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Nov242009

Location of Your Web Host

web hostingHow important is the location of your web host? Here I explain how much more important it is then you think!

All the way from FTC regulations for blogging websites through to Global Warming, when choosing a web host you should really consider where their servers are located and if this effects the industry that you are in. Recent regulations say that Bloggers from USA need to follow the new FTC laws. So this also means if you are a blogger with a site on a US server you have to consider the legalities.

I recently started to use servers that are located in Canada because Canada is a cold destination and is a good way to keep the servers cool. There were recent talks from BBC that some countries such as Iceland are becoming more known now for IT hubs and server space. 100% of the country’s electricity is renewable and basically carbon free, much generated from water heated far below the ground. So carbon dioxide savings are enormous. Banks who have hundreds and thousands of servers are also looking at alternative re-location methods such as this.

Another example is if you are targeting website traffic from say New Zealand, then a server from New Zealand wil help you get your site more optimized for the New Zealand search engines. Search engines such as Google rank your site based on server location and IP. So for SEO purposes location plays a big role.

Also beware when having your server located in US. Never presume this is totally safe. For example, personally I wouldn’t host my websites on servers that are based in Florida as there are quite a lot of hurricanes, if your server is also located in earthquake areas then your chances of losing your data or sites are fairly high. There are alot of web host companies that have servers located in Texas and this area seems to be very safe.

UK Web Hosting companies are also another hot topic at the moment. Registration of European domain names are much easily accepted through UK host companies. Domain name registrations for .eu web addresses peaked at three million earlier this year. So this is a prime real estate area!

Be careful when having your websites located on Asian servers such as China or Thailand. If you state anything politically incorrect on your sites you can get fined big time, your sites will not only be shut down but you can also be imprisoned.

Having a local host is also an option for some as faster upload and download speed is a luxury for your websites and customer care is quicker for support.

Hope this is helpful for you for when choosing a host and remember to take into as much consideration as possible.

Oct162009

10 Creative Ways to Get Millions of Backlinks

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backlinks

1. Be a web development company and when you build sites for your clients put your link in the footer of the site with an embedded link pointing back to your site. As the clients pages and content grow so does your links.

2. Design your own free Wordpress theme, or open source programs for users to download with your link copyright encrypted inside the footer.

3. Offer a submission service site for example Katz downloads but require the site owner to have to place your link before you accept their submission.

4. Design a widget that users can embed on their site for example an alexa toolbar which shows your sites stats publicly. You can design one of your own widgets that you think users would like related to your site.

5. Run your own video or image hosting website, when images are uploaded to websites the links or videos are usually set to point to the site where they were from.

6. Set up a bookmarking type of site and offer your snippet to be accepted in ShareThis.com. If they accept your submission you will have millions of users bookmarking your site through your own bookmark site.

7. Run an affiliate program having your banner placed on other websites pointing to your site. Offer a huge range of banners in your program in many different shapes and sizes to choose.

8. Offer a kind of award program that users feel proud to add to their site if they are one of the top performers they can show this badge off.

9. Set up your own advertising site for example like buysellads.com or text-link-ads.com make users display the banner or link “advertise here” pointing to your main advertising site, so even if the space hasn’t been filled you get a backlink in the meantime.

10. Offer a SSL certificate program something similar to Verisign for shopping or ecommerce sites that show buyers that your site is secure, by getting verified users to place this button on their site will gain in huge back link exposure.

All though all these 10 ways cover most niches, you may have a site that does not fit into those suggestions listed. Therefore It is up to you to utilize your creative thinking and this will in turn allow your users to naturally add your link gaining you high exposure, more authority and higher traffic to your site. Good Luck!

Oct152009

Press Releases for SEO

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Doing a press release regularly or atleast monthly is a great idea for gaining authority backlinks and gaining credibility on the internet.

One thing is for sure if the press release is done right it will benefit your search engine rankings. You normally see many sites with news from Yahoo buzz for example. If submitted to major press release sites PRWeb being one, they generally release these out for you to the major channels and regional news sites for you.

Usually you can add video to your press release, your logo and links pointing to your site, so they can be extremely powerful.

To optimize your press release for the search engines, it is a little bit different from traditional newspaper ads, you will need to be clever and think of words that you want to rank for when writing your release.

It is important that you have a strong title for your press release to catch the reader, then a great 1st paragraph to attract them to read more. Within these 2 areas you should also use effective keywords that you want to rank high for as Google for example tend to when crawling sites gather information from the top of the page first and work their way down, sometimes leaving the further down copy out of their algorithm.

PRWeb

When you write your press release be sure to add around 3 links in the article with anchor text in it. Usually press release sites allow 3 links pointing to your site. Try and add links that not only point to your home page but inside pages of your site aswell. Once you have submitted your press release I suggest you also link to the press release from your main sites inside page somewhere to give it some link juice back and this will help distribute the juice around. You should also use sites like Digg and Reddit to submit your link to which contains the release.

Remember a press release is not an article. An article is talking about a particular topic in general without self promoting. So with the press release be sure to be as creative as possible when putting one together, and be as convincing as possible. It is really your chance to pull the reader towards whatever it is your trying to sell. 50% of users on the internet get sold by reading, the other 50% are visual people, so if you can stick the two together and do it well, continuously, then you will have some good head start. Good Luck

Oct142009

Business.com Promo Codes – PPC & Directory $50 & $100 Coupons

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Business.com have recently been promoting there $100 free credit for PPC startup’s and $50 discount for Business Directory listings.

