Every time Google updates PageRank, I learn something new. During the update before last (August 08) I was really mad because my PageRank of my main site dropped form PR5 to PR4. I really got my hopes up while waiting for the August update – I thought for sure that it was going to increase to PR6 instead of drop. Before the update I was working hard every to nab as many links as I could – from PR0 to PR7. Then the update came and my whole PageRank world came crashing down. That is when I stopped caring about gaming my site’s PageRank. I found out that day that Google is insanely good at analyzing websites and they can tell very quickly when your website is getting some abnormal attention.

The great thing about not worrying about PageRank is that you don’t build up expectations only to be let down. When I noticed today that I moved back up to PR5 I was surprised and happy because I was not expecting it nor did I even care about PageRank at that point.

All I can say to anyone who experienced a PR drop is to try and not worry too much about it. Try to keep in mind that even though your PR may have lowered, it doesn’t mean you will get less traffic from the search engines. Even when my main site went from PR5 down to 4, my search engine referral traffic stayed the exact same. PageRank is just a number, and not how valuable your site is. I also think that the more you try and game your PageRank, the worse off your website rank will be. Just build back links to your website naturally and slowly. I believe this is the key. If you all the sudden start getting these awesome high PR links out of nowhere, Google will start to get suspicious because it is not a normal thing for this to happen.

Just keep working at it and don’t get discouraged. I know that I was when I dropped rank but just remember you can only go up from there. Things could be worse you know -Atleast you didn’t get banned!

Related posts:

1. Free online Google PageRank and Alexa Rank Checker
2. Google PageRank vs Alexa Rank. Determining a website’s advertising value through PR and Alexa Rank
3. How to get your website listed on Google and Yahoo in 24 hours

When I first thought about adding a blog to my website, I was really skeptical. I noticed that everyone and his mother had a blog. How could a journal style website possibly help my business increase its sales? What’s so special about a blog that I can’t do with my website?

There is one myth that I want to clear up before we get into this: a blog is given no special advantage over a static website as far as search engines and search engine rankings are concerned.

Blogs tend to rank better for the following reasons:

1. Blogs are updated more frequently than your main website – search engine bots love continuously updated content and websites. My new blog posts get indexed within 30 minutes.
2. Blogs are typically programmed a lot better from a SEO perspective.
3. They often can simulate a community within the blog itself through user comments and author response.

One thing that I am certain about is that blogs are a lot easier to build up traffic to than your standard corporate style website. In 6 months, I am generating the same amount of traffic to my blog as my main sales website that has been online for 6 years.

• I am able to write about broader topics on my blog compared to my sales pages where I can only write content that is to sell my product. This leads to more search engine traffic because I am able to write content with different keywords than my main site.
• I am also able to add content onto my blog that an average user will find helpful. For instance, I could write an article on how to setup a website a web hosting account. To someone new to building websites, this will be more helpful compared to a sales page that provides no usable or helpful information.

Blog posts are great for long tail search engine traffic

Long Tail Lizard

By adding a lot of related keywords to your blog posts, you can build up some really nice long tail keyword traffic. Also, whenever your readers comment they leave behind some more related keywords that you might have missed during your initial post. I often see search terms that look like this – ‘how to setup a a wordpress blog and monetize it’ while on my main sales site I will only get short tail terms like ‘wordpress blog hosting‘

Now for the two favorite things about my blog:

1. Blogs are really easy to update. Static websites are often a pain to update because you have to go through and change every page to make the changes global. For my blog, all I need to do is add a post and BAM everything is nicely linked together and tied into the rest of the website with no additional work.
2. Your blog can syndicate its content to other websites. Within your blog admin panel, there is a section where you can input a list of RSS syndication networks to ping. The next time you update your blog, your new post is syndicated out to thousands of different websites. This can bring in some nice traffic to your site because every post that is syndicated links back to the original source blog.

So how can my blog help my main sales pages?

With proper linking, it is really easy to filter the traffic within your blog to your desired sales/landing pages. Basically what I am trying to do is build my blog up so that it gets a large amounts of traffic, then filter this traffic to my main business website. It is often more expensive to get traffic to my sale pages than to get it to my blog. Blog traffic is much more…organic, if you will. One thing that you can do with your blog is show off your knowledge on a certain topic. This gives your readers/future clients the impression that you are knowledgeable on your topic and that you are the go to guy/gal for that product/service.

