Understanding Your Computer - Basic Terminology

Have you ever wondered what the names are of the devices connected to, and in, your computer? There are many people out there who have never owned a computer or who have a computer but do not know what the proper terms are for the things that come with it. This article explains what those names are and provides a little bit of information about how they function.

Generally, all computers come with a few basic devices. These usually include a Monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, and the computer (also known as the tower or case).

Monitor – The monitor is the device that looks similar to a TV. There are many types of monitors but the most common is a 17 inch CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitor. A CRT monitor is very similar to your standard TV. There is a new type of monitor that is becoming very popular, it's called an LCD monitor. An LCD monitor is quite a bit smaller and the quality is somewhat better.

Keyboard – The keyboard is one of the most basic input devices. This is the device that has all the numbers, letters, and symbols that you use to type words on the computer.

Mouse – This is the other most basic input device. It is a small mouse-like device connected to your computer that lets you move the pointer around the screen and click on icons.




Computer – This is the device that houses the "Guts" of your computer. Inside is where all of the magic happens. Generally, inside a computer case you will find a hard drive, system board, RAM, network card, and all the other devices that let you do all of the fun things that computers nowadays let you do.

Printer – This is the device that lets you turn what you see on your computer, into hard copies on paper. There are many types of printers, such as: ink jet, laser, and dot matrix. Some printers also come with built in scanners (to digitize paper documents), fax machines, and photocopiers.

This is just some basic information that has, hopefully, helped you better understand your computer. You may think that most people should already know this but you might be surprised at how many do not.

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On-Page Factors Affecting Your Position On Google Searches

This article will focus on the factors that, we believe, affect your results on Google searches. But remember, Google does not publish its algorithms and is always changing and updating the way it views sites - so these are the guidelines for you to follow, rather than a definitive statement of the processes involved.

The major factors fall into two main types, namely, on-page and off-page factors. Basically, on-page factors are those things that you can do to improve your ranking by adapting the actual coding of your site. This article will focus on on-page factors, and a second article will cover off-page factors (those factors mainly relating to incoming links to your site).

In terms, of on-page factors the areas we will cover are:

Keywords - not just the meta tag, but throughout the site

Linking - where your site links to and who they are

Content - how big and new your content is and who is viewing it

Keywords

Funnily enough, probably the least important keywords are those that you put in the actual keyword meta-tag. This feature has become so abused that Google had almost disregarded it, whereas other search engines do pay attention to this tag.

Simple rules for the keyword meta-tag are to make sure its short (less than 10 words), make sure it is relevant (all keywords used appear on the page) and there are no duplicates. Remember search engines work on a page by page basis so always think about the specific page you are working on. We have a feeling that Google only uses this meta-tag negatively, which means that it will mark you down for breaking the rules, but not necessarily mark you up for doing a good job.

Other places where keywords are important are the actual text (see later), your domain name and the other meta tags. We have found that having your keywords in your domain name help, as long as they are not overdone. So www.seo-gurus.co.uk is good whereas www.good-search-engine-optimisation-for-google-that-works.com is bad. Again some other search engines weight the actual domain very highly, as can be seen when you do a search using their engine.

The jury seems to be out on the title tag since duplication of the same keywords here may be seen as spammy or overload by Google. Similarly the description tag should contain a meaningful sentence outlining the theme of the site without overdoing the keywords.

In the actual body of the text, keywords should be apparent without being duplicated so much that Google sees them as spam. Many people use one of the various keyword density analyses, such as the one on the Free SEO Tools site www.datacoms.co.uk, this gives you an idea of the relative density of your keywords compared with the rest of the page. Other good ideas are to have your keywords in H1 tags and also highlighted in bold, both of which Google seems to take into account.

