For most web designers and web developers Internet Explorer 6 is considered to be one of the worst things unleased on the internet. The IE 6 browser was released back in 2001, and has a long list of problems that I won't go into detail with here. So back in 2001 IE6 was great right, well yeah, but now it is 8 years old and by any technology standard that it is old hat.

IE 6 is a last-generation browser. This means that IE 6 can't provide the same web experience that modern browsers can. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences for users. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it's time to finally move beyond the ancient IE 6 browser.
 

E6 is no longer supported by Microsoft and there are a number of other free browsers that are vastly superior, yet something like 35% of all internet users still use IE6 even though it just takes minutes to upgrade to a better browser!
 

However continued support of IE 6 means that we can't optimize our web interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our web design and web developments. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers and website users. Continuing to support IE 6 holds us back as a collective web user group and supresses iniative web design because cool new features just aren't supported in IE6.

For any web developers that want to help the cause and phase out Internet Explorer 6,  go to the following link which provides web designers with a cool bit of code to give your website visitors an option of which browser they use to view your site: http://www.end6.org/

Many webmasters and site owners get caught up in the influence of two main factors of SEO, Googles Rank and the Alexa Ranking. First of all what are they? Google PageRank is Google's way of deciding a webpage importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page ranking in the search results. It measures a pages importance by considering multiple factors.

Alexa rankings rate a site for the traffic which has visited over a period of months. This gives a stable realistic view of a site measure of traffic and how it ranks compared to other sites.

Now whatever the site we all want it to rank well, increase traffic and make us more money, but which ranking is more important. Recently we refreshed our designlots.com website and had a burst of traffic. Our Alexa ranking climbed considerably, traffic was up by 30,000%, sounds impressive but is really happening.

Yes we are getting lots of traffic, but from a business sense is it quality traffic, is it the traffic we want that turns into business leads? Alexa was giving us a snap shot of how our website compares to other website in the popularity stakes, buts that’s about all.

Our Google rank did nothing during this increase of traffic. So does Alexa influence Google? not very much and it’s not immediately, though one would think that a popular site would be considered important by Google.

Both of these ranking are good to be aware of, but to measure your site accurately, both need to be working for you. Google Rank and Alexa rank are both important measures of your website, but at the end of the day the best measure is how many times a day your phone rings.

• 1. Write articles, reports and reviews for other websites to publish, there are plenty of Blogs out there, and then put your website address in the by-line. If you can write good articles, something people are genuinely interested in, this will generate traffic.
  
  
• 2. Start exchanging Links with other websites. This is a very effective strategy to generate targeted traffic to your website. Stay away from dodgy link farms and try to only submit links in reputable websites and directories.
  
  
• 3. Add a Blog, just like this one, to your site and Ping weblogs.com and the other search engines. Pinging your Blogs to the search engines like Google is the fastest way to get search engine robots to visit your Blog, also creating yourself a Technorati Profile as well is great for attracting a number of new visitors to your web site regularly.
  
  
• 4. Become an active commenter and try to leave your comments, good positive comments, on the Blogs that you visit regularly. Most Blogs should allow you to add a link to your own website. So if your comment stirs the pot a little, your bound to create traffic for your site.
  
  
• 5. Finally add your website address to your own email signature, most mail clients let you do this. Each time you send an email to someone, you'll be promoting your own website, and generating more traffic.