One of HostSo server to which this blog website account of mine resides on underwent some sort of restoration work and as a result it was down for over a day and a half. I noticed the problem only when I wanted to update my blog the day before yesterday and connection timeout persists. I wrote to the their helpdesk and I got the following response:

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. The server on which your account is stored is under restoration. It will take 2 to 4 hours to complete the process. Once the process is completed then your site will be online.Meanwhile your patience and co-operation is highly appreciated.

We do apologizes for all the inconvenience caused to you, The server is going for resoration ( Re-imaging ) due to primary drive failure after 2 hours. This issue may take 7 to 8 hours. Once the restoration will get finish all the services from the server will get restore fine and you should able to access the site without any problem. We are re-imaging all the data from older drive to the new drive as it is, and due to bad shape of the primary drive its taking long to copy the data over new Disk. We request you to bear with us in this situation we can understand your frustration and your business but your patience is highly appreciated.

HostSo is the first web-hosting service provider that I signed up for as far as self hosting account is concern  and it is unimaginable that I actually just go ahead without doing much research about the company. My main concern during that time was then of affordability. The Elite package seems like a pretty good deal so I just go with it.

Downtime occurrences are high and sometime your sites just get blocked by the HostSo firewall for no apparent reason. When you write to them the support staff will respond with all sorts of excuses. Even though the Elite plan comes with “Unlimited Bandwidth” the funny thing is that they disabled my account a few times under pretext that my sites are consuming too much traffic bandwidth!

I checked the forum for complaints against this company and there are plenty of them.  Quite a high number of unhappy and frustrated customers accounts  were terminated for no obvious reasons. No warnings given whatsoever, so it seems to me that this company reputation is quite awful.

Web page loading time is very slow and to make matter worse, some adults sites are also hosted on this server. Some SEO analysis sites even reported that this blog has adult themes  for which I believed were due to sharing of the same shared server.

In summary, do your homework before you purchase hosting from any web hosting service provider. Cheaper doesn’t necessary translate to better service quality. Don’t believe the numbers and information  that you see on the company website. Take some time to research the company, check for complains, reviews and gather as much information as you can.

Choosing right best web hosting service provider for your online business is not trivial. You need to consider various aspects such as the amount of traffic that your site expect to generate, the type of software and the amount of processing power that the scripts will need, service of quality, downtime frequency and etc.

It’s  better to be safe then to be sorry later. Do check out my previous article on essential requirements for web-hosting service provider. There’s another good article that I’ve come across  on how to choose the right web-hosting service provider.  All your hard work and efforts to build a successful online business may go to naught if you are not careful with whom you signed up with.

Anyway I am glad my blog is now back online.   There are things that I will do, notably to back up all my files just in case something crops up again. One could never predict when HostSo.com server  is going to run into problem again or when they are going to terminate customer account.

Unfortunately many Internet marketers and online business fail to promote their blog. You have to promote your blog first so as to drive traffic to the link containing your main webs site. Here is a simple technique to increase traffic to your blog using RSS feed. Did you know that Yahoo allows you to subscribe to your very OWN blog RSS feed? You may wonder what’s the big deal with that and how would that help to increase traffic or visitor to your blog or website.

Think about it for a minute. Yahoo is still one of the world most visited website. By adding your blog RSS feed into Yahoo, what essentially happens is that you can get Yahoo’s search spiders to index your website!. Thus Yahoo search will list the presence of your blog and this can potentially translate to more visitors to your site.

The process of adding your blog RSS feed to Yahoo is as simple as ABC. All you need is to for a start is open an account with Yahoo if you have not done so. It is free to apply for Yahoo account. Just go to www.yahoo.com and click the sign up icon as indicated below.

Yahoo Account Sign Up

Fill up the sign in Yahoo account form with necessary details and that’s pretty much to it as far as application for Yahoo account is concern. When you received your Yahoo account (which include the Yahoo email account )  go back to Yahoo page.  Click  on the sign in icon located on the upper right side of the page to log into your Yahoo email account.

When you have successfully login into your Yahoo account, navigate to the My Yahoo icon and click on it.  The icon is located on the far upper left hand corner of the main Yahoo page.   Once you click on it, it will bring up the your ‘My Yahoo’ page.

