Eric

For Giggles, I thought I would list a bunch of sites and their usefulness for your convience, so here goes.

Search Engine Optimization

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 - Google Webmaster Guidelines…need I say more?

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/ - Has a lot of free tools to help you understand what a search engine sees and helps you optimize your site for better rank.

http://tools.seobook.com/ - Has some more great tools for running ranking reports on your site and also a very useful keyword selection tool.  Works with WordTracker, and gives you the counts of how many times it was search for the popular search engines.

http://www.wordtracker.com - Good tool to use when trying to select keywords to target and help and suggestions on other keywords that maybe used to search for your site.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Google Adwords

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Microsoft Adcenter

Affiliate Marketing Networks

Hydra Network - http://www.hydranetwork.com

Commission Junction - http://www.cj.com

CPA Empire - http://www.cpaempire.com

Link Share - http://www.linkshare.com

More to come!

Many may not know this, but Alexa has a progroam called “The Wayback Machine”.  You can actually see how a website looked in the past.  It notes significant changes in layout and content.  This is one of those things that may not be all that interesting, but when bored, it does kill a lot of time.  It is intresting as a web developer though to see how the evolution of your own personal site has evolved over time.

To use the Wayback Machine, go to Alexa’s website at http://www.alexa.com.  Type in the name of the domain you wish to see, in the drop down, select “Site Ranking”, and hit enter.  Once you have come to the website information page, this will give you a break down of the site, how it ranks and compares to other sites, it’s importance on the internet, and other information.  On the left hand side, you will see a header saying “More to Explore“.  Right underneath that will be a link to see how the site looked back in time.  All significant changes are denoted with an asterisks(*) next to the date.

This is an intresting way to kill some time and to take a look into the past and see the evolution of a website.

I recently got the MagicJack in mail. I saw a commercial on it while moving from North Carolina.  This has been so far one of the best things I have gotten.  I can make phone calls anywhere in the United States, for as long as I want and as much as I want for $20 a year.  Not a bad deal.  At first I thought it was bogus, but this product is true to it’s name.  I get voicemail, call waiting, caller id, and all the basics you get with most telephone companies.

However, there are its limitations.  Unfortunately, fax does not work with it, and if it does, I haven’t been able to figure it out. I just might not be the technology geek that I thought I was.  Also there is no feature to transfer your existing number to this “telephone line”.

One of the main reasons I bought this, was for deployements.  Soon enough the Marine Corps and Navy is going to deploy me to go play in the sandbox.  I can bring this with me, find an internet connection, hook it  up, and bam!  I got me a telephone back to the US.  People can still call my normal number and still get me without paying international charges.  I think this is one of best things for our troops deployed or stationed overseas.  They can still have a United States based telephone number while being outside of the United States.  They can call their friends and family without the costs of international charges, and vice versa, their friends and family can call them with no international charges…..all for $20 a year and $40 the initial year.

It just doesn’t get better than that.  I think if they can fix the fax issue, Vonage, move over, there is no way any phone provider can compete with this one.