While a blog does take a little bit of time and a lot of writing, I truly believe it is a great way to increase web traffic to your sales pages. It can also be a great source of extra income for your main business if you advertise on your blog properly.

Related posts:

1. Building web site backlinks to increase your search engine rankings. Off page SEO
2. How to make a successful and popular website or blog. Making a well known website.
3. Advantage of a self-hosted Blog. Why using a paid web hosting service is better for blogging.

There are many free web applications available that are basically a website in a box. All you do is install the script and find a good pre designed theme for your software. I will use the WordPress blog software in this example but there are plenty of other free web apps available for download.

What is WordPress anyway?

WordPress is a free blogging script written in PHP and programmed to run off a MySQL database. Even though WP is considered a blogging software, it can be converted to act as your standard idea of a website.

Part 1: Installation/Setup and Configuration

I am assuming that you already have two things:

• A Web hosting account that supports PHP and MySQL
• A domain name

To begin the installation, download the latest stable version of WordPress from www.wordpress.org. Unzip the file into a folder labeled blog.

Login to your FTP server or file manager and navigate to your web document root. If you are on a cpanel server it would be /public_html

By uploaded the folder blog to /public_html you can access your blog install at http://yourdomain.com/blog/

If you want to install the blog so that it is viewable by going to www.yourdomain.com than upload the contents under the directory ‘blog’ and not the directory ‘blog’ itself. Basically you are uploaded the contents in blog while leaving the main directory ‘blog’ on your computer.

After you have uploaded the files, it is now time to setup your database. You can do this within your web hosting control panel like cpanel, plesk, directadmin, etc.

Once you have created the database and added a user to it, you must setup the config file within wordpress. This is located at /public_html/blog/wp-config-sample.php

Edit the file in notepad and change the database information so that it reflects the database you just setup. Save the file as wp-config.php. Upload this file to /public_html/blog/. If you have done this right, it will NOT ask you to overwrite any files.

Your setup is now completed. All you have to do is go to your blog installation through www.yourdomain.com and it will quick WP Setup. All you have to do is fill in a few text boxes…it’s easy don’t worry.

So now you have a default website setup installed to be viewable at www.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/blog. If you want to, you could start your website right now…however it will be the default look/configuration.

Now it is time to change the look of your website:

Simply download the theme you want at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Unzip and upload the theme directory to your wordpress installations theme repository located at: /public_html/blog/wp-content/theme/. You will see 1 or 2 of the default themes already in there.

To enable the them, login to your wp admin panel located at http://youdomain.com/blog/wp-admin or http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ (depending on where you uplaoded it). Click the themes tab, click the thumbnail of the theme you just uploaded and click activate.

Thats it! Now you have a brand new website that will look really good which is also easy to use and update.

That is great, but its not exactly what I wanted!

I highly recommend you play with WordPress before you come to this conclusion. I guarantee that WP can do 99% of the things you want it to do. You just need to play around with it. If you really want your website to be 100% the way you want it, than forget about using pre installed software and go pick up a few web design books – html, css, and working with photoshop. Then spend the next year designing as many websites as you can. Your first web design is going to look like crap, your 2nd web design is going to be just as worse, and your third design might be slightly better than the 1st and 2nd. Web design is all a matter of experience and NOT knowledge.

Related posts:

1. Build your website – picking the right web hosting type
2. 0bones.com updated to 1.1. Start, build, and promote your website for free.
3. Free Backlink building methods. Build free back links for better search engine rankings.

Valuable back links are links that are do-follow. These are set within a website by the web master to tell the search engines to follow the links placed on the website. These do-follow links pass rank value to the site it is linking to. I use a firefox plugin called SEO for Firefox (how original, right?) in order to quickly tell if a link is a do follow or no follow link. Links that are no-follow are highlighted in red. If the website you want to place your link on has all no follow links, you might be better off looking for another website for your free back links.

Do-follow blogs.

Do follow blogs allow users to post a comment and include a link back to his/her website. A no-follow blog will allow you to do the same, but the difference is that do-follow passes rank value while no-follow does not. There are a couple websites that will list the do-follow blogs out there – here is one good one http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollowdiver/

When commenting on these blogs, make sure to actually read the post and leave a valuable comment. Not just some junk you type in there just to get a backlink. The blog owner is more likely to approve a good comment than a 10 second SPAM comment. A good comment should be atleast 3 sentences or more.