First of all let me start off by saying that getting a directory listing with Business.com even though a bit costly proves to work very well for SEO. The links that are placed on pages tend to have very little amount of outbound links which gives your link more authority when placed with only very few other links on the one page.

Furthermore because business.com have a pagerank of 7, the inside pages tend to carry alot of weight. Inside pages where your link will be placed are generally a page rank 4 or 5.

The PPC model in the directory is certainly worth doing as Ad placements are set at the top of the page and get great exposure. Not only that Google and Facebook advertise in the directory aswell so this in itself must be worth doing to stand out with the big boys.

$50 Directory Listing Coupon
To save $50 off Business.com directory listings click the following banner:

Business.com Directory

$100 in Free PPC Clicks
Business.com for a limited time are offering $100 promo code for webmasters looking to buy traffic through their PPC program. You can click the banner for the promotion here:

Business.com PPC

The Business.com Promo is valid from 2009 all the way until 2010.

If you are also looking for other online advertising alternatives I recommend you view the page on “7 top online advertising options“

Oct132009

Yahoo Search Advertising & ROI

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Yahoo Search Advertising is a big market according to Zac Johnson who makes around $300k per month as a publisher on Yahoo Ads. But how effective is Yahoo Advertising anyway? Well I believe it should never be under estimated.

What I really like about Yahoo advertising is that when you set up your campain it straight away gives you suggested keywords and search volume for the month based on similar keywords you choose.

Bing and Yahoo recently did a deal that would put them directly in a joint venture partnership. What I also feel in this deal is that Yahoo will bring you alot of clicks through to Bing search engine.

One thing that is also good when measuring your success is a program called SpeedPPC . They now offer tracking for Yahoo, so you can now also monitor your performance based on your ROI. I highly recommend you to join before you take on Yahoo advertising seriously.
Yahoo! Search Marketing
If you are new to the advertising game in Yahoo I recommend joining on a $25 free credit voucher to start things off and take it from there.
Oct122009

Google Wave

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After 2 years of production in Sydney, Australia, Google have finally announced their new platform Google Wave . There has been alot of interest in getting an Invitation to try it out before release. It is still in beta stage and will be officially ready early next year.

They call it the 3p’s – Product – Platform – Protocol

What is really cool about this product is when you are emailing you can kind of quote each paragraph to comment on each paragraph and it automatically does spell check and corrects words for you.

google wave

What is also amazing is there is an instant messaging type of system within the platform, as you type and have a conversation the user can see that your typing and instead of waiting on the message, you can see what the user is already starting to type before they have clicked submit.

There is also a playback option that if another user jumps in on the conversation or email, they can see what was said previously without having to go back in other emails. Just really a remarkable option.

Another amazing option is the photo gallery tool. I must admit this is going to be a real test on Facebook as most users love Facebook purely for the reason that they can upload all their images. But with the Google Wave it’s so much more advanced as you can drag and drop photos straight onto your email. Once you see how this works in the video below, your mouth will honestly drop.

photo album google wave

This product being open source will be great competition in my view to Microsoft as Microsoft are always clearly after the money. And will kill programs like outlook and any other email programs will totally flop in my opinion. I tell you im certainly ready to move over as soon as they release this to the public, without question.

The Google Wave concept was initially developed as “Walkabout” by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers who developed the software that became Google Maps.

Oct122009

Linux or Windows

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As most internet users are aware Windows is the most used operating system, but Linux is slowly and steadily increasing. It also seems as though Matt Cutts from Google seems threatened by Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.

I recently partitioned my hard drive so that on start up you can login either in Windows or Linux. The reason why I wanted to do this is so that I can run most of my programs in which use passwords and are more vulnerable for attacks on Linux, as linux is known to be pretty hacker safe.

Using FTP on Linux is also a very good idea, as there are loads of password sniffer tools out there on the market that can get into your Windows and if they are smart enough can really do some damage to not only your computer but also your sites and servers.

I recently had an iframe injected into around 100 sites of mine over 4 dedicated servers. Even though im certain 2 of the other servers were not hacked as a result of the vulnerability of my system, I am still taking all precautions necessary.

One think I like about Linux is instead of downloading files from the internet and installing manually as you would on Windows. Linux allows you to run commands and install using their terminal. It’s really handy. I also the Linux system with the Ubuntu theme . The Ubuntu theme reminds me of the simplicity and layout of the Mac. Really nice layout and easy to use.

ubuntu

One thing that I cannot except though with Linux and tend to rely on Windows is using Dreamweaver. For most developers not being able to use Dreamweaver is like not being able to drive a car. So for the most part I am still using Windows and will continue to do so until Ubuntu makes it a bit easy on us developers. One thing I am impressed though is when I recently installed Windows 7.

windows 7

The Windows 7 interface is really sweet! It’s quick and very futuristic, I must say it has a touch of Vista, but without all the complicated navigation runs nothing like it and perform really well and if you ask me is just like XP but more sleek and  sexy. I know Windows 7 was giving away free download trials for 1 year up until a month or so ago, but are still offering 90 day trial’s. Here is also the Ubuntu download best of all it’s free. Give both a go and let me know how you experience these, and which one you find better!