Everyone who has an email account or surfs the web is aware of the wasted time and loss of productivity caused by SPAM. Spam email is unsolicited bulk email (UBE). The senders of these spam emails usually rack up a small fee for each person who clicks on the link in the email, or makes a purchase on the advertised website. If you so much as click on a link in a spam email, or worse yet, purchase something through a spam email, you are ensuring the survival of this kind of advertising. If you want to stop rather than encourage it, you must never click on a link in a spam email, even if it is a product or service you are interested in. Because spamming is generally seen as an unethical practice in the business community, there is a good chance that any businesses you get involved in through spam will be unethical in other ways, and it is best to stay away. If the business being promoted is a major company, let them know directly that you do not appreciate the spam you receive on their behalf from the 3rd party advertiser.

Emails used by spammers are often "harvested" by robots (software programs) from the Internet. If you post your email address on a website, encrypt it using JavaScript or some other method that makes it unreadable to a robot looking for email addresses. If you do post your email address on a website, and do not encrypt it, expect that it will be harvested, added to a spammers list, and you will be receiving a good amount of spam because of it.

SPAM websites are similar to Spam emails in that they are usually put up by a 3rd party to advertise another business' products or services. These websites contain no useful content themselves, only "affiliate links" for which the website owner is paid per click or per purchase. If you do a search, click on a result, but the page does not have any useful information, hit the back button rather than clicking the "sponsored link." These sponsored links are often made to look like standard links or navigation to trick you into clicking on them. If the page has no content, hit the back button and look for another result. 

This is not to say that the appearance of sponsored links indicates that the page is spam, but if there is no useful information on the page, don't reward the website owner financially by clicking on a sponsored link. Digging through these spam results can be a big waste of time and you might even consider reporting the spam result to the search engine you used to find it. Search engines have staff that will review the report, and if the page does violate the search engines terms of inclusion, they will delete it from the results.

Spamming can be financially rewarding, or it wouldn't be so prevalent. It is unlikely spam will ever be eliminated, but you can help reduce it by not clicking. 

Blogs have revolutionized the Internet. Ten years ago the Web was a different place. If you wanted to find out about a business, you would do a search, find their corporate web site, and find out what they had to say about themselves.

The corporate web site was most often a kind of online brochure. It could sit there for a year or two without changing much, and it was no big deal, because the other web sites weren't changing much either. Many small business people have the idea that a web site like that is still OK. The following are the reasons why it is no longer good enough:

1. Fresh content - It's always been understood that fresh content on a web site is necessary to keep visitors coming back for more. A blog can serve as a news section of the web site, to keep your customers informed, and coming back to stay informed. It will also keep the search engines coming back for more.

2. A larger website -  Search engine algorithms consider large websites with a lot of pages more authoritative, or important than smaller web sites, and they treat them as such in their search results. 

3. More searchable content - The more keyword-targeted pages relating to your products and services that you have on your web site, the more chance that a potential customer searching for those niche keywords will find your web site. And that's what you want to happen, right?

4. Incoming links - If you write interesting, useful and informative articles, other bloggers or webmasters will link to them. This increases your link authority, which is an important consideration in getting high ranking in the search engines. 

5. Share your knowledge - It's not enough anymore to say your business is number one in its field. You need to demonstrate your knowlege to potential customers, and what better way than writing a blog? You can become an indispensible fountain of knowledge, and make that sale before you are even aware of it!

 Submitting your XML sitemap to MSN is easy if you know where to start. That starting place is:

http://webmaster.live.com/

If you don't already have an MSN Live account, sign up for one. Once you are logged in go to  http://webmaster.live.com/ and click on "Sign in to use the tools."

You are immediately brought to the Site List page:

From there, click on "Add a Site." You'll be directed to the page where you can enter the URL of your site, the URL of the XML Sitemap and whether you'd like to authenticate your site ownership via META tag or XML file.

You'll also be able to enter your email address and choose whether or not you will receive the webmaster newsletter. After clicking "Submit" your site will be added and you'll be given the code with which you can authenticate your site. 

Click "OK" when  you are ready to authenticate. You'll be directed back to the Site List page. You can now click on the "Web Address" or your site to access the tools. 

Clicking on "Sitemap" in the top navigation will bring you to the "Sitemap" page, where you can change the sitemap URL or ping the sitemap. 

 Explore the tools and ENJOY!