Do follow forums

The great thing about do-follow forums is that it is very easy to gain a large number of backlinks in little time. Although forum backlinks aren’t as valuable as other methods, they are still useful to gain some extra search ranking boosts. To get the most out of these links, you should join a do-follow forum related to the niche of your website. For instance, if you ran a web hosting website, you would search Google for web hosting forums. These links will be highly relevant to your website so its definitely worth grabbing as many as you can. After you register with the forum, set up your signature to display links to your website and its inner pages. Most forums allow 2-4 links per signature.

One extra bonus in being active on these do-follow forums is that you will gain some good traffic from these forums if you write GOOD threads and replies. The higher quality the posts, the more someone will be enticed to visit the website of the knowledgeable poster.

Related posts:

1. Building web site backlinks to increase your search engine rankings. Off page SEO
2. On page search engine optimization. The most important web page factors
3. Search Engine Position Tool

Websites that will need a dedicated IP:

Anonymous FTP enabled websites – A dedicated IP is required if you want to allow your web site visitors to download files from your FTP server anonymously. Websites that use anonymous FTP are typically file sharing websites or big mirror download sites. This does not mean you need a dedicated IP to FTP files from a server through a username and password, but if you want your visitors to access files from ftp://yoursite.com/file.zip WITHOUT having to login, get the IP.

E-commerce Websites - If you ever want to accept credit cards on your website, you will need a secure connection to do it. Your site will need a SSL cert which requires your site to be on a dedicated IP to work. So if you plan to accept credit cards through your website at any point, pay the extra monthly fee for the IP. By installing a SSL cert, you can redirect visitors to the secure connection for your site by having them forwarded to https://yoursite.com/url/for/order/page.

Reseller Hosting Accounts – If you ever want to have your own custom name servers: IE ns1.yoursite.com + ns2.yoursite.com, you will need 2 dedicated IPs – one for each name server. Some resellers like to have their own name servers so that they are less transparent to their reseller hosting company. If you are trying to sell web hosting, ns1.yoursite.com + ns2.yoursite.com looks much better than telling your clients to use ns1.YourResellerHost.com ns2.YourResellerHost.com

Advantages of a dedicated IP for SEO

Some say that putting your site on a dedicated IP will give you a boost in search engine ranking results for that particular website. I do not agree with this.

If you have one website, a dedicated IP will not rank you higher in the search engines. BUT, if you have a multiple websites, it is to your advantage to put each of these on a different IP because the search engine is less likely to connect your websites together. Here is an example to help you understand this better:

You have 4 websites and you want to make a 5th. Your 4 websites are ranked but are all on the same IP address. You place a link on each of your 4 websites to your 5th in order to pass on rank value to the 5th. The search engine will see that your new site has links from 4 websites. When it goes to check the IPs for the sites linking to the 5th, it will find that they are all hosted on the same server because the IP addresses are the same. The search engine will assign less rank value to the 5th site because it knows that the 4 sites linking to it are all related/owned by the same person. If you put each site on a different IP, it will ‘think’ the sites are totally unrelated therefore assigning more link value to those links.

Dedicated IP for email myth

Some people think by signing up for a dedicated IP the email for the website will be sent through a different IP. This is not true. Most hosts have their email server setup to send all email through one IP address. This can cause problems sometimes because eventually one of these emails will be flagged as SPAM which will end up getting that IP address black listed. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do aside from getting your own dedicated email server. Sometimes that isn’t enough either because these SPAM blacklists will sometimes black list a whole netblock if SPAM comes from any of the IPs on it. So basically one bad server in a group will get the other servers blacklisted as well even though they are totally unrelated.

Related posts:

1. LOL @ Free reseller hosting plans and free dedicated server requests
2. How to get your website listed on Google and Yahoo in 24 hours
3. Free webmaster tools – website speed test, keyword checker, keyword density, & PageRank checker

Some people will tell you it takes 2-3 weeks to get indexed. This is not true. I recently created 2 websites and with my method I was able to get both indexed within 24 hours. Here’s how easy it is.

Sign up for accounts on the following social networking sites:
www.digg.com
www.propeller.com
www.Slashdot.org
www.Furl.net
www.bibsonomy.org
www.Newsvine.com
www.Mister-wong.com

After you signup, start submitting content to the sites with links to your new website. It will take you roughly 15 minutes to signup and post on all these sites. Posting on the 8 websites above SHOULD get you indexed quickly.

For good measure, you might want to also submit your website to a few others like:
Connotea.org
Mixx.com
Thoof.com
Folkd.com
Backflip.com
Technorati.com
Reddit.com
Del.icio.us

All the websites I listed in this post are frequently searched by the search engine bots. Some of the bigger sites are visited every hour. Getting a link on all these sites will insure that your site is indexed quickly.

