Reverse SEO? Does it mean – trying to get listed lower in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)? Of course not! Reverse SEO is interpreted in a couple of ways though.

Some say it’s about – researching your competitor’s SEO efforts – analyzing their title tags, meta description, PR, links to their domain and links to a URL found via a search query for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Does their site have quality, relevant and compelling content? Is it updated regularly? Are they using social media? In short, what separates their sites from your site? This method of SEO emcompasses attempting to emulate success. I use this method daily to analyze what others are doing to rank high in the search engines.

Others believe that – reverse SEO means trying to do damage control. What happens when a search query returns results that are not advantageous to your firm or organization (or you)? Believe it or not, there are companies that will perform online damage control – by attempting to push those unfavorable results down to page 2, 3 or 4 where they won’t be so readily noticed. How? By posting a ton of positive reviews to counter anything negative.

Another take on reverse SEO is – to just not do any SEO. The angle here is to design sites for the users and not for the search engines. This sounds great in theory, but viewing patterns very clearly indicate that you need to be on page one, and the closer to number one, the better.

I read a ton of articles, threads and posts from SEO experts everyday. Why?

Because just like everyone else, I want to increase sales online. For years, SEO practitioners preached a mix of link this and content that, or touted banner advertisements or AdSense ads. Since the onset of search engines, techniques to outwit them to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) have basically evolved beyond simply obtaining backlinks, providing lots of content or optimizing keywords and meta tags.

FREE versus Paid Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic you receive from free click-throughs in search engines (not sponsored) – the higher your site ranks, the more traffic you receive, thus higher revenues on the backside. Paid traffic would be traffic obtained via banner ads or programs like AdSense. Bottom line to increase profits – reduce overhead – increase productivity. So how do you make your website more productive without forking out a ton of money on paid advertising?

Google Algorithms Put to the Test
For years, I’ve been reading about how complex Google algorithms were. We’ve witnessed a number of cycles or shifts in how Google analyzes and ranks sites, but if you tie in Google’s history of acquisitions and free tools, their core emphasis (today) lies within three (3) PRIMARY variables – all driven by human activity. Much like Bing, they’ve transitioned from being a search engine to being a decision engine.

So What is this ‘FREE Traffic” Big Secret?
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen the phrase, “Content is King” or “Content is King Kong.” I’ve said this myself in a past life. The real KING today is Organic Search Traffic!! Think about this for a second. What does paid advertising get you – a position on a page with the expectation that being seen at the top of that page will result in a click through to your site.

Viewing Patterns Take Center Stage
Numerous studies have been conducted by leading SEO firms to determine viewing patterns and projected click through patterns over the years. Going back to the early 2000’s, banner advertising worked very well, drawing over a 30% click through rate. When banner advertising fell out of favor, the trend evolved to link building, but a ton of black hat SEO strategies forced Google to revise their algorithms.

So what do today’s viewing patterns tell us about paid ads?
Very simply that organic traffic is growing and paid is declining. Here’s a question for you – when you do a search query on Google, do you read the sponsored ads at the top of the page or the ads on the side bar? Studies have shown that those viewers who do read them is on the decline. Consider this – sponsored ads were only drawing 5% of the click throughs in their prime, and even less now. So where are the other 95% of the click throughs occurring?

The answer is in Google’s organic listings – the FREE ones!! Banner Ads don’t even register and sponsored ads aren’t much better. Currently, paid listings that appear above the organic listings receive only 2 to 3 percent of the available clicks with those on the side receiving a paltry 1 to 2 percent. To verify this, you simply have to use Google’s own internal Traffic Estimator Tool.

Organic Traffic is KING
Not only is organic traffic FREE, but it also receives the majority of all traffic. The first organic listing receives over 40% of the available traffic, while the second, or number two, receives nearly 20%. Let’s say you’re running an AdWords campaign and you’re getting 1000 clicks per day (multiply those clicks by your cost per click – OUCH). Compare that to number one in Google’s organic listing at 40%. Your paid 1000 clicks translate to 8000 FREE organic clicks. And viewing patterns indicate the first ten organic search positions outperform even the number 1 paid ad on the same page. OK, you’re saying that you know it’s important to rank high in SERPS, so how is this a big secret?