Linking
We are not just referring here to external links, but also how you link between pages. In fact, a good internal linking strategy seems to be highly rated by Google. Whereas a complex internal linking hierarchy can mean that some of your pages just don't get found by Google. We try and keep the maximum number of clicks to reach a page down to three, and preferably two. It is worth considering using Google site maps, since Google seem to be doing a lot of work in this area which means they will probably become more prominent with time.

One last point on internal links, try to make the linking anchor text consistent, Google likes to see the same anchor text on different pages linking to a page.

External links should be used with caution. We saw a site with had an address book that a Russian porn site added its URL into. This led to Google banning the site because we it was deemed to be linking to a bad neighbourhood - sometimes you only learn from your mistakes. It is also worth checking periodically that all the links on your site still work. If you have broken links, Google is more likely to hold your site back in the search results. We also believe that Google rates link stability highly, so don't keep churning the links of sites that you link onto.

Content
Google likes big, old sites and that's a fact. A large site that has been around for 5 years is always going to out-gun a small, new site in the results page takes. So as a new site, you have to keep Google interested, and one way of doing this is new well-written content. Try and put up at least a few new pages a month, all nicely linked to the rest of the site. Avoid having no new pages for 3 months then 100 new ones on one day, we have a feeling Google prefers to see a gradual increase in content. Again suddenly increase of content or links may be seen as spammy by Google and your site devalue in its eyes. Google is trying to see if your site is genuine and growing organically.

We have seen sites with pages that run for miles. Short, well-themed pages are again a big attraction to Google, this also allow you to do more clever internal cross linking with consistent anchor text. It is also better for human readers who can be put off when they see how small the scroller button is on the scroll bar - keep pages short and focused.

In the second part of the article we will look at how off-page factors can affect your Google ranking.

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Why to Shop Online.

Billions of people love to shop online - and why not? It's convenient, safe and usually cheaper.

1. It Saves Money:

One can easily save up to 50% of money by shopping at online websites as they sell items at a discounted price compared to physical stores. Further, there are too many online websites offering same range of products and the competition amongst them usually benefits customer.

2. It Saves Your Time.

If you are a busy person and have little time for shopping, then online shopping is the best for you. Also, with online price comparison websites like Google product search (Froogle), Abebooks, E-bay et cetera, it has become very easy to compare prices offered by different shops.

3. It Saves Cost of Gas:

Online shopping also saves the sky rocketing cost of Gas. The cost in gas alone would cover most shipping costs.

4. Your Money is Safe:

Most of the online e commerce websites offer Google Checkout and Paypal as payment method. These are the most secure payment methods and it guarantees that your money is safe and that you will get the item you purchase. So, you can purchase items from less established e-commerce websites without any fear.

5. Ideal for Sending Gifts:

Online webstores do ship orders directly to the recipient of a gift and hence saving your time, postage and gas cost. Some websites also offer the service to send anonymous gifts so that the recipient just keeps guessing about the sender of gift! Some websites also offer the option of getting items gift wrapped for small amount of extra money.

6. You can Pre-order Items:

Items with high demand like Harry Potter series, go out of stock very quickly after they are released. Pre-ordering such items is another feature that most of the online stores offer. This way you can reserve a copy for yourself without being worried about the release date.

7. Items can be Returned
Mostly, all e-commerce websites offer the facility of returning items if found to be defective or in-compatible. However, these websites usually put a time limit by which items must be returned in order to get full refund. Hence it is advised that you read the returns policy of a website before purchasing the item and if the item received is defective, the matter should be brought to the notice of seller website immediately.

8. Gift Certificates
Online shops are the most appropriate place to buy gift certificates as these websites ship them to gift recipient for free and the recipient can but an item of their choice.

9. No Need to Carry Shopping Bags

With online shopping, you do not need to carry shopping bags and moving around from one shop to another and waiting in lines. Just order it online and the item will be delivered right at your door steps.


10. Rebates and Loyalty Bonuses

These days many websites are offering Loyalty Bonuses and Rebates to the loyal customers who keep coming back with their business. This adds to the savings you can make by shopping online.