Have fun and good luck posting!

Sign

Related posts:

1. Todays unexpected Google PageRank update. New pageranks for September 08
2. Google PageRank vs Alexa Rank. Determining a website’s advertising value through PR and Alexa Rank
3. Fund your web hosting with PPC programs like YPN and Google Adsense

So I went to BestBuy the other day and bought a hard drive with unlimited space for my computer and now I don’t ever have to worry about running out of disk space again!

No one would ever believe the above statement right? But when a web hosting provider claims they offer an unlimited amount of disk space people are easily suckered in. Why is this? Maybe they think that web hosts have access to futuristic hardware that a regular consumer doesn’t have access to.

Best case scenario example: let’s say the web host uses servers with 10 hard drives at 1TB each. This brings the available disk space to 10TB. Yes 10TB….that is a lot…but it still isn’t Unlimited TB. The thing is, it’s physically impossible to offer unlimited disk space. I can guarantee you that no web hosting company will let you monopolize its disk resources.

Let’s take a look at the Terms of Service of some popular unlimited web hosting companies(these are real companies with names removed). They are very tricky when it comes to what you can use their service for:

===========
xyzCompany will not tolerate any form of storage space abuse. At least 90% of YOUR web pages (”HTML”) must be ‘linked’ with files (GIF, JPEG, etc.) stored on xyzCompany servers. Website that are found to contain either/or no HTML documents, a large number of unlinked files are subject to files deletion or account cancelation at the discretion of xyzCompany with or without prior notice.

xyzCompany reserve the rights to terminate any account found to contain file streaming such as audio, radio and video streams (AVI, MPG, MPEG, MOV, MP3, PODCASTS, etc)

If YOU do not qualify for the unlimited service, disk space will go unmonitored until YOU reach the amount allocated to YOUR specific web hosting plan (”PLAN”). Thereafter, normal website data storage costs $0.20/1MB/month will be billed to YOUR account. If you want to pre-pay for disk space overages, you will be billed $0.10/1MB/month.
===========
Basically what they are saying here is unless your website is 90% HTML and images you will have unlimited disk space. Otherwise, you are only allowed to use xyz amount of disk space and bandwidth.

Another very popular ToS clause is the server resource monopolization clause. This basically states that if a user is abusing server resources (RAM and CPU time), the account will be automatically suspended. So if you have a website with any amount of decent traffic, your website will be terminated. If your accounts starts to use up too much disk space or bandwidth, they will simply say you are abusing server resources and give you the boot.

In conclusion, it is impossible for a web hosting company to offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space because it is physically impossible to do so. Disk space costs money and bandwidth costs money; it’s as simple as that. These unlimited web hosting companies are using phony marketing tactics to lore you in.

Related posts:

1. Web hosting plans with 100GB of disk space and 1000GB of bandwidth. Do you really need it?
2. CPU limit exceeded warning: from shared web hosting to VPS hosting
3. Web host overselling tactics explained. How hosting providers offer so much for so little

Todays search engines rank your site based on how many links from other websites are pointed to it. Each back link is given a value depending on how relevant it is to your site, how popular the site linking to you is, and how many back links that site is giving to other web pages.

Google labels each web site it indexes with a PageRank between 0-10. Sites with a higher page rank value are considered to be more valuable websites. These websites gain their high value rating by having a lot of links from other high PR sites. You will want to try and gain back links to your web site from these high page rank/high value web sites. However, this is easier said than done. You will find that links from PR7 and above are really difficult to get.

I will explain to you how these links can effect your rankings with an example. Let’s pretend I run a web hosting business called xyzWebhosters.com.

I have searched the web and have found two web sites that I can put my link on:

Website number 1 – PR 6 – A web site about web hosting

Website number 2 – PR6 – A web site about dogs and cats

A Web site number 1 text link will provide more of a value to my web page because it is related to what my web page is about. Web site number 2 is still a high PR page but it has nothing to do with my site so it will provide less ranking value to my website than website number 1.

Here Is another:

10 web sites with PR of 4 about web hosting

1 web site with PR 5 on web hosting

The single web site with PR5 will provide about the same value as having 10 different PR 4 web sites linking to you. One PR5 link is about = 10 pr4 links. Now you should have a general idea how quantity and quality of links are related. A bunch of low PR links do provide your site with ranking value, but a single higher PR page will provide your page with the most value.

