Most people would readily associate complex graphic design elements with the attractiveness of a website. Graphics can be a way of showing one’s edge over another as the effective use of it can work to dazzle site visitors and make them stay. However, it can also overwhelm the website itself and may cause a slower download. Knowing that time can be such a prime commodity among users; a slow download can definitely make them move on to the next website for their search.

Search engine optimization is not only about words but also about graphics. There are techniques that can help the owners maintain an attractive website while affording a smaller page size. Webmasters should keep up with the quick-changing trends in web development. The faster connection speed today can easily be offset by going overboard with graphics. This can be prevented by knowing the alternatives and simple graphic optimization techniques.

Updating websites is a natural part of Internet marketing. Since a website is a powerful marketing tool for any business, it makes sense to maintain its contents relevant and current as possible. Website maintenance keeps the visitors and search engines supplied with new information that both are presumably looking for. When visitors fail to find updated information, they may not see any reason to come back. Search engines that don’t find anything new after several visits may result to low ranking.

However, not all cases warrant an update. Expansion of product and services, skills improvement, successful project completion, any change in business, and pricing changes, among others would require new information to be provided. “Updates” that have no real value for the site and its users are a waste of time and money. New information can come in the form of testimonials, articles or press releases. The idea is to have these updates seen by visitors and discovered by search engines.

There are many resources available for learning search engine optimization on the internet but you should also be careful where you get your information. There have been many reports of disinformation planted purposefully at various websites or simply wrong information that can either not work or even get you banned.

If you are looking for a good SEO Glossary, try checking out the SEO Glossary available at apogee-search.com. They provide concise information on almost any term related to SEO. They even include prominent names in the field such as search engine guru Danny Sullivan and Google’s own Matt Cutts.

Sub domains are domains which are created under one main domain. They do not need to be registered – it is the main domain that is required to do that. The fact is that we already use sub domains on a daily basis – perhaps we are merely unaware of this. Take for example the “www” of the World Wide Web – this is the most widely used sub domain. Other examples of sub domains are http://maps.google.com and http://store.apple.com. They are both under their parent domains, which are google.com and apple.com respectively.

What about false domains? You would normally see these in the form of www.theircompany.com/yourcompany/. This merely means that they are creating a directory for you under their own domain. In effect, you do not really own a domain – it is a false one. This is commonly used for personal purposes and is not really advisable for business.

On the other hand, one rich source of domain names would be the expired domains list. When you register a domain, it is for a certain period only. After that period, it expires and is up for grabs – unless you re-register it. In any case, if you are in the market for a domain name, you might want to take a look at the list of expired domains.

Pubcon, one of the leading webmaster and internet marketing conferences is coming back to Las Vegas this December in their first four day event. Two of the keynote speakers have already been announced with Matt Cutts from Google and Craig Newmark from the famous Craig’s List. If you haven’t attended Pubcon in the past, but are serious about internet marketing – this is a must conference for you. If you have attended, I’m sure you don’t need my recommendation and assume you are planning on returning this year too.

You should book your stay early since prices should go up as the conference gets closer. A good way to save some money is not booking the hotels directly adjacent to the convention center, but either booking a hotel within walking distance or any hotel that is on the monorail route since there is a monorail stop right by the convention center.

Try going to realtravel.com, they make booking Las Vegas hotels easy and you can use their on screen map to find a hotel that can offer you easy access to the convention center while keeping within your budget. Also check out some of the user tips and travel blogs on the site for some after hour activities. Don’t forget – what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

The webmaster community has been on edge for the past few weeks speculating on the future of Google Page Rank. Most SEO’s estimated that a Google Page Rank update should have taken place by the end of July or beginning of August to the latest. But as day after day goes by and no update apparent the community is flooded with rumors and speculation as to what is going on. Some point out that while Page Rank has been known to update itself around once every 3 months (with the intervals spreading out with each update), there have been cases in the past, especially around this time of year where the update took longer.

It is important to note that the actual Page Rank of each site is considered to update by Google much more often with suggestions by Google spokespeople indicating approximately a weekly update. The only thing that happens with a quarterly update is the export of the current Page Rank values to the Google toolbar.

Truth to be said Google would be quite happy to remove this famous little green bar from their toolbar as it just invites circumventing of the system and encourages the purchase and sale of links. In fact, the last few weeks have shown signs of a slow period in text link sales as people are waiting for the update to see the actual value of what they are purchasing (the current data is almost four months old and may not be correct anymore). But they know just too well that removing the Page Rank indicator from their toolbar will be removing the main reason why millions of people worldwide bother to keep their toolbar live on their browser.

The recent delay in the Page Rank update has also generated some more extreme rumors suggesting that Google is not only reconsidering the display on the toolbar but actually how they measure Page Rank itself. Some suggested they had a source inside Google confirming that the current Page Rank system will be replaced by what they call Web Rank which will give much more weight to factors such as content and relevancy. But none of this has been substantiated by anyone in Google and as some bloggers have pointed out Web Rank is a Yahoo trademark making it quite unlikely that Google will be using such a name.