Deverill

I'm not the one to ask about CSS - it's a new an amazing world I'm not much into yet. The long lines were from the old site. I assumed you had a bad folder name and took out the "newsite" and went to the "regular" FAQ page for instance. The page you posted looks fine as is regarding length. I would guess there's a way to move your nav-box to the right or pin it on the right edge but I'm not sure how or if that's what you're after. Sorry I'm not much help on CSS... I'll eventually find some time to investigate it further.

It's my pleasure. Best wishes on the site!

Yes, by all means read these documents. ... but don't believe everything in it. For instance, they say If I do the query link:www.covenantwordchurch.org I get 7 entries. link:covenantwordchurch.org also yields 7 entries. If I search using "+covenantwordchurch.+org" I get 222 entries. Granted not all of them are links but the #3 entry has a true link to us as does the #4 entry and so on. It's good info but not all of it is true.

Very scientific too...

Water is naturally occuring and thus can't be patented. Now that bottle you're holding that contains the water... <Evil Laugh>.

Heya Nat! Wow, you are indeed multitalented. All you were doing plus this. Thumbs Up One thing I notice is that your menu box ("About, contact, membership benefits, etc.") seems to be absolutely placed. It looks great at many screen sizes but when I look at it in my default 1280 X 960 it sits right over the last half of the word "About" and your logo. Also, for me, every link goes to domain/new_site/pagename.ext which 401's as not found but if I take out the new_site then it's fine for the ones I tried. Finally, you may want to put your pages with lots of text in a table that's something like 85% of the screen just to avoid the lines running from side to side. Probably not an issue at a lower res but at my size it's not as appealing as it could be. Hope it helps and best wishes with the site! PS Firefox 0.8 on WinXP

Under Awstats Summary there are 2 lines (on mine at least) - Traffic Viewed and Traffic Not Viewed. Not-Viewed is the bots so yes it filters it but it does show it there as well.

Rank Eval: You have a great start. You rank fairly high under some terms but can improve a little. For instance, Hiking is not something you will ever be able to compete for. Instead of adding single words try to focus on keyword phrases people will enter into the search engines when they are looking for you. For instance, if I was a family new to the area I'd look for "Boy Scout Columbus GA" because I don't really care too much about the other Troops around the country just yet. Make sure you add that to the keywords and maybe even put it in the title somehow that fits your image of the site. More links back to your site wouldn't hurt but you have a pretty good start already. Google reports about 60 and Yahoo about 20 which gives you good credibility among the search engines. Your site is aimed mostly toward the families and scouts in your troop so you don't need as much visibility as a used car salesman might. You have a great site for the members though... be very proud of that. In all, a great job. Add a few more carefully targeted phrases throughout your page that people will be searching on and it will be awesome.

Rank Eval: Your main page has very little on it for the search engines to go by. Without a moderate amount of content a spider would not be able to classify your site. Also, you have a lot of keywords. If Delta Consulting Services is well known enough that people would be looking for it by name then use it. Otherwise focus more on what it is than who it is. What I mean is, choose a few keyword phrases such as "valuation consulting" or "intangible asset valuations" and focus on those. Words like "interest" won't get you very far in search engines because there are tons of sites that fit that term. You will also need links from other sites if you want to rank well on Google. Other search engines don't weigh them as heavily but most of them do consider it so it will help to have links for them too. Even on the main.html page there is a lot of scripting which should be moved to external files if possible. The use of your keyword phrases is important. Put them in a Title here and a Header there but only where it makes sense. Your title is the name of your company and while that may be what you'd expect to see, its not the best way to draw traffic. Remember, people will look for your services usually and not the name of your company so help them find you by making your title something like "Valuation Consultants - Delta Consulting Services".

Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you on this. Rank Eval: You're ranked #28 on Google for "german literature" as an example keyphrase. I'm not sure what would be the best for you to focus on but that seemed a good one to check. You have a lot of keywords in the meta tag. I'd try to limit them to a few keyword phrases - maybe 2-3 - and use other pages on your site to refine your focus. For instance, "german literature" may be good for the homepage but "learn german free" may be best for your course pages. The javascript would be betten in an external file that you included instead of in the page itself. You can do that like ><script LANGUAGE="javascript" TYPE="text/javascript" SRC="/Scripts/mailto.js"></SCRIPT> for example. You have good content in a relatively non-competitive area. With a few adjustments you should be able to get very high rankings for your site. Best wishes.

If you do that I'll trademark the word "copyright"!

The Helix Nebula is also called the "Eye of God" because of its similarity to a human eye in appearance. I read one quote that said the Hubble looked out into space and it saw God looking back at it. The image most often shown, and I believe the one in the slideshow, is actually a composite between the Hubble and an earth based telescope. Awefully purty stuff to be caused by some big ancient galactic accident.

If I can't find something here that I'm looking for I go to Google and enter "search term site:totalchoicehosting.com" and it sometimes finds more goodies on my topic.

Spammers are a waste of time. Tracking them down is almost always even more of a waste. It could be that you got more junk when sending to the host because the guy hosts himself under another name. Most of the big-time spammers have their own servers. When I realized this I turned to the best filtering I could and try to ignore the rest... it's just not worth my effort - I still have miles to go before I sleep.

