Far too many people think they can do Internet Marketing.  In fact, almost every web design company will offer you their SEO services and most of them will be rubbish at it.

There are many fields in Internet Marketing but I’m going to concentrate on 3 elements here.  I know that people will disagree with my definitions but tough.  I draw my definitions from experience.

1. SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is the general term used to cover all aspects of promoting a website on the Internet.  I’m going to re-define it.

SEO is what you do to a website (internal or on-site optimisation) that makes a search engine happy.  This can start with the simple tasks of making your pages XHTML valid, using descriptive TITLE tags, removing missing links and tidying up your HTML.

Additional tasks should include creating landing pages (more on these in a moment), testing your website is a variety of browsers and accessibility formats and re-ordering content, links and scripting on the page.

To truely SEO your website you should carefully plan your link structure internally and externally, the content that surrounds such links and the content of pages that are linked to and from.

This is where landing pages come in.

An effective landing page IS NOT keyword stuffed and only shown to search engines, it is a carefully crafted page that is relevant to your main website theme and to the external resource that links to it.  Your main landing page is the home page.  It should hold relevance to your most important content and your link-generating content, which are ideally one and the same.

Search Engines are very adept at filtering out webpages where content has been keyword stuffed.  Remember to write for your readers and customers first.  A webpage should use well-formed English (or another language) and not stray off-topic.

If you have two or more distinct areas of content or keyword groups then you should create separate pages for them and where possible, linking pages that draw a relevant link between those topics.  Many people will incorrectly try and cram each and every topic or keyword onto their homepage thus lessening the impact of all of their keywords.  Keep to one topic and a small number of keywords on a page to achieve the best search relevance.

This is all white-hat SEO (ie above-board) which is the best method for long-term, search-engine relevance.

Before moving on to talk about SEP, let me recap:

• do all the simple things on-site before looking off-site.
• when planning out your website, decide on your topics initially and stick to one topic per page where possible.  These pages will generate traffic from the Search Engines through topic-relevance.
• these pages will also double as landing pages for incoming links.
• keep keywords to a realistic level and write for your audience not Google.
• carefully plan how each page links within the website.

(more…)

A good place to start is with Microsoft’s own “How to” page: How do I in C#

Now software companies don’t always highlight the limitations of their own software or programming languages so it’s good to have other resources to hand.

There are many C# and .NET resources on the Internet but I’ll highlight some of my favourites:

• C# Corner - In general some very good code written by hobbyists and professionals that cover very wide topics.
• Code Project - Again a wide variety of examples and an especially good source for non-C# examples.
• W3Schools - Not necessary for C# but for any web-related technology, you can’t beat the grounding that W3Schools can give you.
• 4Guys - more of a ASP.NET resource (also excellent for classic ASP) but will often have a simple example that can be adapted for your needs.

(more…)