4) Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to home page of a particular domain, i.e. other things remaining same, a home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you use some of free hosting services, your index.html page is home page of your site, but not of that domain. Hence in these search engines, your site will find it very difficult to make it to top 20 or top 30, let alone top 10 for some of really competitive keywords. Just think of amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens.

5) Some search engines are now refusing to spider web sites which are hosted by free web hosts. For instance, if you have a site hosted by free web hosts, you would, until recently, have got infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your site if you tried to submit your site to AltaVista. While AltaVista now says that "your URL has been submitted for processing" if you try to submit your site, rest assured that it will not spider any site belonging to many of free web hosts even though it says that your site has been accepted. Can you afford that?

6) When your site is hosted by some of free web hosts, you will find it very difficult to get it listed in a major directory like Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! will never admit that it won't add a commercial site which is being hosted in one of free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get your site listed by Yahoo!!. Listing your site with Yahoo! is difficult enough even when you have your own domain. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.

If you do not currently have a domain name, are you convinced that you need one right now? The small fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is peanuts compared to benefits that you get. You can check out availability of domain names and register new domains at: http://the-easy-way.com/webhosting.html

My preferences are ones that put all information right out front and tell you facts. You need to pick someone that can provide you with real life examples and isn’t afraid to tell you how they accomplish their objectives. Once you have those real life examples, go to your favorite search engines and do a search on keywords provided. If sites rank in top page or two, keywords are competitive, and company has ranked more poorly in past, then you have probably found yourself a competent and reliable SEO company. I like SEO’s like this because they have nothing to hide, so that shows me they use ethical and accepted market practices to help their clients rank better. I especially like ones that tell you they can help improve your rankings, but do not guarantee you top 10 placements. In my opinion, these are realists of SEO market. These are ones that have been around long enough to know what works and what doesn’t, will do best to help improve your ranking, but aren’t going to make promises they can’t deliver on. These types will always hold a credible place within my mind. Any SEO company reluctant to tell you how they are going to gain you rankings or who won’t provide you real life examples probably has something to hide. Even worse, they probably use black hat SEO strategies that could get your web site banned from search engines. Stay away from them and find someone who will be honest with you.

Link exchanges and other urban legends – Finding things that will actually work.

I recently opened my email client to find an article entitled “Traffic Exchanges: Avoiding Pitfalls and Ensuring Successful Campaigns”. In this article, author suggests setting up 10 accounts and linking ten accounts together. His example tells you to link #1 to #2, #2 to #3, #3 to #4, and so on until you get to ten. Then he suggests spending an hour a day clicking on your own 10 links for about a month. He figures that by end of this time you should have about 500 page views across 10 exchanges for 5000 page views per day. Therefore, that’s 5000 page views a day from one webmaster just clicking links to elevate their own program. What happens when it’s 100 webmasters, or 500 webmasters or more, doing same thing? I’ll tell you, lots of pop-overs or pop-unders doing absolutely nothing for your web site. None of those clicks are targeted, and none of them are going to help you to sell your products or services as affectively as spending your time on other targeted means of generating web site traffic. Worst of all, they are all clicks from webmasters who aren’t looking to buy anything, but instead trying to elevate their own traffic exchange program at expense of all other program members.

Yes, I admit this scheme will get you some traffic over time, but again, if this traffic is not targeted and looking to purchase your offers, then what good is it to you? The only thing it will get you is some higher rankings in Alexa or some of other traffic reporting sites, a hosting company that could start charging you more for your hosting, and a whole lot of useless traffic that isn’t going to buy a thing you are promoting on your site. Your time would be better spent developing your web site content or working with a reputable SEO company to increase your site ranking, or finding other web sites and webmasters with comparable non-competing content to link to your site. On other hand, maybe you could spend time writing some articles for submission just as I do and get some valuable one-way links to your site. Almost anything else is going to be better than using such link exchanges, especially if it is time in reading reliable articles to educate yourself to get most out of your web site design or promotion time.

Other things that go bump on internet – How to avoid nightmares after parting with your hard earned cash.

It’s amazing amount of information to be found on web site design, marketing, and affiliate programs. It’s all rather scary when you look at it. Everyone wants your attention so they can pitch their “silver bullet” to cure your web site woes. There are so many people and companies out there making so many promises that it’s really quite difficult to separate fact from chaff and hype. They all want you to think that their solution is end all to your problems, and although any one of them in particular might actually have that solution, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between honest businesses and quacks. If it sounds too good to be true, then remember, it probably is too good to be true. About only thing guaranteed to solve your problems is either self-education that allows you to understand and fix your own problems or never ending deep pockets full of cash to pay “experts” to fix problems for you. The problem becomes finding reputable “experts” that can truly help you, or do work for you, to fix problems that ail you.

Take time to do research. Don’t be fooled by hype, learn to look PAST it. Don’t get caught up in emotion, which is what web site designers and marketers WANT you to do. If they can get you caught up in emotion, they can convince you to throw caution to wind and buy their products or services without much thought. Take time to do research on them. It could mean difference between finding solutions you seek and loosing money to a quack.