Where can you get back links from you ask? There are many ways to getting back links. Some you can get for free, some you won’t be so lucky with.

Do follow blogs - Do follow blogs are a great way for you to get links to your website. These do follow blogs are blogs that have taken off the standard no-follow meta tag and made it so their web site passes on link value to yours. I recommend you check out http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollowdiver/ for a list of a lot of do follow blogs. You can even filter by niche so that you can find blogs related to your site. Leave valuable comments on the blogs you are posting on or else you won’t be given a link. They will just mark you as SPAM

Another way to gain free back links is through web site directory submissions. You could spend days and days doing this and still have thousands of more directories to submit your site to. Here is a good list of some Page ranked web directories that you might want to submit to:

http://tucsonseosolutions.com/dofollowlistoflists

Start with the high PR directories and work your way down. Directory links aren’t as valuable to your site as regular web sites can be. This is because directories tend to have thousands of outgoing links on them so the search engines rank the links with less power and value.

Try to only build between 30-50 backlinks a day. Any more than that and it’s possible the search engines will think you are spamming your links. If this happens they will stop adding the value those links give to your site so your efforts are pretty much wasted. Remember to build your links naturally to avoid this penalties.

Related posts:

1. Free Backlink building methods. Build free back links for better search engine rankings.
2. On page search engine optimization. The most important web page factors
3. Search Engine Position Tool

SEO can be broken down into two main parts – On page optimization, and link building. Your rankings are dependent on these 2 factors. The value of each is roughly:

25% On page optimization
75% Link building

Without either your web site is doomed. Although On page optimization is only 25% of your ranking value, without it your page won’t rank at all so it is best to start here. On page optimization can be broken down into two parts – hidden and visible.

Today I am going to focus on how to optimize the hidden attributes of your web page in order to gain the most traffic from the top search engines.

The hidden SEO attributes include optimizing your web page’ title and your meta tags. The hidden attributes are all found between your <head></head> tags. This is a web hosting blog so I am going to setup a example trying to target the keyword ‘shared web hosting‘.

First start by creating and saving the page with the keywords as part of the file name. For this example I would save my page as shared-web-hosting.html. This will give you a slight boost because major search engines will see the page name shared-web-hosting and will believe the page is about shared web hosting. Some say that hyphens help the search engine parse the keywords out of the URL so you might as well include the hyphens.

Now within the <head></head> tags you will find the two HTML attributes that are used for SEO.

The first and most important tag is your <title></title> tag. Within the <title> tag you will want to use your keyword twice but no more than twice or else your page might be marked as SPAM by the search engines.

If I am targeting the keyword shared web hosting I will want to make my title tags like this:

<title>Shared web hosting Information page. Learn about shared web hosting</title>

Notice how my keyword is used at the beginning and the end of the title. Search engines love this(at least for now). Make sure you use no more than 65 characters.

The second tag that you are going to use for SEO are the <meta> tags. There are a bunch of meta tags but we are going to focus on 2 particular ones. These tags are:

Your meta tags should go directly under your title tag but still within the header tags of your site.

<title>title here</title>

<meta name=“description” content=“2 sentence description of your page” />

<meta name=“keywords” content=“a good, amount, of, keywords to use, is, between, 10-20″ />

These are important no matter what people tell you. Make these accurate to the content of your page and do not try and cheat by stuffing it with keywords or inaccurate information. You will get penalized almost instantly by all the search engines.

Here is how I would make my hidden tags look for a page targeting the search term ’shared web hosting’

filename: shared-web-hosting.html

<html>

<head>

<title>The Shared web hosting Resource. Find articles on Shared Web Hosting</title>

<meta name=“description” content=“Find all the information you need about shared web hosting. We have
quality shared web hosting documents and web hosting industry news” />

<meta name=“keywords” content=“shared web hosting, web host, shared hosting, shared website hosting, shared, hosting industry articles, web hosting news, web, hoster” />

</head>

This is a good place to start with your on page optimization project. If your old page wasn’t keyworded by using the proper hidden attributes, you should now notice an instant boost in search engine rankings for the keywords you were aiming for. To learn the best way on how to design your hidden tags is to just mess around with it until you find the best results. It’s just a matter of practice.

Related posts:

1. Building web site backlinks to increase your search engine rankings. Off page SEO
2. Search Engine Position Tool
3. Free Backlink building methods. Build free back links for better search engine rankings.