What does Google look at today to rank organic listings?
While Google doesn’t divulge their algorithms publicly, they do post recommendations and guidance. We do know they look at content, which is essentially the domain name itself, certain meta tags and so. They still look at links, both inbound and outbound, assigning authority to those links. And this should be no surprise – they look at the human element – activity. This consists of traffic, RSS subscriptions, comments on blogs, updates to your site and so on.

How do today’s algorithms differ from years past?

I think we all remember PageRank. Up until about 2003, Google counted the number of inbound links to a site, applied a ranking score to each (based on quality), and the sites with the most quality inbound links ranked highest.

When Google introduced Adsense, a shift to content ensued. The focus was to create a ton of pages with content – then place Google’s ads on them. When visitors to those websites clicked thru on the ads, Google split the ad revenue with the site owners. What happened?  For a few years, content worked well, but the SERPS began to be overrun with spam. Another shift was incorporated to regain relevancy, going back to a more robust emphasis on links. This was quickly countered with SEO tactics like link wheels, irrelevant comments on do-follow blogs, robotic article rewrites that were posted everywhere linking back to a main website.

Enter Google Current Algorithms
Essentially, Google now rewards activity and freshness, meaning more relevance is given to sites that routinely update their content. They still factor in link juice and volume of relevant content, but human activity (social media) is the prevailing trend across all industries.

Over the years, Google has invested heavily in technology that measures HUMAN ACTIVITY. Think about all the programs and businesses they’ve invested in, many that never turned one penny in profit. Why? As long as SEO practitioners could automate strategies to exploit Google’s algorithms, their rankings and AdSense revenue was diluted.

Going Forward
Consider this – with the addition of FeedBurner, Chrome, Google Analytics, Google’s Toolbar and on and on, user statistics are being sent to Google on a massive scale. Google’s algorithms are updated frequently though – with primary emphasis on traffic. Note – avoid automated programs. Google has garnered a wealth of information about human trends and SEO tactics over the years, and can see through most attempts to exploit their services.

It’s best to create organic websites that are highly relevant to the service or products you offer, then create activity on that site by embracing social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), incorporating a do-follow blog (moderating comments and disabling spam links), then tweak your site as needed.

If done properly, your website will not (realistically) leap to number one overnight, but will rise in Google’s rankings over the first 30 to 90 days. Back links and quality content are still important, but my recommendation is to emphasize ACTIVITY.

How many of you use landing pages - or do you simply use anchor text hyperlinks that point an existing order page on your site?

The goal of a landing page is - to convert prospects into clients, and that’s best accomplished by designing a specific page that causes a prospect to take action. If you’re sending prospects to your home page, then you’re leaving it up to them to search your site for what they’re really interested in. If you’re selling shared hosting, dedicated servers, web design and a dozen other services, you need to make it as easy as possible for your prospects to get from “point of interest” to “point of purchase.”

A secondary advantage to using landing pages is - that it allows you to easily track the effectiveness of your marketing programs. If you can’t measure your marketing efforts, you certainly can’t effectively manage them.

If you’re using Google Adwords, landing pages are ideal. The same applies for email campaigns and social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

Style, font, color theme and white space attributes for landing pages are - no less important than for any other page on your site. What should differ is that your landing pages should be focused, and by that, I mean that links to other pages on your site are a distraction.

As always, a good call to action creates a sense of urgency, either in number of items or days left.

And as every good sales representative knows - you have to ask for the sale, which includes some kind of order icon on your landing page. Split testing has shown that orange converts at a better rate than red, given all other factors remain the same.

As you search the Internet for squeeze page strategies, remember that the rules (Google algorithms) were changed recently, and many once successful one page squeeze pages fell by the wayside. But before I get ahead of myself, what exactly are squeeze pages?

