Basic $10 Health Insurance Logo

Hi guys - we're looking for a sexy logo for our web site that's located at http://www.cheaperhealthinsurancequotes.com/

Just make something that works on that site. It can be a bit bigger than the current logo; that's fine.

As soon as I see something I like, I'll declare it the winner!

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Basic SEO practices for newbies:

Basic SEO practices for newbies:

The thing to remember is that SEO isn't a magic bullet. It's important, but no one knows the exact algorithms the SEs use, and each one is different so all you can do is optimize the best you can. There happens to be a few things that you should just always do whenever you make a new website. Don't stress over every little thing, just make sure you are doing it, this should just become kind of automatic for you.

Make sure you fill in your meta tags with a good title, description, and the right keywords. I personally don't think the keywords meta-tag is nearly as important as everyone else on here does, but it gives me a way to organize my keywords list for me to reference. When you start having many different websites, it's good to include whatever notes to yourself you can. When you come back to work on an older site you might not remember eveything you were thinking before. The metatags help you remember your site info as much as it helps the SE figure it out. A good rule of thumb is that anything that won't hurt you for SEO and might help, you should use and use correctly. Definately use the title meta-tag, try to include keywords in the title. Definately use the description meta-tag, google will normally use this for the summary it displays in the listing. It isn't used for indexing so write it for humans, this is what gets people to click on your link when they see it in the SERP. Don't use the same metatags for every page on your site. Take the time to make them be specific to each page.

Create good content. Make sure you have some decent content. Content is what the internet was invented for. If you have unique and quality content, then all the seo and backlinking you're doing is just to get the ball rolling. Give them what they want, show them where it is, and they'll start coming. If it's good enough then it'll eventually start building on its own naturally because people like what they found. That's the idea anyway. So whenever possible use the best page design and the best content possible. Avoid duplicate content between different pages on your site, the SE will most likely penalize your site for that.

Remember, your content isn't just something to get google to like your site, it is the whole point of your site. The content and how you structure it is what will make visitors do what you want when they get there. If it's crap they'll just leave, and 99% of them won't leave by clicking on your adsense or affilliate link, they'll just close the window or use the back button. (yes, of course if your doing blackhat stuff you can make the browser go where you want, but that's for a different discussion.)

Include your keywords. Structure your content correctly, make a few title headers in the content that include keywords (use header tags h1, h2, etc.), try to have a keyword density around 2% in your content, and maybe 4% for the whole page including the metatags, alt tags, anchors, etc.

Be sure that your .htaccess is set up correctly. Decide on which way you want your url to be and stick with it. If you decide to use www then always use it like that in your links, don't use both. I usually set up a 301 for all www requests to redirect to non-www urls. If you don't set that up then every single page on your site can appear to google as having at least one duplicate. If that's the only thing wrong on your site it isn't going to kill you, but it's so easy to fix. If you don't know how to set up a redirect in your .htaccess file then just do a search, there are many other threads explaining it. Check google if you can't find it here. Also, .htaccess only apples if your on an Apache server, Windows servers do it a little differently, if that applies to you then just search google to find out how to do it. If your consitent in your linking, then the only time the redirect will come into play is if you get natural backlinks that you have no control over. You should also specify which you prefer, www or not-www in google tools if you use it. (If you don't then you really should, I recommend you set yourself up an account for webmaster tools and analytics.)

Make a robots.txt file and I like to include a favicon because without them the robots will trigger file not found errors on your server. Be sure to configure your robots.txt correctly. Make a custom 404 page. If your site has more than just a couple of pages then also create a sitemap.xml file. It's not a bad idea to just create a sitemap anyway no matter what, it lets you define the structure of your site to the crawlers. Just search google if you don't know how to do any of that, it's very basic and you can find exact instructions within a minute when you do a search.

Other than that there isn't a lot more you can do for on-site SEO. When people ask about SEOthey're always thinking of on-site SEO, but thats the easy and quick part. Just do it and get on with it.

