My 2¢ Worth

he search engine, Google may begin losing some of its market dominance with this weeks agreement by Yahoo! to buy Overture.

his is the latest in the series of search consolidations over past months. Last March, Yahoo! completed its acquisition of Inktomi. In April, Overture completed purchases of AltaVista and AlltheWeb.com.

verture launched as GoTo in 1998. It sought to bring people to a new search engine where top listings were sold on a pay-per-click basis.

n 2000, Overture made a major strategy move. Instead of driving traffic to its own site, it embarked to place its paid listings on other search engines. By late 2001, Overture had deals with every major search engine except Google. I think it's safe to say that Overture's future is secured as part of the Yahoo! network.

here will Google go from here? It's been reported that Microsoft has made an informal offer to Google at least once, but would Google sell? The founders say not at any price.

Feature Article

Keeping Your Email Box Organized and Ready for Business

by: Stone Evans Home-Business.com

Learning how to get the most organization from your email software is very likely the most important skill you can learn to conduct a successful online home business.

There are three primary email applications on the market that folks use to manage their incoming POP3 email. Those three are:

• Microsoft Outlook Express
• Eudora
• Netscape Mail

In order to get the most from your email software, there are three key processes that you should learn. These processes are concerned with data organization, saving time and email database management.

SET UP EMAIL FOLDERS

Organization is key to any emails that you intend to save. Having 2000 emails in one folder is a sure-fire road map to confusion and lost communications and information.

You are the best judge as to how to organize your email into topics that provide an easy method of retrieval of the information when you need it most.

Fortunately, the primary email browsers make it easy to organize your information. By allowing you to create folders within your email software, you can file specific emails into folders dedicated to the topic of the email.

To create new folders:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: Click File - Folders - New — alternatively, you may also right click an item in the Folder window — and then type in the name of your new folder. Highlight the folder above where you would like your new folder to be placed, and then click OK.

EUDORA: Click on Mailbox - New — or right click on Eudora in the folders window and then click on New. When the window opens, type in the name of your new mailbox and click OK. If you want to create a folder to place other mailboxes into, click the checkbox before clicking OK.

NETSCAPE MAIL: Click File - New Folder. Then from the drop-down menu, select the folder that you wish to be the folder directly above your new folder, before clicking OK.

FILTERING EMAIL

Email filters are a tool to help you save time and frustration. Have you ever lost an incoming email under the deluge of email coming into your mailbox? With filters, you can direct the important email or not-so-important email into certain pre-ordained folders.

As part of the war against spam, most ISP's use filters every day in an attempt to keep the spam out of your mailbox. In fact, I even use filters to sort my incoming mail trying to catch the spam my ISP missed.

Don’t be fooled into thinking you need some special software to filter your email. Setting up filters is actually quite easy.

To setup email filters:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: Click on Tools - Message Rules - Mail. A wizard will open to help you create your new email filters. Just follow the instructions provided to direct mail based on certain criteria into certain folders.

EUDORA: Click on Special - Make Filter. Once again, just follow the instructions in the Filter wizard.

NETSCAPE MAIL: Click on Edit - Mail Filters. Then click on New in the wizard. Once you click on New, you will be taken to a new wizard window. Follow the instructions here, then when you are done, click on OK. This will return you to the first window where you will set up the sorting order of your filter.

CLEANING AND COMPRESSING YOUR MAIL DATA

This is an important part of your email management. When you no longer need an email, it should be deleted. When you first delete an email, your software will send the email to the Trash Bin. Your email is not actually deleted until you first empty your trash bin.

Emptying your trash bin compresses the mailboxes from where the email was originally filed. This is absolutely paramount to the protection of your email data. If you go too long between compressing your email data, then your email data could become corrupted and you might need assistance in recovering your email data.

Even after you have emptied your trash, Compressing Folders is a recommended step to prevent other data corruption. Once you understand that an email does not actually move from one folder to another until the folder is compressed, then you can better appreciate this advice.

As an example, when Email A comes into your main Inbox, the data connected to Email A appears in two files. One file contains the header and body of the email. The other file contains only the email header information.

When an email is moved from one folder to the other, only the header information is actually moved. The body information will not be deleted from the original folder until which time the original folder is compressed.

This explains the purpose of emptying the trash AND compressing folders. If the email was simply moved from the Inbox to another folder, then emptying the trash is not enough. The original placement of the email is not actually removed from the file that contains the body information until the message has been designated for compression.