All these points show the importance of online shopping, however, there are thousands and thousands of online e-commerce websites but only few are quality websites that offer huge discounts without compromising with the quality of service. Selecting right website is another important factor of online shopping and I will discuss about it in my next article.

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Computer Viruses an Over View.

Computer security is a vitally important issue in today's society, a lot of the most critical aspects of our lives require computers, and keeping those computers secure is critical. The popularity of the Internet and the amount of time we spend making use of it has made it very simple to spread computer viruses.

Computer viruses have become such a problem that they are now frequently mentioned in both the newspapers television news bulletins as well as in the online media. It is absolutely critical that you take steps to protect yourself against viruses, and you must be really vigilant if you spend a lot of time online.

Virus can be transmitted through e-mail, or a file you download even if you do not install it, but they can also be present in the files on a floppy disk especially if it is being passed from friend to friend. Lots of computers get infected every day, and if you do not take precautions yours may be next, you may lose all of your data on your machine. Once gone, it will be irretrievable unless of course you had the good sense to take a regular back up!

A computer virus is a small program that has the ability to duplicate itself, just like a real virus hence the name, also just like a biological virus it must have a host to exist. The virus payload, the end product of the computer virus, can be something harmless it can be as simple as displaying a message, or something very serious it could fully reformat your hard drive. Recent computer virus attacks have resulted in major disruption to both home computers and the networks of governments and multi national companies.

The advance of the Internet has been the most essential issue in the increase of computer viruses. Originally viruses were spread when people swapped disks with their friends, by its very nature this tended to restrict the spread of the computer virus but today most people do not tend to use external media like disks to store data in the same way, This has resulted, most viruses being spread via the use of e-mail and file sharing on the Internet. All that is required is for you to open an e-mail attachment or download a dangerous program and this can give your computer a virus. There are by now, about fifty thousand viruses in existence, but there are several hundred new threats produced each month.

There are a number of motives that encourage people to write computer viruses. The earliest virus programs were by and large written as pranks or experiments. However as some programmers began to learn their way about systems and the Internet, they wrote viruses just to see what they can do with them. For example, a programmer might write a computer virus code just to see how far it would spread. Unfortunately it did not stop there, other more malicious individuals, have far more hostile intentions and they took great delight writing computer viruses to harm websites or damage people's computers.

An additional reason a computer virus gets produced is to blackmail large corporations with the threat of setting off a loss of data on their systems. There have been lots of viruses written for revenge. Employees who are about to lose their jobs can sometimes leave viruses behind on the company system to do damage to their former employer's ability to do business.

Also lots of viruses are written for profit. The computer viruses may be used to send e-mail spam (so the original sender is disguised), causing your computer to serve as a host to illegal data, or engage in other illegal activities. Also, viruses can be used to spy on users, display pop-ups while the user is not on the internet, and acquire user data like bank accounts or credit card numbers.

Viruses tend to fall into two major types, Worms or Trojan horses, but just to complicate things Trojan horses, can be a type of worm.

A Computer Worm is a self replicating program, the first worm to gain wide attention was the Morris Worm this infected a large number of computers and earned its writer 400 hours of community service and over $10000 in fines!

Trojan horses as the name implies are hidden viruses. This helps the program to get installed in the first place. They then quietly run in the background, while disseminating its malicious code. This code can do any amount of things. It can begin right away or it may simply install a program that won't start for sometime. Once it does start, it can delete all of the files on the computer or it can infect the computer and try to infect other computers on the network.

There are a number of ways viruses are delivered, and as a Trojan horse is the most common. It generally comes with other pieces of software that a user might find interesting. This software is usually shared through a file-sharing network or downloadable off of the Internet. Once the user installs the software, the virus also gets installed.

It is vital that you cover yourself against viruses, this can done very simply by installing a good anti-virus program and keeping it up to date. There are both free and expensive software applications around that can be set to self-update to protect from viruses.

