For optimizing Search Engine Placement and driving referral traffic, getting links to your business or ministry site is absolutely essential. Unfortunately, despite the critical need for this, many Webmasters don't even know how to check the links they currently have, much less how to get more.

If I say the phrase, Orthodox author to you, what name comes to mind? Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Perhaps a Theological writer like Bishop Kallistos Ware or Father Alexander Schmemann?

But, if you searched for the phrase Orthodox author using Google for the first few weeks of December 2007, you wouldn't find any of those famous authors at the top of the search results.

Instead, you would find Heather Zydek and Father Leon Castner .

I heard my wife screaming on the phone. I ran into the room, thinking something major was going wrong. Like a home invasion, or a fire or something.

Turns out, she was yelling at technical support because she couldn't get the Website our umbrella school uses to track grades and attendance to take her recent updates.

The old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words" may be a cliche but in the case of technical training - it's absolutely true.

Welcome to my blog. Please send me your questions and comments.

Seizing the day and using our God-given talents: This is why my sister and I chose MLM (multilevel marketing) as the basic structure for our business.

HELPING OTHERS BY BEING TRUE TO OURSELVES

At age nine, I taught my three-year-old sister Angel how to read.

Having a first period class in college was bad enough. But, when the class was Russian History during the Middle Ages with an elderly professor nearing retirement, well that was downright torturous. Especially when the professor was a man known for his dry wit.

I remember sitting there one morning, bleary eyed, as he stood in front discussing the Great Schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches and its effects on Eastern Europe.

I could hear the frustration in her voice as we talked. The head of a non-profit, she was upset about her Website. It hadn't been updated in a year, and she desperately needed to get control of it. She had fundraising product to sell, supporters to keep updated, and prospective member information to distribute.

Techies love acronyms. So much so, in fact, that we often sound like we're speaking a foreign language to normal humans. That's too bad, because a lot of times the acronyms obscure information about really, really useful tools.

"Haven't you written anything about what you actually do for living?"

That question floored me. It shouldn't have, but it did.

I mean, I was in Google.

Whenever I tell someone that I teach the harp, they always assume that my students are children. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Over the years, my adult beginner students have outnumbered the children. I like adult beginners........and they like me.

Success is built into my classes. I nurture a "can do" attitude. We take baby steps and have fun along the way

I took over my first parish Website in 2000, when I was still a catechumen. Back then I was working primarily in the mainframe space, and the Web was both new and somewhat scary. I got an extra copy of Frontpage 2000 at the office, and started putting icons and gold coloring on pages of my own for Holy Trinity in Maitland, Florida.