How do I enable my free subscription to the Marketing Control Panel?
Open a support ticket in the Help Desk and a technician will enable the Marketing Control Panel for you within 2-3 business days upon receiving your request.

What is the Marketing Control Panel?
The Help Guide will assist you with your Marketing Control Panel settings and answer any questions you may have.

The Marketing Control Panel will help to promote your website. There's no point having a great Web site unless you're able to generate traffic - hits! But traffic doesn't happen overnight - it can take several months and much persistence to get listed on some of the major search engines and directories (indexes). To get you started we provide a set of Promotion Guides that help you learn about working with search engines, free promotion through links and announcements, marketing through newsletters, using discussion groups to promote your eBusiness, getting Web site awards,promoting to journalists, using giveaways and contests, legal issues, and much more!

Does Website Source provide a dedicated IP address with my hosting account?
Yes, each hosting plan offered comes with a dedicated IP address. The hosting plans, by default, come with a shared IP address but you can easily enable a dedicated IP address in your control panel for no extra charge. A dedicated IP address is important for search engine rankings. Increasing a website's rank is contingent upon a unique IP address. Website Source understands the importance of search engine optimization and, therefore, a unique IP address as well as a free subscription to the Marketing Control Panel is included for free with every hosting plan.

What is Search Engine?
Search engines utilize indexing software agents often called robots or spiders. These agents are programmed to constantly "crawl" the Web in search of new or updated pages. They will essentially go from URL to URL until they have visited every Web site on the Internet. Search engines read a web site's 'meta tags' and content in order to determine their ranking.

What is the difference between search engines and directories?
The main difference between a search engine and a general directory is that a directory will not list your URL if you do not first register it with them. They do not make use of indexing software agents and so have no way of knowing it's out there. As a result, their registration form will be considerably longer than just your URL. Directories are usually subdivided into categories and you have to submit your URL under the most appropriate heading.

What are doorway pages?
A doorway page is a page that is optimized to rank well on the search engines. Each search engine has it's own unique ranking algorithms (formulas used to determine the relevancy of a page to a given search term). Since every engine's algorithms differ, it is almost impossible to design one page that ranks well in all or even most of the search engines. This is why doorway pages are so important. A doorway page can be any existing page on your site or it can be a page that you create specifically for this purpose. A doorway page has no special look to it. It is simply an alternate entrance to your site that has the right words in the right frequencies, positions, and tags.

The design of the page is very important. A well designed doorway page blends into the rest of your site seamlessly. It also has relevant content targeted toward the key term. Each doorway page's content should vary somewhat with the key term. Ideally the doorway page is not just a fluff page but rather an informative, eye catching, relevant page that describes your product or service.

None of the engines are indexing my site, why?
You may not have allowed enough time for the engine to index your site. The indexing time for most engines is between two days and six weeks, if they are operating normally.
Some engines have several databases they pull results from. Therefore you may be listed in one that the engine isn't pulling from at the moment you do your search.
Frames. If you use frames on your pages, some engines cannot index frame properly.
They simply "lost" the url that was submitted. Sounds ridiculous but happens more often than you think.
Hosted on a free site. Some engines will not index pages from free sites.
Anything that can be considered spamming technique. If an engine suspects any type of spamming they will may not index your page or ban your site entirely.
If your website is hosted on a server containing illegal adult content, and that site is on the black list of Google your website could be banned.
If your website is utilizing a shared IP address. All Website Source hosting plans come with a dedicated IP address for free. Some cheap web hosts do not offer static IPs. If your website is being hosted by a provider that does not offer dedicated IP addresses, your website rankings could be penalized.

What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags for your "title", "description", and "keywords".

<meta NAME="keywords" CONTENT=" your keywords here">
<meta NAME="description" CONTENT=" your description here ">
<title> your title here </title>
A Title (with a high percentage of your site's keywords, and a title that starts with an "A" is best because some search engines sort alphabetically).
A Description (with a high percentage of your site's keywords)
Keywords (to see someone's keywords, while viewing a web site, click "view" "source". Then you can see what keywords they are using (who they are targeting).

For fun, go to your competitors web sites, and click "view " then click "source" (Netscape calls it "page source".) You will be looking for something that says "Meta keywords".

After your website is designed, it needs to be "submitted" to the top search engines (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Altavista, HotBot...there are hundreds of them.) The majority of them charge NOTHING for you to submit a site to them. The best place to begin submitting your site is Yahoo.com. After you submit your web site there, search for "search engines" and begins submitting your site at other search engines.