How many times have you spent hundreds or even thousands on new computer equipment, only to find out that you now have to spend hundreds more in order to be able to do something as simple as type a letter? For years, when it came to a quality, usability, and compatibility, Microsoft was the only game in town, and we had no choice but to buy their product.

Today, that is no longer the case. While Microsoft still makes a quality Office product, there are some options that can save you thousands of dollars, especially if you have multiple computers in your home or office. I would recommend that you take a look at Open Office before you make your next office productivity purchase. The latest versions have really grown up, and they now compete directly with the usability of Microsoft Office.

One of the biggest advantages of Open Office is the price. Open Office is free to use on as many computers as you would like (although they do accept donations). There are no limitations for its use (private, educational, government, personal, commercial, etc.). You can also feel free to pass it along to any family or friends with no worries about copyright violations.

Open Office Writer functions just as Microsoft Word, and Calc functions just like Excel. You can save any document you current in Writer as a Microsoft Word .doc file if you like and the same goes for Calc, you can save your Calc spread sheets as a Excel .xls and open them as well. The software works well across multiple platforms, and it has extensive language support. All of the components of Open Office have a similar look and feel, which makes them easy to learn to use and master. This is a big improvement over previous versions. Another big improvement is that all of the components of Open Office are now integrated with each other. All of the components now share a single spell checker and other tools are also used consistently across the whole suite. You do not need to know which tool created a file in order to open it (for example, a Draw file can be opened from Writer). In most cases, options can be set globally across all components, but they can also be set at the component or even at the document level. Open office also uses an open source XML format, which allows files created to be opened by any text editor.

As always, here at KARTHOST.com, we are here to help your business be successful. Feel free to contact us with any questions that you may have. As always, we are not a success unless you are.

Roy Randolph
Head Hostmaster

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@KARTHOST

Many times, business owners have approached us with questions of how to tie together their social media sites so that when one site is updated, the other sites are updated as well. While there are many tools out there to accomplish this,…DON’T. It is rare that this will make good business sense for you.

You can certainly save time by using one of these automated tools, what works well in one application on one site will look awkward and unprofessional on another. Additionally, optimizing your social media sites usually involve doing different things on different types of social media sites.

For example, there are some excellent automated tools and plugins that can automate the process of tweeting your blog headlines to Twitter every time you post a new blog article. However, what makes a good blog article title often makes for bad Tweets. Blog headlines have two purposes: the get the article ranked high in search engines, and more importantly, to get people to read the article.

Blog articles typically have a relatively short lifespan unless they can get ranked by the search engines. As you add more blog posts, the articles will fall farther down the site. It is important to craft your blog posts so that they rank well in search engines. This keeps users coming back over and over to view your articles. The headline is the most important part of your article. It gets picked up automatically as the title tag. The challenge is to create a keyword-like structure to the article that balances between ranking well with search engines and getting people to read the article. There are several keys to remember when writing article titles: Start your article with the keywords you want (search engines place greater weight to the first words in the article); shorter titles are better (search engines rank the percentage of the title that are the keywords); and try to strike a balance between an interesting title and one that ranks well.

It is generally a bad idea to use Twitter to update your Facebook status. Facebook is more of a social site, and it generally doesn’t work well to fill your friends’ status pages with sales pitches. This can be a turnoff.

In general, it is a great idea to use social networking sites, but remember to use them in a way that lends well for that form of media. As always, here at KARTHOST.com, we are always available to help you grow your business. We are not a success unless you are.

Roy Randolph
Head Hostmaster

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@KARTHOST

Is traffic slowing to your site? This could be related to any number of search engine optimization issues. There are some free tools out there that you can use, but you need to investigate them thoroughly. They vary greatly on their accuracy and reliability. Some of the data they provide is flat out wrong, and if you follow their advice, it can cause you to make mistakes in your site design.

One of the free tools out there provides keyword statistics that are so cryptic, disorganized, and wrong that it is impossible to use. Even a second test a few days later provided the same types of results.

There are many search engine optimization tools out there that you have to pay a fee to use, and they work very well. However, many websites do not have the cash flow needed in order to cover this additional expense. So we will focus on a good free tool.

One tool that works well and is new to the market and addresses the main search engine optimization issues is The Website Health Check (tools.seobook.com/website-health-check) which was created by Aaron Wall. It provides reliable information without being complicated to use. All you need to do is to type in the website URL, and it will provide complete, easy-to-read reports that list problem pages with clickable URL links. The tool is not limited by size of website. This tool can even crawl huge ecommerce websites, although the larger the website, the longer it will take to pull the report.

Aspects of search engine optimization that are covered by the Website Health Check include:

• Missing Title Tags and Description: Makes sure that all pages in the site have title tags and description tags. Every page should have both.
• Missing Descriptions: Check for missing descriptions only.
• Duplicate Title Tags: Checks to make sure that no pages have the same title tags. Each page should be unique.
• Duplicate Descriptions: Checks to make sure that no pages have the same description tags. Every page should have a unique description describing the unique content of the page.
• WWW Versus Non-WWW: Verifies the status of your true canonical home page. In order to avoid search engine confusion and the splitting of your Google PageRank numbers, there should only be only one canonical URL for your website.
• Multiple Index Pages: Verifies if you have more than one true index page.
• Check Error Handling: Analyzes the ability of the website to handle errors.

Checking these basic items of the core structure of your website will go a long way toward search engine optimization. These basic building blocks should be in place before you take more sophisticated steps. Please contact us here at KARTHOST.com if you have any questions, or if you need any help. Keep in mind that we aren’t a success unless you are.

Roy Randolph
Head Hostmaster

Follow us on Twitter
@KARTHOST