MyYahoo Account

The ‘MyYahoo’ allows you to pesonalize your account including the adding of contents such as RSS feeds.  Click on the green ‘ +content’ icon located on the upper left hand corner of the ‘MyYahoo’ page.  This will bring up various add options.  Locate the ‘Add RSS Feed’ link and click on it to add RSS Feed.

Building backlinks is crucial to the success of a website. To make money online means your website needs to get traffic. Building backlinks is one of the most important factors. Backlinks help your website to get listed in search engines and the more you have the better your ranking position will be. The higher your position in search engines the more traffic your site will receive. Of course there are other ways to get traffic to a website but building backlinks is an essential element for it.

Submitting your site to directories is a useful way of building backlinks. Web directories are like an Internet phonebook. Much like a physical directory a web directory will show services / information or products for sale. If you own a business, you want your company listed in each directory to gain potential customers.

In each directory, physical or online, you can choose a category for your company to appear under. For example, if you own a plumbing business, you want your ad to be placed in the section listing plumbing services. Web directories offer a category for your site to be placed under, so if you own a football merchandise website, you can place your site in the category of sport.

Also with a web directory, you can choose certain keywords, known as tags. These tags are useful for when someone is looking within a directory for a service or product. For example, you own a plumbing business in the United Kingdom. You can put a label that says, plumbing services in the UK. When a person performs a search for plumbing services in the UK, your site will appear in search results.

Other benefits of directory submission are one way backlinks. One way backlinks is just as it sounds, its one way. This means that there is no need to offer a link in return to the site, they just link to you. There are several web directories around and most of the directories are free and do not require reciprocal links (link to their website). Currently, thousands of directories over the Internet offer listings for free.

Although it is relatively quick and easy for a person to add the listing information and press submit, doing that for thousands of directories can be quite a daunting task. Lets face it, time is money and most of us do not have hours / days to submit our websites, even if the benefits are very rewarding.

So, lets face it, time is money. Weve all heard the saying, but its true, you built a website today, you want people to visit tomorrow. Well one way to save time and money is to pay someone to do the work for you. This means a small amount of your budget set-up for a second company to go to each directory and submit the information for you. Meaning that you have hundreds / thousands of backlinks in pointing to your website without any effort. The best thing about using another company to do the work for you is the experience of the company in its field. Most companies that offer a directory submission services know their market, to know their customers wants / needs and especially to know the best places to submit your site information.

The way all sites, not just web directories are listed in order of priority is something called PageRank. One site is marked from zero to ten; zero is the lowest and ten the highest. A Manual Directory Submission Service can give your site a chance to be placed in high ranking web directories, giving you many backlinks from ranked sites. Most search engines see your site as being important to them if you have high page rank backlinks. In turn, they rank you higher, meaning more traffic and more sales.

Build thousands of One Way Links through the process of Directory Submission

You can find various elements that go into this but one of the major contributors to your success on this front is obtaining many incoming links for a website for the keywords that you might be targeting.

If you might be just starting out with a new website, you need to do some research prior to you begin so that you can understand how you must construct your internet site. The very first thing that you need to exploration are the search phrases themselves.

It is possible to do this for totally free at the Google Adwords Keyword Research tool. Merely sort from the main concept of your business and website and see what comes up. This totally free device will show you the exact ideas that men and women are typing in when searching whatever product or service that you are offering.

You desire to pick one of these keyword phrases to use in the name of your website. And a lot more research must be done on the validity of that keyword phrase. You can use other free tools like WordTracker plus the MSN commercial intent device to have a lot more info about just how much visitors is being generated for the key phrases that you’re analyzing and if the keyword provides commercial potential or not.

A good commercial keyword phrase tool that I strongly recommend is the Keyword Elite 2.0 product. This software can generate thousands of highly profitable Adsense paying long tail keywords in minutes. It also automates PPC (Pay Per Click) competition analysis and creation of content pages based on keyword selections.