You can also help defend yourself by being cautious where you download files from; only use a reputable well-known source. You should also not to open any e-mail attachments unless you know the sender. Making these safety precautions will help to protect you from computer.

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Ebay Ebook Success Tips: Get Free Ebooks to Resell on eBay

With the spiraling eBay fees and competitive pricing, the last thing eBay ebook sellers want to worry about is buying new resellable content. However, there are many sources that you may not have thought about which provide you with free resellable ebooks that you can successfully add to your inventory. This article details just a few of them.

1) Ebay:- That's right eBay is a great source to pick up free ebooks (OK they're not quite free but very cheap). Many ebook sellers run auctions that start at 1p to attract customers. If nobody bids on these auctions you can pick up a very cheap resellable ebook.

Furthermore, some sellers run 1p ebook listings in their eBay store. That means that you can actually purchase the item as a Buy It Now for 1p and in some cases receive it instantly. Again another way to pick up a very cheap resellable ebook, courtesy of eBay. Do a search on eBay for "ebooks, resell" or something similar, and then list them lowest priced first to see what you find.

2) Newsletters:- When you signed up for this newsletter I gave you two free ebooks. Some newsletters that I am currently a member of give me 5 free ebooks every week. I would recommend joining ebook related newsletters as not only do you receive valuable tips from that ebook seller, you also get free products to add to your eBay store. Have a browse through eBay for the top ebook sellers. If they have a newsletter join it. It costs nothing and you are likely to benefit greatly.

3) Ebooks:- Usually when you buy a new ebook it contains links to many bonus ebooks with resell rights. Although you may have to pay for the first ebook, this is another way to get a plentiful collection of free resellable ebooks.

4) Online Forums:- Many users at online forums will give away free resellable ebooks or give away links that allow you to access free ebooks with resell rights. Just have a browse through the posts and see what you can find.

5) Ebook Websites:- Many websites that sell ebooks have a free download page. From this you can download free ebooks which quite often come with resell rights. Type "resell ebooks" into Google or any other major search engines, and have a browse through these websites. I am sure you will find more than enough ebooks to keep you going for a while.

Although free ebooks with resell rights are likely to be outdated in relation to the ones you pay for they are still a good way to bulk up your inventory at relatively little cost. The larger your store inventory is as an ebook seller, the more chance that you will get a sale. If you bulk up your inventory with free resellable ebooks which you then sell alongside the more expensive, up to date, resellable ebooks you are sure to enjoy increased success. Good Luck with your Ebook Sales.

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Do You Really Understand the Blog Animal And How He Can Help You?

The growth and popularity of blogs in general has been phenomenal within a very short period of time. Blogs or web logs as they were previously called is where all the action on the World Wide Web is, right now.

It is amazing how quickly web sites have been relegated to the back seat. Actually the role of web sites is rapidly being re-defined but it is clear blogs will be the place where all the traffic will be congregating for a long time to come. What some thought was a passing fad is clearly here to stay and is a permanent development that has already had far reaching effects on communications and the way we transmit and receive information.

Yet most entrepreneurs who have quickly jumped onto the blog bandwagon do not seem to fully understand and appreciate what blogs are really all about. Worse still, many of those who have remained away have no idea what all the fuss is about.

A clearer understanding of blogs is bound to benefit any e-commerce business owner or online entrepreneur.

Everybody can be a publisher or media owner
Probably the most significant impact of blogs is the fact that it is rapidly changing mass media, as we have known it since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Powerful media companies have been in the hands of a few people who have carefully controlled what we see in our media. Sometimes deliberately to achieve their corporate goals and objectives. Blogs are effectively transferring that power back to the people and away from the hands of a few.