Everything else is off-site SEO and involves building backlinks and promotion.
This is where you need to focus your efforts. This is where the magic bullet is, if there really is one.

Social Bookmarks, Directory Submissions, Profile Links, and Blog Comments are really the easiest place to start getting backlinks. It's not a bad idea to purchase these links from a service. They are easy to make, but to do it right they really need to be posted from many different accounts and ip adresses. A good idea when your starting is to do it yourself a little bit to see how it works, then purchase larger quantities from a service. You want to get a lot of links, but you don't want to over do it. Building to fast can look unnatural, just do some searches and read up on it a little more. How many and how fast is a judgement call you have to make. hold off on more complex linkbuilding until you have a little more experience. Linkwheels and other link structures can be very powerful, but can also hurt your site a lot if not done correctly.

Whenever possible include keyword anchors and title or alt tags on your backlinks. Don't always use the same anchors, vary it up a little, use 3 or 4 different keywords and even do a few with some non keyword anchors. You are trying to look as though a lot of different real people have taken a liking to your site, if it were natural then all links wouldn't be exactly the same, so you want to simulate that same type of randomness. Backlinking strategies are all about simulating the natural events that happen as a site grows in popularity. If you can do it successfully then the SE's will give you good position in the listings, and then hopefully what you are simulating can become reality. The point of all of it is to get traffic.

Change up your anchor text. The idea of backlinking is to simulate that masses of people are becoming interested in your site. It should have some amount of randomness to it in order to look natural. I've seen a few made up stats on what's best, but I think a good rule of thumb is maybe about 45% primary keywords, 35% secondary keywords, and about 15% random unrelated like Click Here, and then about 5% just the url. The exact percentage isn't dramatically important, it just needs to seem like the linking is natural.

Create relevant articles containing your keywords, include backlinks using keyword anchors, and submit to article directories. Article directories are mostly authority sites and your article becomes a relevant backlink to your site. Then create profiles and accounts on blogs, social networking sites, forums etc. Include a link to your website whenever you do that and each one of those become backlinks as well.

Thats the end of it. Well kinda.
Go back and watch your stats to see what keywords are getting the most traffic to your site, analyze the data a little bit and if you need to, remove or add keywords to your content and tags, and adjust the anchors your using in your backlinks.

Continue building links. Remember you're trying to artificially create the appearance to the SE that your site is popular. When that happens naturally, people are always adding new links to your site. Since you are trying to look natural you have to do the same thing. Linkbuilding never stops completely.

OK, there you go. That's that basics of SEO. Everything else is about fine tuning, and has to be looked at for each individual situation.

If you have any more questions, before you start PMing anyone just read through the threads in the White Hat SEO section, and do some searching on google. You can find some really good information from some much smarter people than me.

If there are any SEO gurus that want to expand on this or if you see any errors you think should be discussed, please add your input.

Hope this can help some of you.

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Basic computer parts question

Depends, are you talking computer or hard drive manufacturer? HDD manufacturers use decimal gB... so 1000... computers use binary gB, so 1024.

Which is why a 1tb drive reports 931 gigs (aka 976,562,500,000 bytes) , since a computer expects 1tb to be 1024^4 (1,099,511,627,776 bytes) not 1000^4 (1,000,000,000,000 bytes).

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10 Basic Blog Tips To Increase Your Traffic Instantly

In blogging, you need to follow some basic blog tips to increase your blog traffic.

Being a blogger, I know how much blog traffic means to each and every blogger. Blog traffic plays an important role for our blogs. Through this, we get to know what are we actually doing and how to create content for improving blog traffic.

Blog traffic helps in boosting your blog’s ranking in the search engines and makes search engine optimization a breeze to boot.

1. Use WordPress -

When you are starting to blog, you should go for the best blogging platform that is WordPress. Why I am recommending WordPress to you is because of its many brilliant qualities. WordPress is an open source blogging tool and content management system that is easy to use for building websites. It is not like HTML Coding and Dreamweaver in which one has to practice a lot for building a blog. Also, WordPress blogs fetch higher rankings on search engines than Tumblr, Google Blogger and other platforms which leads to more traffic for your content.