By definition – Once upon a time, squeeze pages were defined as a single web page with the sole purpose of capturing information for follow-up marketing. The ultimate goal of the page was to obtain the visitor’s email address. Why? To build a list of highly targeted prospects (seems fairly simple).

Times have changed – To avoid penalties and drops in SERPS (search engine results pages), squeeze pages are now being designed across multiple pages, each with relevant content. The goal however remains the same – to build a list that affords you the opportunity to present visitors with multiple sales messages over time, develop relationships, and cross-sell other products.

Conversion Strategies – will vary depending on your goal. The best conversion strategies focus on benefits and solutions. These can be either short or long term. Success stories work well, as do freebies – but we need to backtrack again. With the onslaught of spam, convincing anyone to give up their email address means your sales copy has to be compelling and you have to convey trust.

The Trust Factor – is huge, and I contend it’s the most important element of your site. Prospects buy from sales reps, businesses and organizations they know, like and TRUST. So how can you demonstrate trust online?

• Add Your Picture
• Add Your Signature
• Proofread your copy for spelling and grammatical structure
• Have a Privacy Policy
• Use Color Psychology

Successful Squeeze Pages – often use a short video and opt in form at the very top of the home page for visitors who want to sign up immediately, followed by content that essentially explains benefits and solutions in greater detail – with another opt in form at the bottom.

How do you measure quality?
Is it measured in new sales? More traffic to your website or blog?

Controversy
Can you use controversy to increase your sales? This is actually used quite frequently, especially in titles, to draw attention to the intended product or service. Books, magazines, websites, forums and blogs are great at tapping into controversy. Right way – wrong way. What it can do – what it can’t do. What’s expected – what’s not expected. What works -  what doesn’t work.

Marketing vehicles
An example: For blogs to be an effective marketing vehicle, should they be relatively free of sales hype? My take is that even if prospects are searching to buy, they don’t necessarily want to be sold to. Does that make any sense? Prospects are searching for information, about you and your services as they relate to their specific needs. When they take that leap to buy, from you or your competition, what will tip the scale your way?

Content, and lots of it. First and foremost, your content has to be readable. If you write marketing material in long, unbroken blocks of text, 99.9% of your prospects will either fall asleep halfway through your presentation or move on to your competition. And color contrast is HUGE!! Who designs marketing materials with blue text on a purple background?!! Or uses 13 different fonts and point sizes on the same page?

Clarity
I think clarity varies by whatever marketing vehicle you pursue, but there should be a common thread that ties your campaign – rather it’s in terms of ROI, branding or whatever. Marketing campaigns should be a blend of persuasion, advertising, marketing, writing and knowledge in a manner that prompts a CALL TO ACTION.

Does it surprise anyone that over one-fourth of search results – for the world’s largest brands are links to USER generated content? Peer recommendations are the know, like and trust factors that have catapulted social media into mainstream commerce.

In fact, over 75% of consumers trust – peer recommendations while less than 15% trust advertisements. Is it any wonder so many companies have jumped on the bandwagon, branding themselves via Facebook, Twitter and corporate blogs?

To be truly successful in Social Media ventures – you need to ENGAGE your potential customers. It isn’t enough to simply set up a corporate blog and allow comments to your posts. I know I read quite a few blogs and their ensuing comments, and I’m amazed how many readers ask questions that are never answered by the publisher. Where’s the engagement? Not only does your blog need fresh content – you need to field questions in the comments. It’s called dialog. In marketing circles, it’s called MONEY TALKS.

Social Media strategies – are akin to networking strategies. It’s about building your friends’ networks and keeping your profile status updated. It encompasses more than allowing others to write on your Facebook wall – it’s contributing to their success as well. There are potential clients on your friends sites (their sphere of influence) that you could or would never be able to reach on your own.

