My online home business website usually enjoys good positions in the search results on the main search engines for the keywords that I have selected and optimized my site for. I keep check on these positions very regularly and one evening I noticed that the main page of my site was not appearing in the search results of Google. Some of the other pages of my site were appearing for the same keyword search, but lower down the order.

In my Google Webmaster Tools account, under the Index Stats, my main page did not appear in the list, yet the other pages of my site were clearly visible. If I clicked on the `current cache of your site` link the response was `no information available`. The `information we have about your site` link gave the save response. Yet, if I opened my site under the Google Toolbar, my site still scored a PR4. There was also no notification that I had violated Google’s quality guidelines. This was a very strange occurrence indeed.

Needless to say this can be very nerve racking as you never know for how long the site is going to be excluded from the search results. The other major concern is the effect this will have on your online home business income. Also there really is nothing you can do immediately to fix the problem as you are at the mercy of the search engines.

On checking my stat counter, where I expected to see a downward trend for the period my site was dropped from the search results, I was very surprised to see that there had been very little change.

The reason for this was that I have been regularly writing and publishing articles related to the theme and keywords of my website. While doing searches on Google in the hope of seeing the main page of my website reappear, I came across many of my articles positioned high up in the search results.

For some reason, I believe every now and again sites are dropped from the search results. Why this happens only the search engines can be certain. Some say this can occur if you make too many changes to your site in a short space of time. There are lots of explanations under the Help Section in the Google Webmaster Tools, but it appears to be very difficult to find out exactly why your site disappears. On this occasion, I was very fortunate in that my website reappeared in the search results 24 hours later.

This experience made me realize the very important role that article marketing does play in website promotion. Not only does article marketing build back links to your website, thus ensuring higher positions in the search results, but it also acts as a safety net when your main website is dropped from the search results, as your articles appear for the same keyword searches still giving visitors an option to click through to your website and ultimately ensuring continuity of your online home business income.

A great online home business marketing idea then is to ensure that the articles you write and publish are specific to the theme of your website and incorporate the keywords that you have optimized your site for.

This would also certainly reduce the anxiety one feels when your website goes down due to hosting or server problems.

This is very reassuring and motivates me to regularly write and publish articles based on the theme and keywords of my website, not only to ensure the continued presence of my website in the search results, via my website address in the Author`s Resource Box in the article, but more importantly to ensure continuity and consistency of my online home business income.



By: Cynthia Minnaar

About the Author:

If you bookmark a page with Microsoft IE you will notice some sites have a special icon associated with their respective bookmark thus differentiating or branding site A from site B. Think of it as internet marketing.

It dawned on me recently how easy it was for me to locate web sites that I had bookmarked and appeared in My Favorites menu with a little icon displayed next to the web site name, so I decided to find out if I could put one on my own web site to make my online home business stand out in the My Favorites menu and easier for whoever bookmarked my site to locate.

I started my search on Google and discovered that the little icon that replaces the IE logo (in IE) is called a Favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con) and is short for Favorites Icon or it is sometimes called a bookmark icon. The Favicon also shows in the address bar as well. Notice the red Y! symbol that appears in the left-most area of the address bar in Internet Explorer when you open Yahoo!, or the butterfly in MSN . What a great way to personalise your site.

You will require IE 5.0 or higher and a favicon.ico can show up in at least three different places in Windows:

1) In the Favorites list selectable on the Start menu;

2) In the location bar of the browser when you are visiting the web site;

3) On your desktop if you first bookmark the site, click Start, Favorites, hold down the control key and click on the bookmark to drag it to the desktop (it copies the icon as a shortcut).

The favicon.ico can also show up in the following two places:

4) On the taskbar if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right click on the bookmark and drag it to the task bar, it copies the icon there;

5) On the links bar if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right click on the bookmark and drag it to the Links tool bar, it copies the icon there.

If you search in the engines for favicon you will find that many sites come up offering favicon tutorials, online tools to create favicon icons,free favicon icons and installation instructions too.

A favicon should be 16 X 16 pixels with 16 colors and the file name must be favicon.ico and ideally you should search for a program that allows you to create favicons online. Remember, if you do not save it as favicon.ico it will not work. Do not make the mistake of just shrinking an image to icon size and renaming it with a .ico file extension. That will not work either because it is not a real icon file. Do not be surprised if your own favicon does not show up in your own browser when you open your site, as sometimes this can take up to a few days and even disappear again only to reappear.

I had fun creating my own personal 16 x 16 pixel image in MyImager and then found a site on Google that created a favicon.ico file and I uploaded my image and clicked on generate favicon and that is how easy it was. I then uploaded the favicon.ico file to the root web directory, in the same location as the index.html page of my hosted website and bingo, I now have a Favicon and have personalized and distinguished my online home business from others. Creating such an icon adds to the professionalism of your site, marking you as an owner of an online home business who attends to detail.

So now when someone bookmarks my site with a browser that supports favicons, my favicon will appear, as opposed to a default image (a logo for Internet Explorer), which is used instead if no favicon.ico had been provided. I am sure if you look through your own Favorites Menu you will notice that the bulk of the images are the IE logo.

The favicon allows the webmaster to further promote their site, and to create a more customized appearance within a visitor’s browser. Often, the favicon reflects the look and feel of the web site or the online home business logo. Have fun creating your Favicon.



By: Cynthia Minnaar

About the Author: