A better web host is the foundation of a good website or an online business. Finding a good web host can be a never ending struggle for small publishers unless you get a dedicated server for your website. But even dedicated servers can have some issues. Below is the a small checklist to follow before selecting a web hosting company to work with.
Server Security
Server security is an important aspect of a web host. Some of the common network attacks are DDoS attacks. Its distributed denial or service attack that won't let your website process any forms on web page. It can affect a single or multiple websites across the web server.
A web hosting company must have an appliance to prevent such network attacks. This device is expensive and needs to be connected to the server to prevent DDoS attacks. Many small scale web hosting providers might not have this appliances, so it is necessary to ask the company if they have any preventive measures set up for DDoS or network related attacks.
Invisible iFrame attacks
Invisible iFrame attacks are when your website starts shifting down and a white empty space keeps adding at the top. When you see the source of the web page you find an iFrame getting added on top of the page. Even if you remove the code, upload the new file again it will keep adding there. As time goes this space will keep increasing and your website will keep shifting down. This had happened to be with
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Search engines use complicated algorithms and methods to determine a website's value, which is expressed as its "ranking" compared to other websites. There are various factors that come into play with search engine ranking. Knowing what these factors are can help you determine the best course of action, should your website experience a drop in search engine ranking. Here are the top reasons why you might lose ranking on search engines:
Change in scripting language
Commonly people will decide to switch from one scripting language to another, for example changing from .asp files to .php files. This can cause page breaks in existing files, which will in turn affect page rank. If you use the Apache server, then one solution to this problem is to create .htaccess files which provide instructions on what to do with the new .php files.
A good example of how failing to take the appropriate steps when making significant changes to your website is that of Andrew Fashion, who went from making millions to being in debt. This was because he refurbished his entire website without paying attention to relevant SEO techniques that could have helped him make the change-over without losing page views. The new site was not indexed, and so visitors were no longer able to find the site.
Poor quality links
Pages that are covered in advertisements from paid link exchanges will tend to be devalued by Google,
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I have seen in many forums and in blog comments of people asking for a publisher network or affiliate programs for small publisher.
[caption id="attachment_804" align="alignright" width="243" caption="Basics of Monetizing a Website"]
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Now why do these guys call themselves small publishers? That's because their website don't get enough traffic or else there is nothing like small or big publisher. It is all about the traffic. So the most basic and the only thing that you need to earn money from affiliate marketing or simply from advertising is to
get some good organic traffic.
Many newbies ask about creating a landing page for an affiliate and many blog owners have their own ways of earning through affiliate programs but if the site has no good traffic then who would even know about the affiliate product?
Content and Resources
So you need to follow the most basic methods of gaining good amount of traffic to your website. You probably know it so in short i would say get some unique content on your website. Provide resources for visitors to download and use. Do social bookmarking for your website to get more readers from external sources. Update your website or a blog regularly to increase returning visitors. Use analytics and other statistics software to track your website peformance to improve it.
Organic Traffic
For those of you who don't know what organic traffic is, well its just the traffic that you get through search engines, that matters
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This post is similar to the previous post about excluding yourself from GA. But this time its for AWStats.
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Many webmasters use AWStats simultaneously for tracking website statistics and so it is necessary to block yourself from being counted as a visitor in it.
You will first need to find your IP address. You can find your IP address here
www.whatismyip.com
Then access the root directory of your domain name through control panel or FTP.
Enter the 'tmp' directory and you will find awstats folder.
Open the awstats folder and you should find .conf files for the number of domains you have in your hosting account.
Here is what the file will look like basically: awstats.
yourdomainname.com.conf
Open this file in any text editor and search for this line: SkipHosts=" "
That line would probably not have any value in double quotes.
Just enter your IP address that you found out from
www.whatismyip.com and enter it in the double quotes.
Save the file and upload it.
That way visits from your computer will no longer be tracked by AWStats.
Please note that this works only for Static IP Address.
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[caption id="attachment_674" align="alignright" width="326" caption="Filters Manager in GA"]
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Excluding yourself from being tracked in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an important tool that comes free from Google to track your website visitors and other statistics. Those getting started with their new website or a blog would visit their site quite often and many a times owners are constantly on their site to update content.
But those visits, page views, time spent per page and all other details are tracked by Google Analytics which are certainly unnecessary. You don't really want to track your own visits to your website. That will drastically affect your actual statistics report.
You can however exclude yourself from being tracked in Google Analytics through filters. You simply go to Filters manager and filter out your own IP address.
I wanted to exclude my visits from being tracked by Google Analytics so I wanted to filter out my IP address, But Google Analytics front page seem to be broken.
I could no longer find Filter Manager in GA settings page. So after some intense internet search i finally ended up on Google Analytic support forum where i found a very useful add on for Firefox.
Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
Its currently in a beta mode. This tool will basically block the GA tracking code on your browser.