Quantity versus quality – what works, what doesn’t? Reading Tweets from a user every 30 seconds gets annoying. I’d rather see quality versus quantity, and I bet I’m not alone. I believe social media pays best via meaningful engagement.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure
I stumbled across this phrase as I was reading about managing power consumption in data centers, and it occurred to me that this applies to all facets of business. Of course, some companies take measuring to extremes, right down to how many times their employees visit the restrooms. Yipes! My sister worked for a well known firm in St. Louis that allowed six recorded incidents per year before automatic termination, of those being one minute late punching into the time clock – didn’t matter if you were 20 minutes early 4 of 5 days each week.

What is measureable in business?
In a simple answer – everything is measureable. How you manage those measurements often determine the success of your business.

How does measuring relate to the web hosting industry?
Analytical programs reflect the strengths and weaknesses of our websites. The value we present to our prospects can be reflected in the average length of time visitors remain on our sites, how many unique visitors we attract, the keywords or phrases they used to find our sites, what they clicked through to, whether they bookmarked our site, and countless other measureable queries.

Measurements are done in:

• Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• Profit and Loss Statements
• Balance Sheets
• CPU and RAM Performance
• Network Saturation
• Firewall Analysis
• eCommerce Conversion Ratios

Where I see a need for more attention to measurement in many buinesses

Shows
Analyzing show results and following up (promptly) with everyone who visited your booth. What was their interest – what drew them to you? If there’s any match for your service, set up an appointment to visit their business first (not yours). Let them open up opportunities for you. Showing interest in their business increases the odds that they’ll reciprocate.

Networking Events
Analyzing networking events – instead of just going for the meal and exchange of business cards, work on spreading the word. This essentially means to break away from your group and introduce yourself to other groups at these events. Log every business card and send them a personal, “I’m glad we had the opportunity to meet” postcard or memo. Meet them again for lunch, one-on-one. You’d be amazed how many business decisions are made over lunch.

Everything about your business is measureable
I’ve only scratched the surface here. We could go on about how measurements relate to disaster recovery, network monitoring, load balancing, power consumption, space and bandwidth allotments, and so much more.

Is your mission critical data backed up and protected?

A quick Google search for remote backup software returned 6,810,000 results. I’d say that’s significant. I think everyone agrees that mission critical data needs to be backed up, but how is debatable. In the hundreds of businesses I’ve serviced over the years, most in-house IT departments used DAT tapes. Very few actually physically removed those tapes from their premises every day. Even fewer remotely backed up their data. So maybe the better question to ask would be, “To what degree is your mission critical data backed up and protected?”

As an ex-RMA Manager (for a local networking firm), I witnessed quite a few defective DAT drives doing hard time on my shelves. I’ve also seen my share of managers scrambling to recover lost data following “unscheduled events” like virus contamination or hacks. Do you think it can’t happen to you? Keeping your fingers crossed isn’t the wisest strategy to ensure your business’s continued success.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans are Important
I always recommend incorporating comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans, then periodically reviewing their effectiveness. One part of that plan should be remote offsite backups. Very often, incorporating a remote backup is as easy as downloading a software client onto your network server or personal computer. Many have setup wizards to walk you through the steps of connecting to the backup server, setting up your backup sets, creating a backup schedule and setting a secret encryption key. Typically, backup sets can be configured to run in a variety of ways – backing up data files at the end of the week or your My Documents folder multiple times per day.

Remote backups traveling across the Internet need to be encrypted so that you and only you have the ability to decrypt your data. I recommend programs that use DES, Triple-DES, Blowfish or Twofish algorithms for encryption.

Measuring the success of the data transfer is important. Look for programs with email notification of successful backups or backups with warnings (with log files attached).

Once your data is remotely backed up
Ok, you’ve backed up your data, but now have a need for one file, or an entire volume of data from two months ago. Is this possible? Simply answered – Yes. There are programs that allow instant access to any version of your data files, from the initial backup to the last incremental backup and EVERY version in between.

