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The power to publish directly via the web came with responsibilities and over the last 21 years business has had to adapt to this new reality.

Then along came Social Media - with it's own perils - did you know all content published on Social Media platforms is subject to regulation under Australian law...including all comments and visitor interaction?

Social Media has delivered the most powerful marketing tool to business since the Internet itself, but the moral of this story is there are big traps for young players.

Before engaging in Social Media activity, be sure you understand the legal responsibilities - and the terms and conditions of the various platforms you use.

For more information about the Australian broadcasting standards see the ACMA website and some popular Social Media Platforms terms of use pages are here:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Google+
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

As a leading provider of e-commerce solutions for more than a decade, we're always striving to meet demands for new functionality that satisfies the current and future requirements of the hundreds of clients using our iASP shopping cart and the hundreds of thousands of customers who in turn purchase goods and services via desktop and mobile devices using our technology.

To that end we are pleased to announce the release of new advanced adjustment and shipping rules that now allow for practically any adjustment imaginable at the checkout based on any combination of individual customer attributes, product attributes or transaction attributes.

For example, a vendor can now offer 50% off shipping to customers named Paul who purchase XXL Blue T-shirts on Tuesdays between 4:00pm and 5:00pm!

In the lead up to Christmas we're releasing more exciting new e-commerce functions, so please watch this space!

There are literally hundreds of factors Google uses to calculate search rankings.

SEO professionals spend their lives tweaking client websites to extract every possible advantage, however, in our experience, focusing on the following 4 areas will see most websites rise above their Google competition.

1: Overall Content

If your website does not contain the key words ice cream then chances are it won't appear in a Google search for that search term.

The placement and density of key words and phrases within a web page is the most important on-page search engine optimisation (SEO) metric.

2: Page Titles

Page Titles (for the technically minded Meta Titles), after the overall content, are the most important area to place your primary keywords and phrases.

Every page on a web site should include a unique Page Title. Page Titles not only serve as headlines for the page but also factor heavily in key word weighting.

3: Domain Name

If your domain name contains the key words within a search term you're well on the way to a high search ranking for that term.

For example, try a Google search for: peaches and cream (pages from Australia) and note the top results.

4: Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank was once the most important Google ranking factor and is still a useful method of measuring the overall link popularity of a web page.

Google Page Rank is based on the link structure of the web where a link from site A to site B can be considered a vote by site A for site B.

To get a FREE overview of your website's SEO performance, visit http://www.seobenchmarker.com.au/ and try the free Search Engine Ranking Score Tool, or to learn more about SEO download a free copy of the SEO Benchmarker white paper: An Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

Bootstrap is a popular, modern, front-end UI development framework. It has a 12-column grid responsive layout and includes custom buttons and form elements of its own. Additionally, Bootstrap includes several JavaScript components such as carousels, modals, alerts, and tabs. The component and plugin library is large and community support continues to grow. Overall, Bootstrap is a full featured solution for making a responsive website.

Foundation is another popular responsive front-end framework. Like Bootstrap, Foundation includes a responsive grid system, base CSS, CSS components, and JavaScript plugins. It's also a 12-column flexible grid, but it can scale out to an arbitrary size that's also easily nested. Foundation was built using the mindset of "Mobile First". With the Foundation framework, the grid classes account for mobile devices first, and treat larger devices as the exception. Foundation will be a great choice if you focus on your mobile site more.

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size. Skeleton seems to be most ideal for simple concise websites that don't require a lot of extra features as it's got just the bare essentials and nothing more. The Skeleton template only works up to a 960 pixel width. For those users who want to get started with responsive design quickly, you should look into this open source project.

We all know that, for most businesses, social media is an invaluable tool. Everyone has advice and everyone has multiple accounts, but what if you're new to social media for business and want to take baby steps and learn the ropes?

The quickest way to build confidence and get you on the road to effectively managing your social media is to educate yourself. We recommend that you read as much as possible on the subject (Mashable.com is a great resource!) and get your hands dirty in a monitoring tool. There are a variety of social media monitoring platforms out there to help you schedule content, respond to relevant issues, and provide customer service, but if you're a novice, tweetdeck is one of the most straight forward tools.

With all the reading you're doing, if you're still not ready to post, you can keep an eye on keywords. Set up tweetdeck searches for your business name, words relevant to your business, an potential new clients. For example, if you have an iPhone repair shop in Geelong, you could set up a search for "iPhone repair Geelong" in tweetdeck. When a tweeter posts about their broken screen, you can respond directly. It couldn't be easier.