Free Traffic Tips

As small business owners trying to make our way on the web, and as webmasters trying to save and make a buck here and there, it’s good to know that there are some resources out there to give us a basic education on how to do more advanced webmaster stuff, all online, mostly for free.

It will be hard, but I’m going to try not to repeat any resource I’ve referenced in my blog before. Call me on it if I do and i’ll replace it with another goodie.

BigNoseBird.com, part of the Really Big network can give you a wide education on everything from site promotion to HTML and server side includes. And if you can’t figure out the answer from their resources, you can always post to their bulletin board.

And if you’re stumped about the priciples behind internet marketing and site promotion, you really want to check out sitesell.com – they have free trials… I know you have probably heard of Ken Evoy’s site before, but you should give serious consideration to, at bare minimum, taking them up on one of their trial offers. Even if you can’t afford some of their other products yet, it’s really helpful to take a look at the trials – they give you information you may not have considered before. There’s a longer review here.

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In the good old days, there were lots of places you could go for a mechanical pair of eyes to look over your site and tell you how fast it loads, if there are broken links, that kind of thing. Netmechanic’s services used to be free, or have free trials. Ah, the good old days…

Most, if not all, of the utilities linked below are free.

The Craig Cecil site also has some valuable helpers, including a CSS validator, an HTML validator, and links to other tools as well, such as the Bobby checker, that will tell you if your site is suitable with people who have physical or sensory challenges and can’t view the web the same way most of us do. That’s a fantastic page, you could be there for hours.

Designerwiz will also trace the network route to your server – good in the odd case that you can’t access your site or your host’s and everything else seems to be fine – sometimes it’s between your PC and the host, not that your host or the site is actually down.

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Before I tell you what to do if you get hacked – and how to prevent it – here’s a short, funny story.

So there I was, thinking, “I can finish my long-overdue update to my book and then, I can try that thing they call sleep. Then I’ll finish my toolbox tips”.

I went to do a final check on my sites before I continued on my merry way and guess what.

I got hosed, Timmy. Someone with way too much time on their hands hacked my PHP-Nuke section. Oh, the shame of it!

Shame on me for forgetting to do the security updates to my PHP-Nuke installation after the last upgrade.

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