If you have a business website and your business is manned during working hours then installing LiveChat is a great way to encourage more sale conversions.

LiveChat is extremely easy to install and free. For example, the open source Crafty Syntax Livehelp is perfect for any small business and can be installed with just a couple of clicks using Fantastico.

LiveChat is extremely good as potential customers can talk to a real person without having to make a telephone call but also without the hassle of waiting around for a reply to an e-mail.

A recent case study using a popular LiveChat system increased sales for an online real-estate broker (that’s an American estate agent to you and me!) by 10% in the first month. It’s an under-used tool that shouldn’t be underestimated.

If comparing PPC and SEO I would say that the main difference between the two is that SEO is relatively cheap but takes a long time to produce results, whereas PPC is relatively expensive but produces results almost immediately.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the principle of paying for every click from a website (in this case we’ll use Google’s Adwords program as an example) to your website.

In the case of Google Adwords, all PPC advertised sites appear at the right hand side of the search page under the ‘Sponsored Links’ header.

Sounds simple but there is a little bit more to it than that. Clicks are paid for on a bidding basis - the person/company prepared to offer the most per click gets the top spot and therefore the most traffic. This has resulted in charges of up to £10 per click for the top spot for certain keywords.

Generally speaking, PPC advertising should not be the entire basis of your online advertising program, instead only part of it.

Search Engine Optimisation/Optimization (depends where you’re from - from now on we’ll just call it SEO!) is the basic idea of optimising a site to make it more attractive to search engines

80% of websites are found through the search engines, and the principle search engine is Google. It therefore follows that if you want your site to be found it has to be listed with Google.

Google uses an algorithm which basically ranks site on quality and how relevent the site is to the user’s search term and the most relevent and highest quality sites come highest on Google for that particular search term.

SEO is an art for competitive keywords however there are a few basic steps.

The first thing to do would be to download the Google Toolbar. On the Google Toolbar is a little green icon which shows you the Pagerank on the page you’re currently visiting. The higher the better.

Secondly, identify your keyword. Using a tool such as Overture Keyword Analyzer (www.overture.com) will help as it will give you some idea as to search volumes for a particular keyword. Make a list of 10-20 keywords which fit your site best. It’s now time to formulate your SEO plan!

SEO takes about 6-9 months to complete, this is solely due to the fact that the process has to look to the search engine like it is occuring naturally. Also, search engines do take time to update their records. You should plan your work evenly over a 6-9 month period and spend around 2 hours per day on it.

Once you’ve analysed your keywords it’s time to make your plan. To help you in this you can purchase software such as Axandra’s IBP (www.axandra.com) but if you’re on a tight budget this is not necessary as at the time of writing this software costs well over £400.

The first major part of your SEO plan will be the on-page optimization. Search engines will rank higher sites which have a larger amount of relevent content - ie. a lot of pages which contain relevent keywords.

Factors for your on-page optimization are:

1. Title tags - include keywords in your title tags, keep to a reasonable length - not too long but not too short either

2. Meta tags - be sure to include description, content and keyword tags

3. Headers - use the header tags and be sure to include keywords in headers

4. ‘ALT’ tags for images

5. Body text - make sure a suitable density of keywords is included in your body text - do not have a list of keywords at the bottom of your page in the same colour text as the background or simply a list of keywords because Google will know! - you can’t con Google!

Generally, use CSS and keep coding clean as this makes it easier for the search engine robots to spider it.

Also, uploading a Google sitemap may help - make the most of Google’s analytical tools

You can get an idea of what the search engine is looking for as regards on-page optimization by analysing around 5 competitor web pages. In Internet Explorer, visit your competitor’s page, right click and click ‘View Source’.

Once you’ve completed your on-page optimization it’s time to think about your off-page optimization. Over your 6-9 month period you need to plan the following:

1. Link building: it’s better to use one-way links rather than two or 3 way links. In general, a smaller number of links from sites with high Pageranks is better than a lot of links from trashy sites with low Pageranks. If you use two-way links and have links back to a large link page on your site, the search engine will know and this may harm your ranking.

2. Ezine articles: make sure you write quality articles. A Google search on ‘ezines’ will bring up a number of sites you can write for

3. Forum postings: if you’re a member of a forum, have a link to your site in your signature, but don’t spam as you’re likely to be kicked off the forum

4. Press releases: there are many websites which will help you do this

There are also many other more exotic ways to try and boost your rankings such as:

Creating a blog and marketing that

Creating profiles on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Faceparty, etc.

Uploading videos relating to your site to uTube

This is only a brief introduction to SEO - it requires a fair bit of knowledge, a lot of planning and a lot of time but if done correctly it will be the make or break for your site. If you don’t think you’re up to the job there are many companies who will offer to do it for you, but beware and read the small print correctly. Additionally, beware of companies who claim to have worked for corporations such as Burger King, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc. - these corporations do not need SEO as everybody knows them already!

Every Linux hosting account from 600host.net comes with Fantastico, an easy to use script installer. The icon is located at the bottom right hand side of your cPanel control panel.

Clicking on the Fantastico icon will bring up the following menus:

Navigation - you are currently at Fantastico Home. To return to your cPanel control panel, click Control Panel Home

Blogs - a selection of blogs including WordPress and Nucleus you can install

Content Management - a selection of great CMS software you can install on your site including Mambo and Joomla

Customer Relationship - if you’re a reseller there are some great packages in here, including Crafty Syntax LiveHelp (the same software we currently use for our LiveChat) and some great support ticket packages

Discussion Boards - including phpBB (you can also install YaBB from the cPanel main page)

eCommerce - including Zen Cart and osCommerce

FAQs

Guestbooks

Hosting Billing - again great if you’re a reseller, including the fantastic open source phpCoin

Image Galleries

Mailing Lists

Polls and Surveys (a great add-on for your site)

Project Management

Wikis

Other Scripts (some great PHP scripts here)

Extras - in here you can:

• Change the language
• Change the appearance of the side menus
• Set E-mail notifications of installations of Fantastico scripts
• Get an overview of packages you have already installed

The majority of scripts includes are open source - that means they are completely free to use and free of advertising. To install a script, select your required script and select New Installation. Also on this page are links to the support forum and a short description of the script.

Enter a directory you wish to install your script to - this has to be a directory which doesn’t already exist (for example if you were installing an eCommerce script you could choose the directory ’shop’ so your script would be installed at www.yourdomain.ext/shop, or leave blank to install in the root directory, ie www.yourdomain.ext).

Choose a username and password and click ‘Install’. Fantastico will then install the script and set up any required MySQL database for you, so all you need to do now is log in!