There is quite a few different attributes to the application which make it so much better than other packages out there which cost MORE than advanced web ranking. Most of them may do one thing well, but try to bolt on other options but never do them very well. Luckily with advanced web ranking, the whole tool has been thought out and created really well and with the user in mind. It works well for a person that needs to monitor one or two sites, or someone like me who looks after 10+ with a boat load of keywords.

Lets check out some of the features Advanced Web Ranking offers.

Overview Screen

As you can see below the layout is really crisp, clear and easy to navigate. The main thing I like is how the keywords and the search engines are laid out in a row and show their current and previous rankings. This is what I call the “Breafkast View” because it’s the first thing I look at every morning haha. Its also so easy to check the other areas like reports / data etc as they are just tabs on the left hand side. You might be like “whatever”, but compared to some of the other applications I have used, this is easily the best laid out SERP tracker by far.

Current Rank Chart

I love this view. It really gives you a look into whats been happening with the site in a historical view. Let me just say, it’s VERY CUSTOMISABLE. It might look a bit confusing for you, but basically all it shows is the different keywords in a chart, as one color per keyword. The great thing is that the more rankings that you gather over time, you really get to see a massive timeline of your SERPs and see whats worked and what hasn’t. It’s also very good to show clients so you can prove that SEO really does help

Check out the bottom part of the screen shot. There is a little overview showing : current position, last known, maximum, minimum and average position. I love this bit.

Current Ranking On Selected Search Engines

Now some people like to monitor various search engines like google, yahoo and bing. This view shows you what you are currently ranking and a whole bunch of over handy data on all of them in one screen. There isnt many tools that actually offer this which is surprising. The quick jump bar allows you to change your search engine, and also your keyword. It’s quick and fast which is what I want. Some of the other tools I have used are so clunky, so Advanced Web Ranking is definitley a breath of fresh air.

One Of The Biggest Extras – Keyword Research Tool

This was one of the deal makers for me. Most ranking tracker tools don’t have keyword research tools. Having a keyword research tool right on your desktop is SO HANDY. Its pretty quick and you can customised it really well just like it was the actual google adwords tool. The ability to export to CSV is nice as well so you can archive them or add them to other spreadsheets. If you are like me, you probably have one excel spreadsheet for each website you are working on, so extracting the valuable data out of Advanced Web Ranking is a dream come true. A lot of the other tools don’t actually allow you to extract their data out, or if you do its got their branding all over it. Since it’s a CSV export, its just raw data and I respect Advanced Web Ranking for letting us do that.

Conclusion – Yay or Nay?

To be honest I didn’t talk about every single facility in this application, and thats mainly because I wanted to focus on the web ranking as thats what I primarily need. The other tools in this application are amazing. There is no stone left unturned when it comes to the rank tracking and reporting. They have really packed it full of tools that you will use all the time, and others don’t offer which cost MORE than Advanced Web Ranking.

They offer various types of their application based on what you need. This is great because the people who just want to monitor their own personal website don’t have to pay for things they aren’t going to use. Hat off to Advanced Web Ranking for that one.

Check out their website for more info, but seriously take it from someone who has tried probably all of them. Advanced Web Ranking is the best tool of the trade that you only have to pay a one off payment for.

Lets start with the letters in the names of the different types. R stands for “recordable”. This means that it can only be written to once, and the data can never be deleted off the disk. RW disks are able to be erased, and re written on again. This makes them very economical as far as price goes. Most of the time, people want to keep the data on the DVD so they don’t want to ever delete off it.

Lets move onto DVD+R. DVD+R disks can be written to in multiple layers, giving them a bit more storage on the disk, and better integrity of data. The downfall is they are a bit more expensive than the DVD-R’s, but these days its barley noticeable.

DVD-R discs can only been written to in one layer on the disk. They don’t have the data integrity that the +R’s have, but make up for it being cheaper.

I would also like to add in the difference between a DVD-RW and a DVD-ROM.

A DVD-RW can read and write (burn) DVD’s, and most of the time can also write and read CD’s.

A DVD-ROM can only read a DVD disk (or a CD) but cannot write any data to a disk.

The great thing these days, is that its industry standard to put DVD Burner in all computers (except net books). If you don’t have one and want to upgrade, then go for it! They are usually only around $60, which is definitely worth it.

One of the best things you can do to help prevent RSI is to get up and walk around every half an hour. (I can see some peoples bosses getting angry at this one!). Even if it is something simple as going to the bathroom or getting a cup of tea. If you have a window near by, it is a good idea to stare off into the distance, since you are always focusing on the screen which is very close.

