination of links in XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) of a hyperlink code may look like this:

CODE:
<a href="http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/">WebPaws.com&rsquo;s Internet Marketing Services</a>

HOW YOUR BROSWERS DISPLAYS IT:
WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services

We will now review the XHTML code including the meat of the link, the anchor text.  An “a” tag means the anchor or start of a link, where we start the hyperlink code.  The “href” is the hyperlink reference or the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that tell your computer’s browser where to go for the specific information (linked page) and download and pull it up in your browser.  The anchor text is text sandwiched between the opening <a> tag and the closing </a> tag.  In this example, the anchor text is “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and is the text that is associated with the link “http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/”.

This is an important key factor in increasing your search engine rankings because the search engines use this (anchor) text to aid in determining the relevance of the linked page to the anchor text used as incoming keywords.  The use of this particular anchor text will help the domain, web.marketing.webpaws.com, perform better in search engine results for the keyword “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and similar keyword phrases too (e.g., “Internet Marketing”, “Marketing Services”, WebPaws.com, etc.)

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In a VB.net application, retrieving variables from a database, if the value was null, it would cause the error, “Conversion from type ‘DBNull’ to type ‘String’ is not valid”.  A work-around to stop this error was to create a function that would evaluate the imported database variable for a null value as an object then convert it to a string for use without error in your code.

Here is the VB.net code:


Function checkNull(Byval variable as object) as String
If IsDBNull(varialbe) Then
Return("")
Else
Return (variable)
End If
End Function


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