2. Use Good SEO Plugins -

WordPress is SEO-friendly, easy to use and is the best platform for building informative portals. It has so many plug-ins that help you in easy optimization of your blog. You can use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin for doing SEO. You can even buy a premium SEOPressor plugin for better optimization of your blog. SEOPressor is the best plugin for knowing the exact SEO score of your blog post. This will help you in getting good rankings for a particular keyword on Search Engine.

3. Use of fast loading theme -

Another blog tip that you need to follow is adding a professional theme on your WordPress blog. There are lots of themes available in WordPress. You can go for Swift Basic which is free, or you can go for Thesis or Genesis Frameworks which are paid. I am suggesting you to go with these themes because they have more features and they take less time to load the page. People and search engines love sites that loads quicker than others.

4. Customize 404 Error Pages -

You should customize 404 error pages in such a way that it looks appealing to your blog visitor in case your visitor gets it. If a person gets a 404 error page then he/she should click on another link in your blog instead of closing your blog’s window and searching for other site. This will help in decreasing the bounce rate of your blog and prevent you from losing precious traffic.

5. Add Share buttons to your blog post -

There are so many social sharing plugins available on WordPress. Currently, I am using AddToAny Plugin on my blog. Your blog readers will never share the blog posts on social networks if you don’t add social sharing buttons on your blog. Social sharing buttons improve blog traffic and they can even increase your blog’s search ranking.

Bonus Tip: Ms. Ileane can help you Install the Digg Digg Plugin [Video] which she uses here on Basic Blog Tips

6. Install Google Analytics to track blog traffic -

When you start to blog, you should install Google Analytics to see your blog stats. You can sign in easily on Google Analytics using your Gmail ID. Through the Analytics report, you can see where visitors are landing on your blog and also from where they are coming. You can see which keywords are doing good for your blog and you can target that particular audience. Google Analytics has so many features and is considered as the best tool for getting to know more about the source of traffic coming to your blog and you can also track conversions. So, you should see the flow of your blog’s traffic in detail and schedule blog posts accordingly. Connect your Google Analytic account to Google Webmaster Tools for even more insights about your traffic.

7. Content is king  -

Without content, you can’t do anything in blogging. If you want to make your blog popular, then you need to produce quality content every time you publish the post. Writing quality blog posts is not an easy task. It requires good writing skills and you must have good knowledge and expertise on a particular topic. This will help your readers to gain a better understanding of your topic. And people will be coming back to your blog which is a positive sign and a sure way to increase traffic.

8. Keyword Research -

Keyword research is one of the most essential technique in the search engine marketing. This can help your blog to gain more organic traffic from search engines. People do search for those terms that comes first in the “Google Search Suggestion”. If you add those keywords for your blog posts, then you can get more blog traffic than normal. You can check the keyword popularity on the Google AdWords Keyword Tool : https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool or use a paid tool like Market Samurai. These tools will give information about monthly searches of each and every term and you can put accordingly. This will help you in getting right kind of visitors or targeted traffic on your site.

9. Guest Posting -

Guest posting is the most brilliant way to drive traffic from other blogs. You can write on some popular blogs for increasing your blog traffic. In real estate, location matters a lot to a buyer. Similarly, the location of your content matters as well. If your blog post gets accepted on a popular blog, then you will be getting familiar with new people. This will help you gain authority and thus your blog traffic will increase.

Same way, you should also accept guest posts on your blog. The writer will be sharing that blog post on his/her social networks and you will be meeting new blog visitors.

10. Blog Commenting -

The last but not least, it is blog commenting. There are lots of benefits of daily blog commenting. You should comment on different blogs of the same niche for getting more blog visitors. Also, try to leave the first comment on other’s blog posts. People do check out the blog of the first commentator. This is what I have experienced personally and helps me get lots more traffic.

Tagged as: Google Analytics, increase your blog traffic

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