Another huge problem is that a lot of people slouch at their computer. Sitting in an upright position with both feet on the floor will definitely help with back pain problems. There are many great chairs out there that will help you sit correctly, but often can be expensive. A popular trend in the work place at the moment is using a fitness ball to sit on at the desk. The fitness ball forces you to sit upright, keeping your posture perfect.

It is also important to keep your monitor at eye level. If it is too high, low, or on an angle, this can cause pain in the neck.

Another important factor is your monitors quality. Old CRT monitors have low refresh rates, and can make your eyes very sore even in just a short period of time. The new LCD’s on the market are flicker free, and have very good brightness controls, so you can set it to suit your eyes. Having the monitor too bright can hurt your eyes, and having it too dark can strain your eyes.

When lunch time comes around, don’t sit at your desk. Go outside and eat your lunch away from the computer, or if that is not possible, do your best to find a nice place to sit without staring at a screen!

If you would like to check out some stretches you can do, head over to youtube.com and search for some RSI exercises, there is heaps there!

A net book basically means “A wireless computer, used for Internet access”. They are smaller than most normal laptops. A normal laptop has usually a 15″ screen and above, where a net book has less than 12″. They also do not have DVD Roms (CD Roms).

This can put a lot of people off buying a net book, because they want to be able to use a DVD Rom to load music, applications and watch movies etc. Also, the small screen is not good for watching movies.If you want to do this sort of thing, then a net book is probably not for you.

The reason for a net book is to be completely mobile, and to have access to the Internet. Yes, they can still play movies and you can definitely listen to music on them with no problems, but you have to keep in mind that is not their primary function.

They also usually have smaller hard disks than normal laptops.

Benefits of a net book:

• They are very light, so great for travelling.
• Small screens means they are small in size, very easy to carry around
• A Lot have very good battery life, again great for travel
• Cheap! They are usually cheaper than most other laptops on the market.

Negatives of a net book

• No DVD Rom, which can be a pain for people
• Screen is small, so not good for people with bad eyesight or want to watch movies
• Some keyboards are hard to use if you have big fingers
• not enough power for some applications people like to use ie. Photoshop etc

70 percent of all net books on the market run Windows XP. They basically cannot run Windows Vista as it is way too resource hungry, and the net books just don’t have the power to be able to run it good enough. The benefit of having windows XP is that it also keeps the cost low as Vista is more expensive. The other 30 percent of net books on the market run various operating systems like Ubuntu.

So the conclusion is, if you want something small and portable to check your email and your facebook, then a net book is definitely worth looking at!

Over the last few years, wireless internet has taken off in Australia. It is very competitive in regards to price, which is great for the consumer because we are the ones that benefit. There are a lot of downfalls with wireless internet, which I will explain later.

Basically, a lot of people get confused with the term “wireless internet“. The true meaning of wireless internet is “internet connectivity, no matter where you are” ie, sitting at home, at the office, at the beach or in a park. This is done by having a small wireless internet receiver, called a modem. These usually plug into the side of your laptop or computer via a USB port. Inside the modem, is a SIM card, exactly like your mobile phone. This is how you connect to the internet. As our infrastructure has been upgraded (to 3g) this allows high speed data transfer, which is great for internet access. A Lot of phones these days come equipped to browse the internet, because it uses the same connection to accept phone calls, to connect to the internet, two in one!

The down side with wireless internet, which is also a problem with mobile phones, is connectivity problems. Some places get really great strong signals, and others you cannot even connect. Much like a mobile phone, sometimes you have reception, you might go somewhere like a friends house and get none at all. Since it is the same infrastructure, it suffers exactly the same problem. This is probably the main characteristic that makes wireless internet bad.

Another reason can be the contracts they sign you up to. Some businesses require you to sign a 24 month contract, which is a very long time, too long if you ask me! Luckily a lot of them offer a 30 day money back guarantee, which is great because you can take it home and test out your connection from where you will mainly use it. If it is no good you can take it back and get a refund. One way you could get stung though is that if you were going to move house in the next two years, and the new house got 0 reception. Then you would be forced to pay for an internet connection on a monthly basis that doesn’t work.

That about sums up what wireless internet is about. Now lets move onto the “home wireless network”.

