IStock Photo provides a variety of sizes for you to select from, but which size is right for you and if you are selling images how do you know what size to make them?

When browsing IStock photo size options, it becomes rather difficult to understand which sizes are Small Medium or Large, as they often have different dimensions associated with them. The examples of image sizes below show that IStock doesn’t have a hard, fast guideline for image sizes.

If you are buying photos, the medium to Large sizes will be more than adequate for your webmaster. If using for highlights, the Small and XSmall may even be usefull. Shoot an email to your webmaster if you have any doubts.

After reviewing the IStock Photo FAQ’s we see that item number four (see excerpt below) implies that IStock Photo resizes the images when uploading for sales.

What are the specs required for images to be uploaded or rules for uploading?

1. Images must be RGB JPG format only
2. You must own the full copyright to any image you upload. This means you must be the photographer or artist that created the image.
3. All trademarks must be removed. This includes logos, brands and entities with copyright or trademarked elements. This many also extend to trademarked products such as cast sculptures, toys, architecture and other elements of design. Copyright is checked with each file.
4. File sizes: the bigger, the better. 300 dpi 5″ x 7″ is optimal. 640×480 images are not usable by most graphic artists. All files should be 1200 x 1600 pixels minimum (anything smaller will be automatically rejected).
5. Entering keywords and descriptions: be descriptive. Include at least 10 keywords and use a title other than ‘dog’ or ‘man’. Supplying more keywords means your image will match more searches. Images with more keywords get downloaded more often.
6. Model releases: images with clearly visible people require a model release (iStockphoto Model Release) form for legal reasons. Children in images can’t sign a model release. A legal guardian or parent must sign for all children under the age of 18 years. You will be notified if you need a model release and it can be uploaded later if you’re not sure.
7. Legal notice: uploading images/artwork that belongs to somebody else (copyright or otherwise) will result in a suspended membership and in some cases may have legal ramifications.
8. Your account profile must have your full, real first and last names, and mailing address entered before completing an application. Anyone uploading with a fake name will be banned immediately.
9. More detailed information is available in the iStockphoto Photographer Training Manual.

Don’t get caught off guard and blow the big pitch!

First impressions can be everything – use multiple browsers!

First impressions can be everything when you are trying to sell products and services. That’s why it’s so important that you ensure your website looks good to any potential client.

For example both Google Chrome and Safari display similarly but Ie 7 and Ie 8 look nothing alike and FireFox is in a category all it’s own.

If you are a PC user you can’t assume all your website traffic will be using a PC and if you are a MAC user come on wake up! Apple has a minimal presence in the business computing world (MP3s and Cell Phones are a different story).

Don’t believe us? Check out this sample website in four different browsers!

Google Chrome	Internet Explorer 7	FireFox	Apple Safari

If you have ever read forums about SEO, you will probably have come across complaints of SEO killing content on the internet. What people are referring to in making complaints of this nature is the type of websites that have been set up purely for SEO benefit. You have probably come across such sites, even if you haven’t realised it at the time. They’re sites that have headings all over the place stuffed with keywords.

The articles it features often have the keyword repeated in every sentence to the point at which it sounds frankly stupid. But good SEO is good for content.

Here’s how to prevent SEO from killing your content:

• Remember why you set your website up. Remember its goal and make sure that it still fulfils that goal. The SEO should be something you do to your website. It should not be your websites.
• Write for a human reader. Yes, include your keywords. But build them into your content. Do not build your content around a keyword. It’s humans who will read your site!
• Make people want to come back! What’s the point in getting your site to the top of the search engines for any word if your visitors won’t come back? A lot of visitors finding their way to a website with abominably bad content will lead to bad press and no returning readers!
• Keep your content unique. This is great for your readers and it’s great for SEO! Why should someone visit your site to read something when they could visit any one of millions to read something similar? Make your material stand out.
• Make your website informative. The more relevant content you write, the more your keywords will be present and the more easily search engine crawlers will be able to decipher the relevance of your website to the words you are targeting. But, more to the point, the more you are then giving to your readers as well.

The internet is fundamentally for humans – not bots or crawlers. And search engines are designed to help people to find good, relevant information on the topic they are searching. There aren’t many people who particularly appreciate searching something and then spending time sifting through spammy, over keyword-stuffed material. Good content is imperative to the sustainable success of a good SEO campaign!

