A little self control goes a long way online, especially when it comes to your business. It’s a simple concept, but sometimes, business owners forget that, especially given the relative freedom that the online realm provides.

Restraint is a virtue in the real world; a person does not always say what he or she is thinking, all in an effort to avoid breaking social mores, and causing even worse problems.

Just as that sort of restraint is important, it’s vital to ensure that you control yourself online. When you write a blog post, prepare a tweet, or send an e-mail message, it may be easier to write without restraint or restrictions, because you’re behind a keyboard, and not directly facing the person to whom you’re writing.

The Internet is a new frontier; once you post something– once you post anything — it’s there forever, thanks to the advances in caching, as well as the practices of retweeting, or reposting.

Think about what you’re writing, and be positive that it’s something you want to be put on a page or site that represents your company, and at the end of the day, you.

Are you upset? Are you thinking as you type?

If you’re dealing with stressful or emotional subject matter, simply walk away from the computer, take time to relax, and come back a little bit later.

Do you still want to post it? If you don’t, then you can simply delete it forever.

As a businessperson, the material that you write will be read by potential customers, not to mention current customers, and the public at large. With that in mind, be absolutely sure that when you write something, you’re comfortable with a potential customer reading that content. Would that content give a potential customer pause?

Just take a few moments to re-read and reconsider your postings, and in the end, you may save yourself embarrassment and lost business.

It goes without saying: you have spent a lot of time investing in your business. Don’t let all that effort be a waste by posting something without thinking.

If you run a blog, run the famous WordPress software, and haven’t upgraded to version 3.0.2, now’s the time.

The free software continues to improve with every update, and the latest is no exception. Now, you have the ability to host multiple blogs from one installation, a new default theme which came with 3.0, and numerous bug fixes.

If you do upgrade, make sure to back up your database and your export file first, just in case something should happen. The last thing you want to do is assume everything will go fine (it usually does), and then have something go wrong, only to find out that you didn’t run a backup.

Upgrading to 3.0 won’t take all that long; it should only take about five minutes. Once you’re done, you’ll be enjoying a nice, shiny, new version of WordPress!

When thinking about starting a website, it’s always good to take a look at the competition, and see what other sites are doing, so you can get an idea as to what to do and what not to do. In that spirit, let’s look at a website that specializes in aggregating YouTube videos, or more accurately, links to those videos.

Three things are readily apparent what utilizing the website known as ZeroViews, the content, the web architecture, and editing. Just focusing on these three elements will provide a crystal clear picture window into the soul of this website, a hot mess of a electronic soap-box for an arbitrary characterization of YouTube vidoes.
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Of all the problems on the Internet today, spam remains one of the biggest. Fortunately, you can easily put the the Sender Policy Framework system, or SPF, on the job. SPF does something great; it helps protect your domain from being unwittingly involved in spammers’ evil campaigns.

Don’t let the technical terms intimidate you; it is absolutely not required to possess any technical knowledge to compile an SPF record. All you need to do is go to www.openspf.org. There, you will be given step-by-step instructions on how to form an SPF record for your domain or domains. For example, if you were setting an SPF record for the domain example.com, you would be left with this, once going through the steps:
“v=spf1 a mx ~all”

That specific SPF record would indicate that the mail servers openspf.org found do send mail (SMTP), and that they are the only servers that are authorized to send mail for that domain. You can learn a little more about the syntax on the site, and you can easily adjust it to meet your site’s specific needs.

After you make your SPF record, you will then need to add a TXT record to the zone file for your domain, which is simple to do in control panels such as Cpanel, Plesk, and DirectAdmin.

As an example, in Cpanel, you would just need to go into your Advanced DNS section under “Domains,” and then enter your domain name with a trailing period under “Name.” (example: ) Then, enter a value for TTL. For these purposes, just enter 900. This determines how long it will take before the change goes live in your DNS. Then, click the drop-down menu and select the “TXT” option. Finally, enter the record you created previously, complete with the quotes, and then confirm your changes.

By investing a few moments to do this, you’re not only helping to make it more difficult for spammers to do their evil deeds, you are protecting your domain from potential abuse.

One thing that any successful website needs is good SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Basically, SEO involves priming your site for maximum exposure in the search engines. A big part of SEO is meta tags, which are the tags that go into your site’s header. A good tutorial on the basics can be found here.

The idea is that you want the search engines to be able to crawl your site, and then take information that they will then use to rank your site, and the search engines will hopefully rank your site higher than your competitor’s site. An excellent SEO campaign doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition; you can easily do SEO work yourself, or if you do pay for it, make sure the price is reasonable given the actual work done. Don’t let the “experts” tell you that you have to spend thousands of dollars.
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SEO. You’ve likely heard the acronym, but what is it, really? It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it basically means what it says. You want to optimize, or increase the efficiency of, your search engine results.

Whether Google, Yahoo, Bing, or something else, the majority of your visitors are going to find you via a search engine. That means that if you’re in business, people are competing with you for the top spot in your given industry. So how do you jockey for position? SEO can get quite complicated, but at its core, it’s quite simple. Here are the key items you need to pay attention to when optimizing your site for search engine traffic:

• Keywords: You can assign keywords to your meta tags (more on that in a moment). These keywords are words that pertain directly to your site.
• Description: A brief but concise description of your site, including its name, and a brief synopsis of what visitors will find.
• Sitemap: Make it easy for the search engines to crawl your site. There are several sites such as this one which will generate a sitemap for your site free of charge. If you use WordPress or another CMS engine, there are plugins or extensions available which will likewise compile a sitemap for your site.
• Robots.txt: Make sure that your robots.txt file allows search engines.

As mentioned above, a key component of SEO is meta tags. They are a topic all to themselves, but very simple. For example, to set up keywords, you would create a meta tag, which would then be entered into your header file:

Of course, you would modify the keywords to suit the subject matter of your particular site or blog, but by placing these tags into your header, and by ensuring that your robots.txt file allows search engines to crawl your site, you make it easy for search engines to crawl and archive information on your site, which in turn will vastly improve the search results someone gets when looking for your site, or the subject or industry your site pertains to. This in turn will result in more traffic to your site.

It’s important to not dismiss SEO as something that only big sites do. Every site can benefit from efficient coding, an organized sitemap, and neatly formed meta tags. After all, the name of the game is to get those eyeballs to your site, and the best place to start for that is with your search engine traffic.