A Lot of people get confused with the difference between a home wireless network, and a true wireless network. Yes you can connect to the internet wirelessly in your house, but ONLY in your house. This is because most people have a piece of hardware called a wirelessly router (or a wireless modem router). What this does, is allows your home internet connection, which is usually ADSL or Cable internet, to be shared wirelessly in your house. The little box has an antennae on it (or inside it) that broad casts a little signal with a small radius, which allows you to connect to the internet, as long as you are in range of the signal. Another way to think of the home wireless network, is like a mini radio signal, that gets beamed out by the little box in a 10 – 20 meter radius (depending on the strength of the hardware).

Can other people besides you and your family see your network? Yes. As long as they are within the signal range, they can see your network. This brings up the importance of wireless internet security, which is another kettle of fish I will be writing about soon.

Let me start by saying that it is okay to use some of these things, but adding extra complexity could be the key to keeping what ever you are protecting secure. Using a more complex password increases security, but does not mean that it should be the only measure taken to keep your passwords strong, and safe.

A Lot of the clients that we look after, most of them have very weak passwords, if any at all. Having anti virus and a firewall can’t protect you from someone guessing your password, which is why it is so important to make them strong, and even for the really important things, change it frequently, lets say every 30 days.

People that have worked in an office workplace have probably been in this scenario before, where you have to change your password every month or so. You are also advised that you have to use at least one capital, and one number in order to pass the password safety credentials. Everyone finds this very frustrating and annoying, but it is needed to be done for a reason. Data on computers can be worth millions, and sometimes is only kept secure by a simple password.

How to make your password stronger:

Using characters like $!#%^&* really help strengthen your password. As a rule, you should try use at least one symbol in a password, along with a capital and a number. It is pretty simple to see how it will strengthen your password, but just remember to memorise it, and try to make it complex but something that you will remember! You don’t want to make it so complex that you cannot remember it yourself!

Another great way is to use a password generator when available. Some pieces of software when using to create a new account for an email account for example, generate a password for you. The reason this is good is because computer algorithms do not fall into habits, like using their dogs name etc.

Although using a strong password does not guarantee your safety, it certainly plays a big role in helping it.

VOIP stands for Voice over Internet protocol. Basically, it means make voice calls over the Internet. This product has become very popular around the world, and now in Australia.

If you have a high speed Internet connection like ADSL or Cable, you are able to get a VOIP phone and start saving!

Many companies now are offering Internet and VOIP packages bundled together. This can save users huge amounts of money, in a few different ways.

Line rental: All phone companies charge line rental, and can be around the $40 dollar mark per month. That is how much you could be paying, even before you make a phone call! With VOIP there is no such thing as line rental, because you are not renting a line, you are using your Internet connection to call people.

Call Charges: The call charges on a land line phone vary depending on what carrier you are with, but they are all roughly the same. 25 cents for local calls, maybe 30 cents for a 30 second block to mobile and then STD and international calls. A bill can rack up pretty quickly if you have interstate family and friends, and have to call mobile a lot too which in this day and age is almost every call you make. The great thing about VOIP is their super competitive rates, with most providers offering bundle packs of time for a monthly fee. For around $40 a month, you will get unlimited local calls, national calls and several hours to mobile phones. They also offer the best prices to other countries, usually only a few cents every 30 seconds or minute.

As you can see, VOIP can be a very effective way of saving money, whether you are a home user looking to save money calling family interstate or overseas, or if you are a business who makes hundreds of calls a week.

A Few things to Remember:~

If you are a business, and you want to setup a VOIP phone system, keep in mind that it shares the bandwidth of your Internet connection with your computers as well. If you have multiple users at your site, you want to make sure that you have a good enough connection to support web browsing by multiple people, and also making a phone call at the same time. You can setup a few things that will maximise your Internet connection, giving your VOIP priority over people browsing the Internet. It can be tricky if you don’t know what you are doing, so it is best to hire someone who offers this computer service, like us, to set it up for you.

Keep in mind as well, that if you are running a business, and you convert all your phone numbers to VOIP lines, that if your internet drops out, this will take down all your phone lines too. This can be frustrating for businesses, but there is quite a few ways around this problem, like forwarding the number to a different phone number (example, the bosses mobile or another office landline), if the internet goes down.

If you require any advice on VOIP, or are interested in setting up a line at your home or office, we are happy to help!

The word blog is a mixture between two words, “web log”. A web log, now known as a blog, is a website where “journal” style entries are submitted to on a regular basis. Most non tech savvy people would relate a blog to a diary, but it can be very different from that.

Blogs take on many shapes an forms. One way to describe a blog in a very general way would be to say that it is a “journal with material relating to a certain subject”. For example, you could make a blog on your favourite footbal team, talking about last weekends game, then the next day you could post about their match up for next week. You could show pictures of the team, talk about their history, when they won their last grand final etc. It is a place for a person to share their thoughts on a particular subject, free of “factual like” information, and more about personal feeling.