Robbie Jeffreys is an online marketing expert. For more information visit SEO Manchester.

“Google Sandbox theory” – It is one of the most confusing issues that webmasters have to deal with while trying to optimize their new sites for high search engine rankings. The reason why the “Google Sandbox theory” is confusing is that it is just a theory, and is without official confirmation from Google that it actually exists. Without being able to verify the existence of the Sandbox theory, much less its features, it becomes very hard to devise strategies to combat its effects.

The term “Google Sandbox theory” came into existence around early 2004, when webmasters around the world began to notice a pattern with new websites, whose domain names were registered around this period. The pattern was that new sites, even after being optimized and having lot of quality inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords. Also in few cases new websites (websites that came into existence during early 2004) that ranked highly for certain keywords, were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their optimized keywords.

So what is the Google Sandbox Theory? The Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engine’s algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. It is a common notion in the industry that the Google Sandbox effect decreases after a certain period of time due to website aging. However this is far from true. Actually, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.

Link Aging implies the time from when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if nothing is done, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox. So it is important to follow the strategies mentioned below to minimize the time spent in the Google Sandbox:

It is beneficial to start the link building process as soon as the website is created and not making the mistake of waiting for the website to be perfect to start this process. The sooner you start the link building process, the sooner your links will age and the sooner you will escape the sandbox.

Try to establish a long term link building plan with specific targets for each week, day or month. It is important to get themed links rather than hundreds of “junk” links. For example contacting 5-20 link partners per day and setting a target of acquiring 30-40 links per week.

Finally the most important factor is to avoid the black hat SEO techniques at all cost, because with the constantly evolving Google’s search algorithm, penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual or get banned.

Debbie Everson is the CEO of SearchMar.com, the leading provider of search engine optimization, social media & online marketing solutions to over 2,000 small businesses. Read my SEO Blog. Follow me on Twitter or call 866-885-6263 for a free consultation.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com, Debbie Everson

Getting your website listed at the top of the search results for a competitive search phrase is a dream for most marketers, but it doesn’t have to be if you’re willing to do what it takes and are consistent with your efforts. This article is going to reveal the techniques you can use to get your site ranked in a very short time.

One of the most important elements to a top listing in Google is doing the proper research. After all you don’t want all your hard work going to waste on a search term that gets no searches each month. Using Google’s free keyword tool that can be found with a quick search on Google is probably the best place to start.

I do recommend purchasing a good keyword tool once you start to make a little profit as it will greatly increase your chances of finding a keyword phrase that will be easy to rank for. Once you have a keyword phrase you think you could profit from you need to start producing content on your site with that keyword phrase in the title, heading, and throughout the content without stuffing it.

Your next step is getting inbound links from a variety of different sites using your keywords as anchor text in the links you build. One of the easiest places to get incoming links is through article directories like EzineArticles it is also a great place to start getting some traffic to your site. Another great place for links is social bookmarking sites there are thousands of them online.

By consistently building incoming links your site will climb to the top over time. Sometimes you may see it make big jumps in its climb and others it will seem to be stuck. Or it will bounce around for a while until it settles where the search engines feel it should be. The trick to getting it to the top is to not worry too much about where it’s at, but to keep building incoming links on a daily basis as well as adding more content to the site as the days go by.

Jo is not only an expert in article marketing he also has other interests like his latest website that can be found at roundkitchentables.org where you can find information and reviews on the best round kitchen tables you can purchase for your home.

Article Source: Jo_R_Green

A client contacted us to ask for help recently. Aparently when people went to his website, anti-virus warnings were poping up.

After a few minutes it became clear what had happened; a cialis spammer had hacked into the site, uploaded files and folders and coded a ton of spam junk into each page of the site (see image below).

This client had a decent alpha-numeric password, but it did contain a portion of the domain name. We can’t be certain that it was a simple case of hacking, the password could also have been accessed by means of a trojan or keystroke recorder that slipped past the anti-virus program.

It’s ok to use passwords that are easy to remember, but complicate them by using symbols and punction marks.