Locking down clients
Locking down clients simply refers to implementing procedures to protect critical backup sets from being accidentally changed or deleted, while flexible enough for administers to view and change those settings that control the level of usage each client is offered.

When to backup?
Most organizations schedule backups in the evening, during lulls in their business operations. Some programs allow you to run in silent modes (in the background) without displaying any Windows or Task Bar icons – allowing you to run backups throughout the day.

What if my backup gets interrupted?
Let’s say you start a backup and you lose power. Will the remote server retain the ongoing transfer, or bite the bullet? Features like event managers allow you to resume interrupted backups.

Does remote backup software offer file filters?
Most do offer file filters that allow you to include or exclude files from the backup selection, mostly via file extensions.

Just the tip of the iceberg
There are so many things that can and do go wrong in business every day. One thing is for sure – if you have hardware, particularly IT hardware, it will go down sooner or later. Power supplies fail, memory modules flake out, hard drives crash, DAT drives melt down – stuff happens. Some issues can be resolved in minutes or hours, but others may take days or weeks.

Backing up your mission critical data is – an integral ingredient to averting disaster, but just the tip of the iceberg in developing and managing a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan that will ensure your business’s continued success. Step back and ask yourself, “What if?” What if a disgruntled employee, possibly a sysadmin, corrupted your main servers, then disappeared? What if your building burnt to the ground? What if that DAT drive refuses to release last night’s tape – holding it hostage with a strangle hold on its recording heads? What if?

• Physical space
  • Rack
  • Servers
  • UPS
  • Switch
  • Router
  • Diesel Fuel Generator
  • Firewall Appliance
  • Security Systems
  • Demarcation
• IT Staff
  • Certified
  • Trustworthy
  • Reliable
  • Elevated reimbursement plus benefits
  • Available 24/7/365
• Location
  • Expandable connectivity available to your location (s).
• Climate control
  • Sensor alarms for temperature, moisture, smoke, etc.
• Physical security
  • Locked server room with assigned access privileges
• Network Monitoring
  • Hardware/Software investment
  • Email Alerts
  • IT staff on call 24/7/365

Colocation offers a very cost-effective means of housing a secure hosting environment. Physical space is freed in-house, plus capital asset expense is dramatically reduced.

In-house – Few businesses can afford dual diesel fuel backup generators and none have the ability to cross-connect to different vendors. Managing an IT staff layers substantial payroll expense and man-hours. Disaster recovery plans are typically DAT tape backups and are rarely compliant.

Climate controls depend over whether the cleaning lady left the door to your server room open. Often there is no door – simply open access to your most valued resource – your data. Companies who have lost data fail at an alarming rate.

Scalability is limited and monitoring is more often than not a user complaining he/she can’t get their email, surf the Internet or receive calls.

Colocation – offers

• BGP networks for maximum uptime and reliability (blended)
• Remote Hands Support
• Redundant power sources
  • Power grids
  • UPS
  • Diesel fuel generators
• Cross-connects (e.g., Cogent, SAVVIS and Level3)
• Physical security
• Electronic security
• Network monitoring
• Alarm sensors
  • Temperature
  • Moisture
  • Smoke
  • Fire
• Scalability
  • Cabinet and rack space
  • Bandwidth

Colocation services can be quickly deployed (no wait time to provision new circuits) and are easily expanded.

Businesses are migrating to colocation because it simply makes good ‘business sense.’

Google makes over 400 changes to their algorithms each year, and this year is no different. If you’re performing SEO for your own site or as a professional service for your clients, it’s essential that you keep up with these changes.

Fortunately, Google routinely publishes a list of these changes on it’s  Official Search Blog, but it seems as though no one knows that this blog exists. I’m always seeing threads on web hosting forums where members ask about Google’s Panda updates, and the variety of replies astounds me.

Below is a list of changes they listed for February 2012

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets forexpanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”]Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
• Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
• SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
• Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

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Be the first to know when your website or server is in trouble! We notify via email Easy to Use  No complicated software to install; all you need is a web browser.