You can install the tool from the link below
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
However it only supports the following browser at the moment,
- IE 7 & IE 8
- Google
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Yelp is a high traffic directory of real reviews on local business shared by real people. It's fun and easy way to share reviews about local business makes it a good directory to browse for a service you need. Some of their major categories includes but are not limited to Restaurants, Dentists, Bars, Beauty Salons, Nightlife, Pets, Public Services and Religious Organizations.
Yelp was founded in 2004 to help people find great services locally. As of August 2010 more than 38 Million people visited yelp in the past 30 days. Yelpers have written over 12 Million local reviews, 83% of them rating a business 3 stars or higher. To give a slight idea about Yelp's website traffic statistics here are the details, Alexa rank of Yelp is 251 and its Page rank is 7.
That also makes it a very good directory of business to find an event, a service or any special offer that you are looking for.
It looks important for offline or online business owners with a valid address to get their business reviewed on yelp.
Getting a review on yelp will highly increase your exposure and potential clients to your business.
If you happen to get no reviews about your business on Yelp yet, then no need to worry. You can find such reviewers that can write a friendly review about your business on Yelp at a low cost.
Taboose is willing to offer you such service for a price of $5. She will be writing a friendly review about
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[caption id="attachment_601" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Web Host"]
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You have a fully established website that gets a lot of traffic and generates a lot of revenues. But what if you feel a need to change your web host due to any reason whether poor up time, bad service or simply changing platform from Linux to Windows?
Many bloggers or online business owners have no such technical knowledge of transferring entire CMS based website from one web host to another server. You can often find such projects on freelancer.com or other such services asking to help them with the transfer.
So here are the simple steps to make it happen.
Backup website Files
Go to your control panel and simply compress all the web pages, folder structure and any downloadable files that you provide through file manager. You can easily find the file manager option right on front page when you log in to the control panel. In file manager you can find an option for "Compress" on header section. You need to select all the files and folder that you want to transfer in order to compress.
This will simply create a ZIP file of all the files on your current web server. Just download that file and keep it safe on your local computer.
Database Backup - Dump File
If you are using dynamic website that stores all the data in a database, you will need to take the database back up too.
In your control panel front
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You have probably read a list of 100's of social bookmarking websites to join but are you dedicating enough time on each one of them?
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You need to dedicate enough time to get any good results. One might join them all with a hope of getting back links to increase page rank but back links and page rank should be the least of your concerns
Good traffic and real visitors matter the most. Page rank is just the Google's view of importance of the web page and your website might have thousands of back links but how many of them are actually driving traffic?
After some internet search and users opinions i found the best list to use. This can save a lot of your time and really help you get traffic and real visitors to your website.
Stumble upon
Stumble upon is the widely used social bookmarking website. You can find many stumble icons on other blogs and website for sharing. Due to their methodology of displaying newly added links on a selected category. It happens to drive a lot of traffic to your website. However it obviously depends on how relevant and interesting your title and description is.
Digg
Digg is another good social bookmarking website that gave me good results in traffic. Google analytic never showed digg as a source of traffic in my account but AwStats and other analytic that i use simultaneously showed a good
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Twitter is a social community website to share short updates called tweets.
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These tweets can be anything from personal activity to an update on a website. That makes twitter one of the best social community for online business owners.
But in order to get good results from twitter it is necessary that you have enough number of followers. These followers will be able to view your updates on their account home page. They can then retweet of visit your website if they find it appealing enough.
When you first create an account you have 0 followers, you are also recommended some followers to follow but it is better not to go for it before knowing a few things about how twitter actually works.
Start Following
To get enough number of followers you need to follow those who are in same online business niche as that of yours. If only your interests matches their interests, they will in turn start following you.
Make sure you don't start following people like Mr Bill Gates with a hope that he will start following you in return. You can of course follow him or who ever you want to but if you are expecting a follower in return then these guys won't do it unless you are some big guy.
Almost 45% to 50% of the total people you start following will start following you in return if both of your interests or business niche matches.
Once
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Marketing a newly launched forum can be difficult because you might get into a chicken egg situation about your forum.
Forums are a place for users to ask questions, answer and discus an issue or a trending topic that is less discussed elsewhere. Basically forum members will fall into two categories, there is a third category but those are the readers or website visitors through search engines looking for information. But at first you need to be concerned about the two important types of users. They are the one that are looking for a solution and those who are interested in discussion by answering and asking even more.
Many visitors looking for a solution would tend to join the forum if the forum is active with active topics and replies. If your forum is new then you have almost negligible topics and replies.
There comes the main problem. If your forum has no activity then no new member would want to spend time registering and asking a question because they know they would not get any replies. And, if your forum has no new topics started then how can one even answer those? Hence your website never gets any genuine member to join and take an active part in a forum.
Spamming and Zombie Users haunting a new forum
When you start a new forum and when it starts getting some crawler activity then you might find some users getting registered on to your forums. These users are bots from automated submission tools usually used
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