To empty your trash:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: Click on Edit - Empty 'Deleted Items' Folder. To compress the remaining folders, click on Tools - Options, then click on the tab for Maintenance. Then click the button that says, *Clean Up Now*. Once the compression is completed, click OK.

EUDORA: Click Special - Empty Trash. To compress the remaining items that need compression, then click on Special - Compact Mailboxes.

NETSCAPE MAIL: Click on File - Empty Trash Folder. To compress the mailboxes, click on File - Compress Folders.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that you utilize the tools for emptying the trash and compressing the mail folders. Protecting your email data on a regular basis is good practice for avoiding disaster in your mailbox.

So many of us rely upon our email software to keep our online business running smoothly. Once you master the tools provided in your email software, your online business will run smoothly also.

Let me share one important lesson I've learned about computer software. One should never be afraid to try new things. Learning how to get the most out of your software relies upon your willingness to dig in and learn how to use it.

Once you learn how to use your software to its full potential, then your life will be greatly simplified and your effectiveness will be dramatically improved.

**************

Stone Evans publishes Home Business Tips, a fresh and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people like YOU! If you are looking for the *best rated* home business opportunities, the latest time saving tools and helpful support from an honest friend in the business, come by and grab a F-R-E-E subscription today at: Home-Business.com

JavaScript Drop Down Menu

This is a simple drop down menu that will automatically advance to the selected page without a submit button. Place this script on the page where you'd like your menu to appear. You can add as many links as you like.

Customize the fields in red to reflect your menu's links.

For more links, just continue adding the <option value=" as shown.

Keep in mind that this will not work for those who have JavaScript turned off in their browsers.

<script language="JavaScript"> function AutoLink() { var number = document.Menu.Links.selectedIndex; location.href = document.Menu.Links.options[number].value; } </script> <form name="Menu"> <select name="Links" onChange="AutoLink(this.form)" > <option selected>Choose a Link <option value="first-page.html"> Page One <option value="second-page.html"> Page Two <option value="http://www.somewhere-else.com/"> Page Three </select> </form>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which gives you this:

Choose a Link Page One Page Two Page Three

* Get these syndicated tip feeds for yourweb site, free. *

Second Article

Two Easy Methods To Optimize Your JavaScript

by: Steve Shaw The Takanomi Newsletter

Many web sites, even those owned by people we all think of as gurus in the Internet marketing business, have large blocks of JavaScript at the top of their web pages, sometimes running to dozens of lines of code.

But did you know that this common practice can have a negative effect on your search engine listings, by pushing your major keywords down the page?

In terms of search engine ranking, it's generally accepted that the higher your keywords are on the page, the better.

This easy-to-follow article will give you two easy ways to make the JavaScript on your web site more search engine friendly, improve your search engine position, and give your traffic levels a nice boost.

1. Move the script to the bottom of the page

This is the easiest method. A lot of JavaScript code can be moved to just above the closing body tag on your web page, without affecting the functionality of your web site.

The best way to do this is simply to test it out and see if it works - if you don't experience any adverse effects and your site appears to continue to perform normally, stick with it.

Your keywords will suddenly be much higher up the page, and your site may even load quicker too with all the code at the bottom.

If you wish, you can also combine this method with the second method as described below

2. Externalize the script into a .js file

This method has the added advantage that the external .js file containing your JavaScript is often cached in your web visitor's browser, meaning that on subsequent visits your web page will load faster.

It also means you can have the same code on a number of different pages, yet only have a single file to modify and maintain when you want to adjust the script.

Here's how you do it:

Your JavaScript will look something like the following:

<script language="JavaScript"> <!-- your script here - copy this bit into a .js file //--> </script>

 

 

 

 

Ignoring the opening and closing script tags, and the comment tags if you have them, copy the code in the middle into a brand new plain text file - for example, paste the code into a plain text editor like Notepad (don't be tempted to use something like MS Word).

Save this file with a .js extension, for example, 'mycode.js', and upload this page to your server to the same directory as the web page.

To make your web page reference this new .js file, replace the existing JavaScript as shown in the example above, with a single line in the following format:

<script language="JavaScript" src="mycode.js"></script>

Just replace 'mycode.js' with the name of your own .js file.

Upload your modified web page to your server and test.

And there you have it - a smaller page, improved keyword positioning, quicker load times for your visitors, and easier script maintenance.

As stated above, both these methods can easily be combined if you wish, too.

**************

Technical e-marketer Steve Shaw reveals the technology behind e-marketing, the stuff the techies don't tell you. Find out more information at takanomi.com/newsletter

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