Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Selecting The Right Web Host


The Importance Of Hosting For Your Website.

Keeping a business website online for as much of the day and as many days of the year as possible is absolutely vital to the financial success of your business venture. Your website host is the company that is responsible for ensuring that your website remains stable and online for this time. Most hosts will give an estimated downtime or uptime for their service and this is measured as a percentage. For example, if a host declares they have a 99% uptime, this means that for every 100 hours that your site is hosted with them, it will be down for 1 hour.

The Downtime Of Your Host Directly Affects Your Business Performance.

1 hour may not sound like a lot of time in this context, but when you consider that 100 hours is only 4 days then your website will not be accessible for 1 hour in every 4 days. Not only will you lose the potential custom during this hour but any potential future business from the customers that eventually and inevitably look elsewhere. For this reason it is absolutely vital you get a web host that has as high an uptime as you can possibly find to protect your business and to protect your profit.

Other Areas You Should Consider.

Many companies may have similar reliability with their offering, and this means there are other areas you must concentrate on to determine the most appropriate web host for your needs. If you have a personal website then you may want to use a free host. Free hosts usually make no guarantee as to the reliability of their site and use advertising to supplement the lack of direct income made from your account. However, with a business website it is not advisable to use a free account. With paid accounts you receive many benefits, some are essential items while others are more luxuries that will inevitably make your website business run much smoother.

Contemplate Your Requirements.

You need to sit down with your site designer and discuss exactly what is required from your host. You should also consider whether you need responders, unlimited email addresses and many other factors. Only by considering all of these different factors will you be able to make a reasonable judgment on the hosting account you will eventually opt for. These factors will include whether you require FrontPage extensions, regular backups of your site, site analysis, email responders, form handling capability and many more different factors.

Look Around For The Best Deal.

Always shop around to ensure that you are getting as good a deal as you possibly can. Whether you are working on a shoestring budget or you do not consider the amount you spend to be that important, you should never pay more than is really necessary. Your best bet with hosting is to make sure you have more than you actually require, because this way should you need to expand the site or you require more options in the future you will already have them. You certainly need to select a host that allows for this level of expansion.

About the Author


eHostInfo provides a web hosting directory which has details on a number of hosting companies and their plans. Please visit http://www.ehostinfo.com for more information.

Article Source : Articles Warehouse

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Monday, September 25, 2006

Reciprocal links are dead!


I've been reading a lot of nonsense on various SEO forums about reciprocal linking being dead. People screaming and crying because their sites no longer rank well after Google's last update. I thought it would be timely for me to write an article about what REALLY happened, and what you can do about it.

Reciprocal Links Aren't Dead

First of all, reciprocal links aren't dead, not by a long shot. It would be foolish of any search engine to ignore links from one authority site to another just because that other site points back to it. That, in fact, reinforces the value of both sites!

What really happened is that Google got smarter about reciprocal links. They are harder on link farms now, and bogus "directories" of links. So the people who are crying foul probably had most or all of their links coming from these kinds of shady sources.

From my own experience with my many sites, however, it seems clear that reciprocal links have been devalued by Google. All that means is that they don't count quite as much as they used to, but they are still very valuable.

If you follow my philosophy of optimizing for keywords that are not super competitive, though, then you may have already guessed that my sites weren't affected much, since most of my "competition" isn't really competing for the keywords I'm targeting anyway.

Reciprocal Links Have Always Been A Short-Term Solution

Besides, reciprocal links should ALWAYS be looked on as a short-term boost to get a site going. You want to get those reciprocal links so that you can get ranked for some less competitive keywords. Once you're getting some traffic, if you're offering high quality content to your visitors, you'll get more links into your site naturally.

This happens because if a lot of people value your site, you are bound to get talked about in forums and message boards that are related to your site topic. And other webmasters who visit your site and like it will add links from their sites to yours. Your link popularity will grow naturally–as long as your site content is high quality.

But a site needs the initial momentum that reciprocal links provide to get started. Just the act of emailing webmasters for reciprocal links will result in people who are in your area of expertise looking at your site. So whether you get a link or not, if you have a quality site, you've put it in front of a person who has the opportunity to spread the word about you. And believe me, quality sites get talked about a lot.

Getting More Links

Since it's true that reciprocal links have been devalued by Google, that could mean that you need to get more links to stay competitive (though that really depends on what keywords you're targeting).

Personally, I find SEO Elite to be a huge asset in this regard, because it automates the process of getting people to link to your site. I also highly recommended Jack Humphrey's Power Linking methods.

Summing It All Up

If you're building quality content and using reciprocal links as they should be used (to get a short-term boost that launches a new site), then changes in the valuation of reciprocal links will not be a problem.

If you're a link spammer, or if you're relying on shady directories or link farms, then yes, you're in trouble. Stick to the methods I've outlined above and use software-assisted link gathering tools like SEO Elite and you'll be on top of the search engine game for many more algorithm updates to come.

About the Author


Jonathan Leger is a well known AdSense authority who runs an AdSense Tips blog filled with AdSense, SEO and Internet Marketing advice.

Article Source : Articles Warehouse

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