So who gets that space? What is the magic formula? What do I do to get better rankings in Google?

The simple answers to the above are:

1. Whoever has the most money to spend will get Page 1 
2. The “formula” is updated every so often and is mainly based on proper title tagging, balanced keyword density, good relevant content, quality backlinks and the age of your web site.
3. You could simply pay Google for your rankings in the Sponsored links area of AdWords Advertising – or spend time and money developing your site’s search index profile by working on the above.

There are many people out there using the Google SEO tactic to scam hundreds, if not thousands of dollars out of desperate businesses every day – cold calling and spamming with promises of “secret formulas” “agreements with Google” “page one guaranteed” – and simply walking off with your money.

Sometimes you will get results – though remember, you will generally have to keep paying to keep optimising with these mobs. These “optimisers” basically compete against each other for top spots and whoever has the most money can hire the most overseas SEO sweatshop workers to monitor and maintain hundreds if not thousands of fake backlinks to your site from all over the web.  Google can be fooled – and many are getting results… FOR NOW.

Google is always updating their formula to separate SEO manipulators from naturally developed rankings – and they are getting better at it. Once your site is de-ranked, it can take a long while to get back up there. If your site ends up on a blacklist you may have to scrap your whole site and domain name and start again. SEO can be risky business!

A well optimised and naturally linked up web site will rank well and usually maintain ranking through Google formula updates.

THE DO’s

1. Title your pages relevant to the page content
2. Make sure you are using proper HTML tags in the proper places – mainly headers  <h1> <h2>
3. Write good quality content, paying attention to spelling and grammar.
4. Have a separate page for each of your services to allow for more targeted content.
5. If you sell products, have a separate page for each product – use an online product catalogue.
6. Link your site in quality directories and related sites. Pay a reasonable amount for links in quality local business directories.
7. Get socially networked on Linked In, Facebook and Twitter + YouTube if you have videos.
8. Do an online press release to try and attract as many news outlet and blogger links back to your site. (www.prweb.com)
9. Do try and target specific areas like your City / local Suburbs. Link yourself in Google Local
10. If you are going to employ an SEO provider – make sure it is someone you know of and has referrals you have spoken to.  If they don’t have a money back guarantee and a valid ABN avoid them!

THE DO NOT’s

1. Never give out your FTP details to any SEO chump who promises you magic rankings in Google – and if you do give out your FTP details make sure your site isn’t being hacked and you update your passwords. We have had several clients scammed and hacked by “SEO Experts” as they often come back weeks and months later to log in and take advantage of your hosting account.
2. Do not stuff your pages and Title tags with “keywords” – this is the quickest way to get banned from Google
3. Never buy “SEO Backlink / Social Linking” packages – these are artificial and automated links that will probably get you banned from Google
4. Never build multiple web sites or “doorway” pages for the same business – while some people still do this, if Google finds out you may get banned.
5. Never try to “hide keywords” in your pages using colours or in image ALT tags. All image tags should be relative to the image it represents.

Many of these additional “features” are not needed if you know what you are doing and know basic safety when using a PC online.

SPAM filtering is usually done by your ISP / Email provider and most email clients come with a junk / spam filtering system.

The built in windows Firewall is more than adequate for business use and “safe web browsing” is just the installed software scanning every page you visit and comparing it with a list of “known bad pages” = privacy concerns abound here.

ID Theft should not be a concern if you are careful about where you give out your personal information and do not store credit card or other sensitive personal information on your PC.

The simple fact remains that 99% of all infected PC’s are done so “deliberately by users who download untrustworthy software from the Internet, or click scam links in emails” – and many of these nasties will bypass your Anti-Virus / Protection anyhow as they are not actually viruses and  when you click the “run / install / allow” button they shut off your protection, installs a downloader which in turn infects your PC.

That said – the best alternative we have found to “subscription based protection” is Microsoft’s own Security Essentials. This Anti-virus has never failed us yet and caught many web based attacks that others have allowed to load.

Despite all Microsoft’s shortcomings with other software – Security Essentials is in our opinion is truly the goods for basic, effective protection of their own operating system.