For example: The domain name Your-Propeller-Head (76 bit encryption) could be used as a password, but we would adjust it something like this Y0ur+Pr0Pe1!Er-HeAd# (109 bit encryption).

It’s still the same password, it just uses more symbols and punctuation than the original. Even though it might be a little tougher to remember, after entering it a few times it would be easy to remember.

P.S. – No Your Propeller-Head isn’t stupid enough to use his actual password in a blog post

We recieved this official looking email today, which at first glance, looked legitimate. But upon further review it turns out to be a scam designed to get the recipent to buy the Chinese version of their domain name. So if you get one of these messages, just ignore it.

Dear Manager:

 We are the domain name registration organization in China,who mainly duty for domain name and Internet Trademark registration work.
Here,we have some important thing confirm with your company.On November.10, 2009, we received an formal application ,one company named “Meihua Group”
wanted to register the”your-propeller-head”as CN/ASIA internet domain names and Internet trademark names.
After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names applied for registration is the same with your company’s name and trademark.
So send mail to your company and need to confirm whether this company is your company’s partner in China.If it is,we will finish the all registration work.
If it isn’t ,please ask your company’s related person to contact us as soon as possible.Thanks! 

Looking forward to hearing your reply!
 
Kind regards

Alice Zhou
Checking Department

——————————————————–
China Internet Service Provider:
Company:YIGUAN IT LTD
3002, Nanhai Building ,854.Nandan Road 
Xuhui District, Shanghai 200030
Tel: 0086-21-6296 2950
Fax:0086-21-6296 1557
Mail: alice@yiguanit.cn
Web: www.yiguanit.cn

For more information on this particular scam, visit the Web Developer Forums

Ever wonder why some Web address don’t end in .com, .org, or .edu? Most likely, the Web site is hosted on a server in another country, or, the origin of business is in another country. Here’s a list of different country domain extensions and their corresponding countries sorted alphabetically according to the file extension.

The Internet Archive, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

One of their coolest features for webmasters is the Wayback Machine, aptly named for the WABAC machine used by Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman (from the Rocky & Bullwinkle show) to travel back in time.

The Wayback Machine pulls results from the Internet Archiver and allows you to view how a website used to look. This is similar to how Google allows you to view a cached version of a website, except that it keeps multiple copies. In most cases if the images in the archives are stored on the website’s own server, which means many results will appear with missing graphics.

What this means for webmasters is that in a situation where a client might have lost content from their website, the developer can copy the text from the Wayback machine results and then rebuild the page. It’s a bit of a bummer that many images won’t be available, but then it often takes much more time to write good copy than to create simple graphics.

If you want to be able to use the Wayback Machine, you will need to insure that your website’s Robots.txt is not blocking the archiver. From the sample results for saeler.com below, it’s apparent that many time periods are missing. These missing periods are from times when the archiver was blocked from accessing the website.

Running or starting a small business can put a substantial strain on the pocket book, but with a little stewardship your small business can thrive on limited cash flow. Remember not everything needs to be new or brand name. Often with a little bit of research, you can find the supplies, clothing and tools you need at substantial savings.

Take this College Grad Student wearing a thrift store sports coat. With limited finances he is able to add credibility to himself and his speech/presentation by looking professional in a quality used sport coat. Proving the point that small businesses can present the image they need, while getting the job done with limited cash flow.

Saeler Enterprises started overnight when the company I was working for, Global Presence, closed it’s doors suddenly. I had left my Full time job at AOL just weeks earlier and was dependant on the income from the sub-contracting I was doing for the company. I had to really crank out the work to keep above watter financially, but still had limited cash flow.

Here are some of the Cost Saving tricks that helped my business stay afloat:

Know your localThrift and Second Hand Stores – Thrift and second hand stores have personalities as unique as theoir donors and the charities they support. Get to know the stores in your area by visiting them a few times seperated by a week or two. This will allow you to see the quality and type of merchandise they tend to carry.