Blogs are using by all walks of life. Businesses use them on their websites to give updates on what they are doing, and are used to market new products etc. What you are reading now is basically a blog, this is an online article written by someone providing inforamtion on a particular subject, technology. Every article inside the tips page is a “blog entry” as they are entered at different times, on a regular basis.

Blogging has become so popular that some people make a living purely off blogging on certain things. How do they make money you ask? Usually by the advertising around their blog, eg, Google Ads. They also reccomend certain products, which they may get a percentage of if you purchase it.

Blogging has been around since the early 90′s yet they went under different names. They were usually just frequently updated websites.

One thing that you have to remember if you are ever reading a blog is, anyone could have written it, so it may not be actual truth, if they are providing factual evidence on a certain category. Blogs also get abused frequently by companies promoting a new product. It is very simple for them to go to a free blogging website and create a blog, telling people “how great this product is”.

One important feature of most blogs, is that it allows readers to comment. When you make a blog post that’s contreversial for whatever reason, people will comment on your thoughts, either good or bad.

After reading all this, you should know what as blog is and what it is all about, and you have officially finished reading one too! Congratulations!

First of all, lets start of with what PDF stands for. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It was created by a company you have probably heard of, Adobe systems. This file format was created over around 15 years, and is now one of the most depended upon file formats in the world.

The reason it is so popular is that a PDF (.pdf file extension) can be viewed on any computer, any operating system including Windows, Mac OS, Unix and also lots of mobile platforms, including phones.

PDF files look great, and can be very interactive, providing hyperlinks, drawings, full colour graphics, photos.

They are used very frequently for their digital signature capability, and also because you can password protect them, making sure that only certain people can view the documents. This is very handy for sensitive work material, that could be dangerous if it gets into the wrong hands, or edited by someone. You can also delegate a lot of other security permissions like who can view it (by password), if it can be edited, or even if it can be printed.

Basically any document can be converted into a PDF file, by using the “print” function. There are many different types of software available, that let you “print” a PDF file, and save it to your computer. This is probably the best part about saving things as a PDF file. For example, if you had an invoice to send to a client, and it was made in Microsoft excel, you wouldn’t have a clue if they had excel or not to be able to open the file right? Well printing it to PDF using a virtual PDF printer assures that they will be able to view the invoice, regardless of what software they have on their computer, as long as they have something like Adobe Acrobat Reader on their computer. They will also be able to print out the PDF document, and it will look exactly the same as if you printed it out on your computer.

PDF documents are handy for all walks of life, from a business sending invoices, to children doing homework or even someone who wants to write a book!

With over 1 billion PDF files created on the planet, you can be assured they will be around for many years to come.

1. Never open email attachments from people you don’t know.

This is how a lot of people get inundated with viruses and spy ware from emails. Getting strange emails from random people can be very dangerous and has cost people alot of money falling for scams and what not. If you do not know the person that the email has come from, be aware that the content in the email could be harmful. Now this does not mean every email you receive from someone you dont know is full of viruses, it is just good practice to be on the defence, rather than just open up and download anything anyone sends you.

2.If someone is offering you something for free, its a scam.

No one every offers anything for free, there is always a catch. More often than not, they don’t even have a product or service to give you, they just want your information eg, address, bank account, phone number, visa card number etc. Unless it was a friend telling you to come over for a free BBQ, I would definitely recommend passing up what ever offer they have.

3.Install Anti Virus

Make sure you have an anti virus that scans all inbound emails. This will save you getting into a whole lot of trouble. As you download your emails, the Anti virus application scans them, and makes sure they are free from viruses and Trojans. It will put your mind at ease knowing that your emails are safe to open and view without getting stung by something harmful.

4.Do not publish your email address online (if possible)

There are nasty programs out there that scan websites all day, looking for email addresses to send spam to. This is one of the main ways people start getting inundated with spam in their mail box. The less people have your email address, the better. Obviously this is hard to achieve when you have a business contact page (like us), but you should still be cautious of who you give your email address too. An example is signing up to newsletters with websites with no privacy policy (This website has one!!).

5. If someone you know sends you an infected email, let them know!

It is important to let other people know if they have sent you an email with a virus. Chances are, that person did not even know they did so. Politely send them an email back advising them of their nasty email, trust me, they will appreciate it! Obviously if the person who sent you the infected email was unfamiliar and suspicious to you, they meant to send you the virus so don’t bother replying to them, block them!