I often receive spam in my mailbox and on my websites. It is expected that emails will include one link that's repeated several times so the readers are much more likely to click on it at least once1. If they don't click on the first one, they are likely to click on the second or the third. When they skip all of those links, maybe they'll click the one in the P.S. area? This technique makes it easy to funnel people to a specific location on your website.

Now this is completely different from good SEO.

• 1. As a rule of thumb, you do not want to have more than one link per paragraph, and if you have really small paragraphs, probably one every other paragraph. If the link doesn't really fit in the paragraph or you decided to send text emails, you may also place the links between paragraphs.

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I learned today that in the last couple of months two people tested content using an IFRAME to see whether the links in the IFRAME would generate the expected juice1 to the destination page, and it does!

The image to the right shows you what the test is about:

1. You create a new page

2. You create a link from a low ranking page2

• 1. In SEO terms, juice means passing ranking value from one page to another.
• 2. You do this because that's where the link really belongs! Remember that for clean SEO and high ranking, you want links to look right for the page.

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Today I watched this video about Übercart which is the e-Commerce system we offer with Snap! Websites.

The last slide presented in this video1 shows a list of pages by importance. This entry really caught my eye because the order of the pages is different from what I've seen before.

If you also have a cart and offer goods to your customers, this is very important to you because if you are like me you want to increase your sales and not just spend your time on beautifying pages that are not significant to your actual customers.

For example, my company's main website has an okay front page. We actually don't change it (it could definitively be better!) because not even 10% of our traffic ever visits our front page (i.e. out of 3,000 hits or so a month, we'd get a whooping 260 hits on the home page, often not the same people who landed on another page.)

• 1. The slide of interest appears a little after 9 minutes. Note that the video is pretty awful otherwise...

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On October 18, Google announced that all the searches for logged in users (say you have a G+ account...) will make use of their secure pages (i.e. using encrypted data.) Our new upcoming Snap! Websites version will also let you log in your account using SSL.

This is important for users of Google+ since a bar appears at the top and the functionality of that bar includes a cookie. This is a security issue since your account could get hacked since your cookie is traveling on the Internet in clear while doing searches (unless you log out of G+ each time you use it?)

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Today I got a new contact in Los Angeles named L.A. Outback. Their picture made me curious. I looked at their website and they are actually selling Didgeridoos, also called Mago. This is an instrument, a long tube, created by arborigenal tribes. They create a quite interesting vibration when you blow inside them (I put a video about it below.)

The reason why I'm talking about this on Snap! Websites is because this is definitively a niche market. Where are you going to by your next Didgeridoo? You're not likely to find it at the store down the street, although some music store may have some, it certainly is a rare item in the U.S.

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I created a MerchantCircle account a very long time ago and at first did not see any value in it. Today, my account as a Google rank of 3. It's not the best of the best, but it points to all my main websites, such as Snap!, equally increasing their rank and this without having to do much work, really!

Link from your site

First, assuming you are a small business, you want to add a link from your main website to your MerchantCircle account. This will send some traffic to your MerchantCircle account and end up in some people connecting with you.

For this purpose, you can use your MerchantCircle vanity URL. This is done by going to your Dashboard and after clicking on Business Information, scroll down to Website Links (at this time, the last entry on the page) and then click the Edit link. Here you are given a way to enter two links: your main website and your Custom Link (or vanity link). In there, enter your preferred alias. In general, the best is your business domain name. Say your business website is http://www.example.com/ then use example. Finally, hit Save.

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As I keep up to date with Google Search Engine enhancements, I listen to a video (here on the left) yesterday explaining how you could increase your credibility (and thus increase the number of hits you get on your websites) by clearly specifying who the author of a post is. I immediately made the necessary changes to Snap! so it supports this capability.

For anyone who offers a blog or similar feature on their website, it is very likely that you will include the name of the author and a link to his or her account. The account should include a small biography describing the author

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Today I was visiting the American Cancer Society when I stumble upon a strange sentence... Now I'll have to think about means to inform Snap! users whenever they are creating a page that could be affected.

The sentence goes like this:

Pages shall be designed to avoid causing the screen to flicker with a frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz.

The figure to the right shows the accessibility of an handicapped person in a wheelchair.
Click on the picture to see the full figure from Section 508 paragraph 1194.41.

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The very simple logo of
Google+
Click to register!

Today I started testing Google+ and I find it great for it is really fast (some of the features are a lot faster than the equivalent in Facebook.) This being said, and even though I got about 90 connections in a day, this doesn't mean it will overcome Facebook and LinkedIn.

Now, if you look at the URLs as you browse your account, it looks terribly ugly, right? To get a better name you want to go to the Google+ shortener: http://gplus.to/

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Most of us are impulsive buyers. Once you want something, you just got to have it and you'll easily take the first offer presented to you even if there is a cheaper alternative available. This is true with Internet services such as Snap! Websites and other online services. This even happens with everyday items such as food. Remember the large number of items on display right next to the cashiers? Those are the last thing on your list, but they are right there to remind you to get them before leaving the store, and it works.

On the Internet, you can use many tricks to grab the attention

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