As soon as you’ve identified a excellent keyword for your website, one that’s both relevant, and offers enough site visitors, register the name of your internet site with GoDaddy, NameCheap, or any with the other domain selling internet sites. If you’ve got chosen a extremely general keyword, you may need to add a word or two in order to acquire the domain name. For example, if your site is about Bird Cages, the domain BirdCages.com will most likely not be obtainable, so you will have to pick a name like BuyBirdCages.com, or BestBirdCages.com, etc.

As soon as you’ve got your key phrases and name figured out, start developing the content of your site with those the keyword phrases that you might have researched and that folks are searching for. As soon as you’ve got some content up, you possibly can then submit your internet site to the research engine directories to commence you off with some backlinks which will raise your keyword research engine ranking.

To submit your internet site, just comprise the name, a short description (using your key keyword) and the url, and place it within the right category in the look for engine. You’ll be able to submit your internet site towards the major seek engines, the minor lookup engines, and niche-related seek engines that pertain to your site.

Next, it is possible to post comments, which contain a link back to your website, on blogs and forums in your industry. Also commence bookmarking your internet site at some with the various bookmarking websites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

It also helps to write articles that include things like your keyword phrases and link them back to your site, and to post them on web sites like Hubpages.com, Squidoo.com, and EzineArticles.com.

These are just some with the methods that you can start off obtaining a high keyword search engine ranking.

Getting your website to the top of the search engines is crucial for a thriving online business. You may have heard the term keyword research in Internet forums, discussions and etc. First thing first what are keywords? In the most simplistic terms, it refers to words and phrases that user enters into search engines such as Google to search for websites or blogs.

Keyword research is an important aspect of Internet marketing. Suitable keywords and phrases could improve your website visibility, popularity and position within the search engine ranking position. Two factors that is closely associated with keyword research is 1) the number searches per month and 2) the total number of websites with such keywords.

General keywords and phrases are extremely competitive judging by the number searches per month and the number of websites. It gets increasingly difficult to compete against thousands if not millions of websites for keywords or phrases that are extremely popular and in high demand. You can make use of Google Keyword Tool to estimate the volume of search for any keywords.

It is worthwhile for you to invest in some SEO tools to expedite keyword research and website optimization. If you are operating on shoe string budget then fret not. There are many free SEO tools which you can use as well.

One of the keyword research tools that I find very useful is Dave Guindon’s Golden Cash Compass. I did not purchase that software. It came bundle with Virtual Smart Agent which I bought last year. Surprisingly Golden Cash Compass is very easy to use and the help section that Dave’s provided is very informative and excellent.

Does that imply you should totally do away with keyword research and just focus on the article content? I guess not. After all, it is known fact that you should foremost post article with good content for human readership. On the other hand you also need to be mindful that search engine relies on keywords and phrases to categorize your website content.

Search engine optimization is not as difficult as it seems. SEO is pretty much an art as much as it has its underlying functionality deeply rooted in Internet computer science. There are two ways to get your website rank high by the search engines.

The first method involve outbidding competitors for popular keywords in PPC (pay per click) Adwords. Most big online business with deep marketing and advertisement budgets use PPC to garner traffic. PPC Adwords is very attractive from the perspective that you could get your website rank highly within minutes of launching your marketing campaigns.

It is important to note that using PPC Adwords to drive traffic to your website requires constant monitoring and adjustment to keywords and bidding cost. You could lose big time money if you are not careful with PPC. Your website may end up with many clicks but few or no buyers to your products or services.

The alternative method to search engine optimization is through what is term improving organic search traffic to your website. Natural search traffic optimization, also known as organic search improvement involves multiple aspects and requires longer time to take effect.

The positive aspect of focusing on organic search traffic as part of your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts is that the traffic generated is more targeted and you don’t have to spend as much money as PPC Adwords to bid for completive keywords.

Here’s a couple of simple tips to improve ranking of your website

Optimize Your Title Tag
The title tag goes between the head tags and looks like this:

<head>
<title>Your Title Here</title>
</head>

Make sure your main keyword appears once or twice in the title. If you have a secondary keyword, put both of them in the title. Don’t have any keyword more than twice as it might be construed by search engine spiders as keyword stuffing and your site might get blacklisted or even worst still ban completely by the search engines.

