Whew! Well, we made back. The Hawkins girls survived our time in Alexandria, Egypt and glad to be home. You can see my short blog regarding my travels while there at www.globalspex.com/wordpress.

Interesting to note that while I was gone that new clients did not feel comfortable working with a web designer that did not live in their city. I tried to assure them that all of my work, even while in Houston, is accomplished via cell phones, email, fax, etc. I rarely meet a client.

I have been working hard with Pay Per Click campaigns to generate more business. Interest in my service from new customers declined during the summer. But my wonderful, current customers are great and always needing updates, changes, and marketing advice.

I'll be posting my trials and tribulations regarding my work with various PPC services (Overture and Adwords) more often.

To be a family again, the Hawkins family have decided to join Mr. Hawkins in Alexandria, Egypt. What an adventure awaits us! But the challenges of continuing a web design business long distance begins.

I have signed up with a Vonage account, 832-886-5843, using the websoft program to make and receive phone calls through my computer. It is  a small monthly fee but I won't and, more importantly my customers, have any long distance calls.

I've bought a new, powerful HP Pavilion notebook, Zd8000. It essentially a desktop replacement and a very big one at that.

The biggest challenge will be the time zone difference. But I can promise that their changes or updates will be completed before they wake up the next day.

It's a trial and error approach to Pay Per Click. You can do all the Wordtracker key phrase research there is, but if your Overture or GoogleAd doesn't grab your audience's attention, the key words will do you no good.

For more on pay per click and creating exceptional ads, the SEO Chat forums are great for learning the latest. Go to http://forums.seochat.com/

So far, I say no. It's a wait and see prospect. Definitely purchase a link in the Yahoo! Directory and submit your site to Lycos/MSN/Open Directory for the spider to find your web site. Google will find you sooner or later too but always make sure your web site is optimized for the key words or phrases. Use Wordtracker and Overture's tools to research the best phrase possible. All in all, wait and see how your web site performs and moniter the stats.

Check out http://www.seochat.com. It is an excellent resource for learning all the ins and outs of search engine marketing.

http://www.bearcanyonseo.com/tips_links.html - list of various web sites related to SEO.

http://www.googlerankings.com - Check your position in the search engine of Google

My friends and I are always complaining how we forget to send our attachments with emails. Here's a neat little program that'll "scan each outgoing email and ask you if you meant to attach a file before sending the e-mail, giving you a chance to insert the attachment." Go to http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Outlook/Products.asp for more information.

Simply put, content is the stuff on your site. Good content is useful information or tools that your visitors will find helpful and keep coming back as a resource. It means different things to different businesses and the bottom line is that what constitutes "good content" depends on the goal of your site and your targeted visitor's needs.

It's not who and how many links are linking to your web site that will help your search engine ranking but the quality of the link on other sites to your web site. Farm links can be a detriment to your site showing how you just don't care who links to you. Consider the quality and subject of the site.

Consider these links as relationship builders between you and your online viewers, vendors, and associates. They are looking to you for quality information. Your link page should provide the type of information of interest to your online viewers. The same goes for who is linking to you. They should be providing a service for you.