For example locally we have:

• The Miracle Center (provides women with hope, transitional support, self-esteem, and tools that will break the cycle of poverty and addictions), is a great source for furniture, housewares and electronics.
• Casa De Los Ninos (Focused on the prevention and intervention of child abuse in Tucson, Arizona, through shelter care for children aged infant to 11 years old), is an excellent source of furniture and housewares.
• First Rate Second Hand (benefits Tucson synagogues and Jewish agencies in their works, like giving aid to katrina victums), has an exqusite selection of antique, furniture, housewares, and mens dress clothing.
• Deseret Industries (The Mormon Church started the Deseret Industries chain of thrift stores in 1938 mainly to create jobs), excellemt source of mens dress clothes.

Upgrade your Computers, instead of buying new -

The average business doesn’t need a Lamborghini to get the job done, just a good reliable vehicle. most business software isn’t going outstrip the resources of a Pentium 4 with a decent video card, memory and hard drive storage.

Most people who end up buying a new computer complain that the old computer was too slow. Usually it’s not the machine, but the software. Over time the operating system becomes bloated and tries to run too many processes at one time.

So instead of spending $600 or moreon a new machine, consider an upgrade of a few parts, have your system tuned up and spend one third of the cost of a new machine.

I was reviewing my website statistics and noticed a website was referring a lot of traffic, so I clicked on the link and saw it was a political website that looked like mine, and even included my own company logo! 

Obviously this needed to be stoped, but how?

If you use a company like HostGator with CPanel, your protection is built in, on other servers you may have to work a bit to protect yourself from these freeloadeers.

If you aren’t using HostGator or another webhost that uses CPanel, you may need to rename all your images, or simply the logo file names to protect yourself from these freeloaders impacting your reputation (on the other hand, you could simply sue, but the effort really isn’t worth it unless the offender has deep pockets).

Many web editors have find/replace functionaily and FrontPage/Expression Web will update all the links to your image files when you rename them.

If You are using Cpanel, you can do what we did. Go to your control panbel and turn on Hot Link Protection. See the screenshots below to see how easy this solution is (be certain to white list your own websites orshared images will dissapear just like in the screenshots below).

Sample of website ripping images with CPanel Hot Link Protection Off

Same site after Hot Link Protection was turned on

The law is intended for the email distributor sending unsolicited messages

The President recently signed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. This law is a positive step towards fighting spam while making it easier for legitimate email marketers to comply with anti-spam laws.

The law is intended for the email distributor sending unsolicited messages, using deceptive practices, or distribution of sexually orientated material, as the title suggests, Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003.

What You Need to Know about the Can-Spam Act

While this new law will not stop spam, it does make most spam illegal and ultimately less attractive to spammers. The law is specific about requirements to send commercial email and empowers the federal government to enforce the law. The penalties can include a fine and/or imprisonment for up to 5 years.

Most e-mail list servers already comply with a number of features of the new law. We do however, highly recommend that you contact your provider, or your attorney for additional details on how to ensure you are in compliance with the new law.

Key points that will keep you out of trouble:

• Use a permission based list (opt-in), which means that you don’t have to comply with the unsolicited email requirements stated in the law.
  This law does not seem to impose any regulations on permission based email lists. Although, the concepts below are ideal for any type of email list.
• Falsifying Headers - “Do not use misleading email header information (Often used to make filtering spam difficult or to attempt to hide the senders identity)”
• Valid FROM Line Email – “Your email campaign’s “From” address should be verified and accurately identify you as the sender (In English, You can receive e-mail from the stated “From” address)”
• Subscription Removal Function - “Include the ability for your subscribers to opt-out of future emails, promotions, and/or eZines”
• Misleading Subjects and Material - “Make sure that your email campaign’s “Subject” line is straightforward, not misleading (Do not use catchy phrases just to increase the chances that your email is read)”
• Respect Remove Requests – “Any unsubscribe requests that come to you via a reply to your email must be honored within 10 days of the request”
• Alternate Contact Information – “The new law requires that all email campaigns include the sender’s physical address”
• Sexually explicit material – “Requirement to place warning labels on commercial electronic mail containing sexually oriented material”

Included in the federal law is an option for the FTC to institute a “Do Not Email List” and for the feasibility the list to be determined no later than September 2004. For many reasons, the solution that has worked so well for phone numbers does not work well for email addresses. The FTC recognizes these issues and will be cautious in the way they proceed.