• Download Microsoft Security Essentials

Be sure you have all your domain email login details + your ISP email logins (your Bigpond / iiNet / etc) so you can setup outgoing SMTP email for sending email via your ISP.

If you don’t have your ISP outgoing SMTP login details you will need to contact their support and request your SMTP outgoing email login + password.

Be sure you have all your domain email login details + your ISP email logins (your Bigpond / iiNet / etc) so you can setup outgoing SMTP email for sending email via your ISP.

If you don’t have your ISP outgoing SMTP login details you will need to contact their support and request your SMTP outgoing email login + password.

When setting up email on mobile devices we recommend using the IMAP protocol for mail type.

Things went smoothly for the majority of the 450+ migrated hosting accounts, with outages for only a few of our clients on Secured SSL hosts and customised DNS hosting environments.

All issues were generally resolved within 4 – 6 hours as new DNS settings propagated the web and were picked up by ISP service providers.

The new servers are expected to house our customers’ sites and email for at least the next 2-3 years.

Already some clients are reporting in with increased responsiveness of WordPress web-based sites and other hosted software.

If you are experiencing any problems at all please phone Jonathan directly on 0431 757 449.

I needed something that would actually rename and move files into Artist / Album folders to keep things organised and make it easier to find duplicate and stray files.

Then I found BLISS (www.blisshq.com) – and it appeared to be exactly what I was looking for and more. Joy!

I won’t go into to much depth explaining everything about the software here as the BLISS website covers most of the details.

What I have done is created a 12 minute video of me using and talking about the software below. (sorry about the audio + comment quality!

Basically after running a few tests I set BLISS loose on my massive collection – and was more than pleased with the results.

The BLISS demo allows you 100 “fixes” to your collection – and you can purchase blocks of 1000 fixes at a time – or like me, if you have a large amount of music files – you will want to pick up the Unlimited version of the software.

While BLISS may not be what everyone is “used to” in terms of user interface / graphical polish – it is a very useful and functional tool to help organise digital music files.

You do have to wait sometimes for the program to load – as once the app is launched it will continue with it’s last uncompleted commands automatically in the background.  I also found that once BLISS starts doing it’s thing – it’s best just leave it be and let it run until it’s done – as it can be slow to respond (at least on my system) while it’s scanning / fixing / embedding artwork etc…

New features and improvements are always being added to BLISS and I’m already looking forward to future upgrades.

We also provided a new simplified design for the web site allowing users to better navigate and gain quick access to the information they are looking for on the site.

Have a look here: rewardminerals.com

Thunderbird allows the installation of FREE 3rd-party “add-ons” or “extensions” which extend the capability of Thunderbird. So adding a calendar and a simple note-taking application should be easy.

Adding a calendar to Thunderbird

The first problem to overcome is getting an integrated Calendar happening in Thunderbird.

For this you will need to install the Lightning add-on / extension. Just go to Tools > Add-Ons and search for Lightning.

Once activated you will have a local Calendar setup in your Thunderbird email. Too easy!

Shared Calendars

If you need to share a calendar with multiple systems or devices, you will need to get a remote hosted calendar setup.  The quickest and easiest option is to use a Google Calendar shared using it’s CalDAV support.

Google Calendars are actually pretty good as you can sync them with your various systems and mobile phones quite easily.

Once you have Lightning installed you simply create a new calendar and set it to use your Google Calendar.

If you need to share calendars with other members in your organisation you can manage access via Google and share the calendars with other users.

While not everyone uses Google accounts, it is the quickest and easiest way to get email + synced calendar setup for free.

NOTE: there are other options available and we can help you find a solution that fits your needs…

Adding Notes to Thunderbird

There are a few note taking extensions for Thunderbird, just search “notes” in the add-ons.

We chose to use use QuickFox Notes and store the notes in a synced folder to share them across different PC’s.  This way we can use any sync services such as Ubuntu One, Dropbox or Box to share and sync notes across all our devices that can run either Thunderbird or Firefox.