OH, Rankwhere.com is another site that tells you your placement on Alexa, Google, Altavista, MSN, Inktomi, Lycos and Alltheweb. It's a pretty nice tool for an overall picture. Don't accept it as gospel either. It's just a tool that may or may not be accurate. I don't know if they are having a bad day or if they are being blocked, but for one term I'm #1 on Altavista but this tool says I'm not in the top 100. At least it's good for the ones it does tell you about. Welcome to the ever changing world of SEO.

Ah, it's not Caps Lock itself but any method of notifying you that it's on. Interestingly enough, Windows XP's login screen warns you when you start typing the password that Caps Lock is on. Hmmmm. Let the games begin.

They really are a thing of their own, aren't they? You might like "chat" but that really doesn't fit perfectly. I honestly can't think of another good short name. Would "messengers" work for you?

It's ok Tracy... there's enough of me to go around. As far as tracking your placement and changes, just don't make yourself crazy trying to track it too closely. They change the rules almost daily at the search engines so you may think you did something terrible and it may just be today that Google recalculates all the sites that begin F-H or something. Again, it's worth repeating, don't just focus on Google either. My humble opinion is that they are making themselves less desirable by their recent actions and may soon lose their dominance if they aren't careful.

High ranking is an entire science unto itself and I'm no Albert Einstein in the field so I'll say this: Content is a great thing. It helps your visitors get information and it helps the search engines figure out what you are so they can tell the right people. I'd definitely put as much text as makes sense on the pages as it fits your design. I'd not write entire paragraphs into alt descriptions but put a sentence or two about the images as appropriate. Make sure you targeted phrases appear in the site. For instance, when I knew less than I do now I thought I was optimizing for "Key West fishing" but I had the title of "Key West is the best fishing" which is not my target phrase! On engines like Yahoo, the elements of the page are very important. Those being things like the Title, Header Tags (H1, H2, etc), bold text, etc. On Google they are not as important but should still be there. The meta tags are used on some but not really heavily on any. Put the Keywords and Description ones in there but don't stress too much about them. Remember, the Meta Description is what some search engines use for the description of your site on their results pages. Make it a great site for your visitors and it will be a good site on the engines. A little tweeking will help it be great on them too. Also, don't chase only Google... there are tons of people on other engines and Google is acting stupid (and has been for awhile). By the way, look me up by all means! It would be fun to meet another TCHer in person.

Find the phrases that they will most likely use to find a site such as yours and make it #1 in the search engines. Ok, that's oversimplified. The key thing is to find phrases people will be using when they should find you. "Virtual conceptions" is not something that anyone will ever search on, I'm afraid. Maybe "altered reality photos" or "conceptual artwork" or "photoshopped pictures" or something - it's not my area of knowledge - but you'll need to find the right phrases to go after. When you do that you can use tools like overture's pay per click (PPC) tool or wordtracker or one of the other tools to find out if that phrase is going to be searched on and if it's got a bazillion others there already. Keep in mind that these tools are all subjective and should be used as guidelines only. After you have your best keyword phrases try to make your page emphasize them without making it look stupid. Put the phrase in the title and in a header tag and maybe even bolded but don't make people crazy with it when they read your site. Then get links to you - as many as you can - and especially ones that are from sites in a related area as yours. A gallery would be primo - a shrimp house would help but not as much.

Ok, here's the common terms and meanings: PR - PageRank - Google's unique measure of how popular your site is, and thus theoretically how good it is, based on the number and types of links back to your site. This is a scale from 0 to 10 with 10 being the best. SERP - Search Engine Results Page - usage: SERP Rank - This is where you turn up on a search for a given keyword phrase. It is best to try to get #1 on the search engines when a customer types "blue widgets" if that's what you sell. The first page is good. After that is not so good. Now, as to why PageRank (PR) is not something to be overly concerned about: Google is the only one using it. It is rumored to be losing its power at Google, possibly because of some issues over who really owns the PR algorithm. If you build your sites for the visitor and have good information there others will link to it automatically. If you try to get more links then go for it - don't only seek links from sites that are only PR4 or higher because next week they may be PR8. If you chase PR you will become crazy and you will miss out on all the benefits of creating a great site. For instance, Google has PR10 (some argue it's 11) but if you go to MSN and search on the term "search engine", Google only comes in at #4. What about all those customers? Another thing is that if you search "grill equipment" the #1 site has no PR rank and the #3 has a PR3, #4 is PR3, #5 is PR0 and #6 has a PR of 2. Results #14 and #15 have PR5 which I am sure they fought hard to get but what did it do for them - it's on the 2nd page! There are better things to work on than PR.

Good point! Shew, thought I was going to have to $t@rt t@lking l33t 0r $0|v|3thing. (translation: start talking (e)lete or something)

Wow, thanks for sharing Kasey!

Nah, we don't have any puny bass here in the Keys. They're all like this one: http://grandslamkw.com/images/RecentCatche...ILFI~1_png.html Have fun! It's a seriously different game than saltwater... just don't leave us alone with Rob for too long at a time! You know how he gets!

Thomas, I am on another site that uses this software and they are asking the same questions lately. I wonder if this version or maybe a few versions of the forum software is broken.