More Information on the Can-Spam Act of 2003 and e-mail marketing practices

Read the federal law, If you have specific questions about your organization, we recommend that you contact your attorney. Click Here to download the attached printable PDF Version

By Jason Saeler
Your-Propeller-head.com

If there is one point I can’t stress enough, it’s Backup your website! I know you have probably heard this before, but have you heard the horror stories? Recently, I have come across a number of scenarios where my clients have found themselves in a world of hurt. Luckily, none of my clients completely lost their sites, but then a two year old copy isn’t always as good a save as you would think. Here are a couple of examples to emphasize the need to back up your website!

Hosting Company Shut down site:

Recently one of my clients missed an email from their hosting company stating that their credit card information needed to be updated. Unlike most companies, this company didn’t provide a grace period. End result; no website. My client then contacted them , and contacted them, and contacted them to no avail. With no recent copy of their website and a company that didn’t want to respond (so that we could pay them to activate the site and get the files back), we were forced to relocate to a new server. Of course since it was my client, I did have copies of her website. The problem is that I hadn’t done any work for her in nearly 2 years and my copies were out of date.

Hosting Company restored a’ old copy of a website,’ erasing the Current VersionA few weeks ago, I had a client call me because their website wasn’t coming up. I took a look and found that all of the pages had been converted to 0KB files (If your not a propeller head, this means that all the files in the site were replaced with blanks). I called the hosting company and told them to restore the site, two weeks later the site still hadn’t been restored, so I called again. This time I told them to restore a copy a few months old. The hosting company responded with a short impersonal message stating they couldn’t restore the site. Again I ended up placing a two year old site online, in order to get my client back up and running.

”

I think the point is simple, back up your website. You wouldn’t buy a brand new car and not ensure it, so what possible excuse can someone have for not backing up their own website. If you want to take the chance go ahead and leave it up to fate, but it could be a costly mistake.

The Spamhaus Project is an international nonprofit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations, to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, to work with Law Enforcement Agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.

Founded in 1998, Spamhaus is based in Geneva, Switzerland and London, UK and is run by a dedicated team of 28 investigators and forensics specialists located in 8 countries.

Spamhaus maintains a number of realtime spam-blocking databases (‘DNSBLs’) responsible for keeping back the vast majority of spam sent out on the Internet. These include the Spamhaus Block List (SBL), the Exploits Block List (XBL), the Policy Block List (PBL) and the Domain Block List (DBL). Spamhaus DNSBLs are today used by the majority of the Internet’s Email Service Providers, Corporations, Universities, Governments and Military networks.

To meet public demand for its DNSBLs, Spamhaus has built one of the largest DNS infrastructures in the world. Its network of over 60 public DNSBL servers spread across 18 countries serves many billions of DNSBL queries to the public every day, free of charge.

The number of internet users whose mailboxes are currently protected by Spamhaus DNSBLs now exceeds 1.4 Billion (actual number is published under ‘Spamhaus Userbase’ on the left of this page).

In addition to generating spam filter data and publishing realtime blocklists, Spamhaus publishes the Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO), a database collating information and evidence on the ’100′ known professional spam senders and spam gangs worldwide. ROKSO is used by Internet Service Providers to avoid signing up known spammers who would abuse their networks and by Law Enforcement Agencies to help target and mount prosecutions against professional spammers.
 
Spamhaus CEO Steve Linford speaking at the European Parliament  The Spamhaus Project’s teams and staff are volunteers. Infrastructure is provided courtesy of industry sponsors and autonomous organizations that provide services to the spam filter industry utilizing Spamhaus data and technologies.

Funding for operations is through sponsors and donations from industry, including from The Spamhaus Foundation, a private Foundation whose charter is to assure the long-term continuation of The Spamhaus Project and its work.

• Spamhaus is Working to Protect Internet Networks Worldwide

Beware scams to get you to transfer your domain names to another registrar. A great example of this not so ethical practice is Domain Registry of America. Domain Registry of America will send you a written notice of gloom and doom about your impending domain name renewal. The catch is, they probably aren’t your registrar.

If you respond to their renewal notice, Domain Registrars of America will transfer your Domain to themselves (as your Registrar) and charge about 75% more than the going registration rate.

So remember that just because they spent the extra money to mail you a warning, doesn’t mean they aren’t spammers!