Optimize Your Site

There are many other factors that are important for on site optimization. Two of the big ones are your header tags and your keyword density.

Use <h1> for your headers. In between them, make sure you mention your keyword at least once.

Use your keyword often in your text, but make sure the keywords and phrases blends naturally with the content. If in doubt, read out loud the content with keywords and if it sounds funny then probably its not optimize properly.

These two factors have an influence on Google, but not nearly to the same degree as before simply because people abused the system.

Get Quality Back links

The next step is to get good back links from sites that are related to yours. There are many ways to do this. Here are some of them:

• Submit free press releases
• Offer to write articles for other sites in exchange for a back link.
• Pay for it. (Make sure you are paying services which are using non black hat methods )
• Submit your site to directories
• Link to them and ask them to link back. ( A one way back link is more valuable though)
• Post comments on related blogs (This is one of the most effective way to increase back link)
• Etc

Be creative. Come up with ways to get back back links to your site. Focus on one particular technique to get quality back links. For instance, if you decide to write articles for other sites than by all means put efforts and focus to write and submit as many articles as possible.

Optimize Your Anchor Text

If you can, ask the website owners who’re linking to you to create their link with good anchor text. A good anchor text is a link that has your keyword in it, rather than just click here.

For example, if you’re selling GPS:

Bad: *Click Here* To learn About GPS

Good: Click This Link to *Learn About GPS Workshops*

Where ** = The Link Text

Summary

If you select your keywords carefully, optimize your title, your h1 tags and your keyword density, get quality back links and optimize your anchor text, you’ll be far, far ahead of your competition.

In fact, you now know more about how to get your website to rank well in the search engines than most web masters on the Internet. Now it’s time to put this knowledge to use and really see the results. What you learned here can literally double your business overnight.

Selling a product or service to a local customer base often does not provide a business with the needed growth opportunities to thrive. By expanding a customer base a business has the capacity to expand ex potentially. However in order to expand in this manner it is necessary to employ more strategic marketing tools. One of these tools involves the use of SEO and website design.

There are thousands of websites designed on a regular basis which are vying for the market of customers that will help their businesses to thrive. Many of these businesses have some idea of that search engine optimization is. Some businesses may have been approached by companies offer SEO services and thought that it would make little difference in the overall impact of their marketability. However with careful planning and use SEO and website design are intricately linked when used as an effective marketing strategy.

SEO can play a vital role in the ranking of a business or company on the search engine directories. When websites are scanned there are certain key words that cause the entire website to be placed in a higher ranking than other website. These are the words or phrases that are used most often when people search a directory for a product, service, or information.

There are companies that offer website design services which do not have staff who are familiar with the concept or format requirements to incorporate SEO into the design of the site. There are SEO companies that do not have the staff on hand who have the unique skills and talents required to make a website design that is attractive and enticing for a visitor. However, in recent years there have been some companies created that provide both services and have the staff on hand that are trained to provide both SEO and website design.

Companies that select internal employees to create websites often find that the skills and expertise required are not available in a regular business setting. The field of SEO and website design is very specialized and requires a unique skill set that often is not found in an office or business setting. Companies that have a site designed then hire a full-time staff person to maintain the site often see much better results and also find that the long term cost effectiveness makes the initial investment of an outside resource well worth it.

When a specialized SEO and website design company is retained by a business there are many meetings held to create a design that will be effective and attract the target audience for the product or service. The language of the content must be carefully thought out and placed in the body of the website in a manner which will elicit positive responses from visitors to the site.

Many website designers have perfected techniques for creating sites that are user friendly and provide the look that is required to attract a large audience. It is the purpose of SEO to take the site one step further and provide the content within the design that will increase traffic to the site and raise the search engine ranking of the site.

A growing business finds very quickly that a well designed website affords the company many long-term benefits. The customer base is expanded from a local market to a global market, the sales of products and services increases, and the objectives of a business are more easily met. SEO and website design can be costly in the initial stages, however these costs are quickly offset by the increased sales and customer interaction that is attained.

Before you start a search engine marketing campaign, go to The Brilliant Assistant’s site for information on website design and graphic design services.