Now for crushing TOPtext, jl scott kindly sent me following information, normally reserved for iCop members and has given me permission to pass it on to you so we can get it to as many people as possible.

If you read THE iCop WHISTLE BLOWER! on Monday, you know about TOPtext and how it's invading your web sites. And you've probably heard about Microsoft's "Smart Tags."

iCop Founding Member, Bob Massa of SearchKing, put his people to work and they've come up with a code that will stop TOPtext from working on your web pages. You can get it at: http://www.searchking.com/ezulakiller

The second one goes in body of your document, so those of you using SSI can probably insert it once in your header or footer and it's job done. Employ both and you'll keep most of these sharks at bay - for time being, at least.

http://www.alternate-health.com/home.html

For this site with mostly free health advice, I believe this approach is right, but for more involved salesmanship, spice it up as needed while still keeping load time as low as possible. For an example of a lot of necessary graphics, look at: http://www.smg-yachts.com The emphasis here is on graphics, as people want to get a look at yachts that are being sold. This sells, where text wouldn't do job.

Next, if you aren't gifted with sales ability in writing (and graphics to go along), you have to learn a lot more in this field. Or, you have to have somebody around that does. Decisions, decisions - do you use paid ads, paid banners, ffa's, ezines, MLM's,or what? More and more study is needed, or more and more money is needed to hire this knowledge (and hope that whoever you hire knows what they are doing.)

With thousands of ads telling you that "they" have all secrets of internet, and positioning, and making 10,000 a month, it's more than a little confusing, and some expertise is needed in this area as well. >From personal experience, I can state that this knowledge comes with making some mistakes and learning from them.

So what's a competent webmaster? He/she is a really multitalented person, or preferably, a team. A technical HTML expert, an expert on search engines, a graphics expert, a sales/marketing manager, a technical writer, an ad writer, a computer technician experienced in software and list goes on and on.

There are a lot of would-be webmasters out there, charging a lot of money, and designing lots of very flashy webs. But, are these webs actually doing job, and making money for owner? Do they load reasonably fast? Surfing will show you hundreds of sites that are pretty lousy in some ways, and odds are that they cost somebody a lot of money, and they are getting very little return.