This era of blogs means that anybody can be a publisher or media owner and effectively transmit whatever information they want and push whatever cause is dear to their hearts. The impact of blogs in politics for example has been a clear demonstration of the power of blogging. We have some blogs covering politics that have a couple hundred thousand visitors on a daily basis.

This may be a scary development to many folks including media owners but it presents a number of excellent opportunities for entrepreneurs to reach huge audiences with their messages at a tiny fraction of what their budgets used to be in the days when blogs did not exist.

Breaking news, courtesy of the blog community
Further power of blogs to handle breaking news in real time, complete with photographs and video clips, has clearly been evident in retimes. For example during the Tsunami tragedy last December. Footage of the damage being caused by the giant waves was seen in blogs long before the traditional media channels got wind of what was going on.

This opens up a whole range of new opportunities that can be tried out in the years to come. Not many entrepreneurs have realized this yet.

Anybody who didn't have a site can own a successful blog
Blogs are so easy to set up, maintain and run that a new breed of online entrepreneurs is on the rise. It consists of many individuals who for one reason or another were unable to set up and maintain heir web sites.

We are now in an era where an online entrepreneur needs little else other than lots of creativity, there is actually so much that he or she can do without a single cent in capital.

Distinct advantages of having a blog
Blogs tend to get lots of traffic. Lots more than websites do. Besides search engines seem to love them. Blogs are also able to build up links much more easily than web sites. Thus it is no longer surprising for a nobody-novice to suddenly shoot up in stardom and recognition.

No entrepreneur can afford to be left behind
The benefits of a business having in it's stable a blog or two that is capable of attracting huge traffic, is very important and can be extremely useful in helping a business to achieve its' marketing goals and objectives.

Any entrepreneur whether online or offline who does not have a blog to help promote their business is making a very serious mistake that they will definitely live to deeply regret. In fact even playing catch-up with a blog that already exists will continue to be more and more difficult.

There are a number of advantages that blogs have which will continue to be extremely useful to entrepreneurs and webmasters. One of them is the fact that they easily allow for customer comment and anybody can be able to post a comment at your site. In a way this is a form of research and sampling because it enables the business to get feedback and thus be able to gauge the sort of response they will receive when they finally roll out their product or service into the market.

Start using your blog more carefully and watch your traffic and revenues steadily climb as a result.

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Why Pay When You Can Get Free Anti Virus?

I'm sure you have heard this from a friend before, even some of your computer literate friends; but what I want to warn you of is that this is a dangerous question to be asking. You for sure know about viruses and that anyone today is vulnerable to them if they haven't taken appropriate efforts to protect themselves, but other than that (if you are like most people you don't really know what is out there (lots more than just viruses) and how to really protect yourself properly. In the next few paragraphs I want to tell you some critical information to save you lots of time and money and tears.

So viruses are, just like their biological counterpart, parasites in that they use a host to exist and more importantly to replicate. A virus is made up of computer code that is written in such a way as to insert itself into existing code of (most often) an executable file that already exists on the host computer. It uses the internet mostly to travel but can and has been transferred by removable forms of media like floppy disks, smart cards, etc. Like viruses, worms use the computer as a host, but only in order to use the hardware, as they do not need the host computers software to replicate. Trojan Horses are another example of malicious software or malware that use techniques that evade the natural and built up defenses on a computer. The point is that there is more than just viruses that you need protection from and not all anti virus software (especially free anti virus software) provide the comprehensive coverage that you need

The sad thing about free anti virus software is that it lulls computer users into complacency and they end up as bad or worse off than when they were virus free. The companies that offer these freebies are doing it more or less as an advertising ploy, bringing more traffic to their sales page.


Now there is a caveat to this that I would like to explain and that is that free anti virus software is better than having nothing at all. So, if you are too poor to purchase your own security software package than by all means get it on your computer. However I seriously doubt that if you are able to purchase a computer you would not also be able to get anti virus protection. Consider it nothing more than a necessary maintenance cost, kind of like putting oil in your car every once in a while.

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