FAQs

1. Can I use your software on my web site? We do not allow other sites to run our software but you may link to any of our pages from your site.

2. Do I need to download or install anything to use Hostirian’s Up Time Monitoring? No, all monitoring services work remotely from our servers. All you need to do is login to your password protected member area to use our service. You will be able to view account history details and have results emailed to you.

3. How can I contact Hostirian? You may send an email to support@hostirian.com

4. How do you determine if a server is up? Our software checks the server response code from your host and if the server response code is “200″, “302″, “301″, “403″ or “401″, your hostname is considered “up”.

5. How far back do you keep monitoring statistics for my account? Detailed statistics for each domain are kept for 2 months while statistic summaries are kept for the life of the account. All statistics for our premium accounts are keep for the life of the account.

6. How many domains can I monitor? You may select the monitoring interval that you want for each domain.

7. We already have an internal monitoring system. Why would we need your system? The Internet is a node/gateway based system. Your internal monitoring may tell you that a device is broken inside your network or even that the outbound gateway is having problems, but it may not inform you that inbound connections from different nodes on the Internet are able to access your website. Hostirian provides monitoring from various geographically diverse locations on different networks.

8. What are the costs for your services? Hostirian provides all of our basic services free of charge. We ask only that you register as a member.

9. What protocols do you support? We support: HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP. Additional protocols are available with our premium services.

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If you’re in the market for hosting, the following links will give you an assortment of invaluable info. Simply plug in the hosting providers URL on each of these services.

Google Safe Browsing

McAfee SiteAdvisor

Norton Safe Web

Alexa

DNS Tree

Whois info

WHAT’S A QR CODE?

A QR Code (“Quick Response”) is a cell phone readable bar code that can store website URL’s, plain text, phone numbers, email addresses and pretty much any other alphanumeric data.

Storing up to 4296 characters, QR codes are internationally standardised under ISO 18004. They’ve been big in Japan forever, broke into Europe and the UK a few years back, and are now getting real traction in USA.

I’ve been noticing QR codes on places like Yahoo Sports, local newspapers, magazines, business cards and billboards.

QR codes are printable mobile phone ready two dimensional barcodes that can contain a website URL, an email address, a phone number, a pre-formatted SMS (text) message or just plain text.

I have a Sprint EVO and simply downloaded QR Droid (a FREE application). Scanning a QR code is as simple as centering the code on the camera cross hairs and clicking to save.

What I love is the link between static ads and digital capabilities. For example, if the QR code contains a link to a URL, you can click through and view that site right from the QR code.

Need directions? An address placed on a QR code will bring up a map and directions. Place a call? Phone numbers on QR codes allow you to place a call directly from a scanned code.

Unfortunately, a ton of websites get hacked or defaced everyday around the Globe. I’ve seen statistics that state up to 90% of all hacked websites are related to (CMS) – Joomla or WordPress, at least those not related to compromised cPanel logins. And apparently Joomla gets hacked twice as much as WordPress.

I believe all websites are vulnerable to attacks, but Joomla and WordPress more so because of their popularity. There are shell / cracking scripts specifically written for both. These cracking scripts are installed using the default database table prefixes which are jos_ and wp_, and in the case of Joomla, FTP functions which are enabled but never used.

Some recommendations to help protect your websites:

Use secure passwords like 4#gty+TeQ^Rf37! (take the guesswork out of play).

Change your default admin login

Delete all the stuff you don’t use, including templates and plugins. This includes Hello Dolly, twentyten, twentyeleven and ASKIMET.

With WordPress, disallow bots from scanning crucial directories by adding Disallow: /wp-* in your robots.txt file. And CHMOD your wp-config.php file to 640.

Keep your CMS websites updated to the latest version, and recheck your security settings after each version update.

And don’t use anything related to timthumb.

I read some predictions this morning that really opened my mind to the possibility of mobile, and the most significant was that 2/3 of mobile traffic would be consumed by video. Here’s the predictions:

A prediction for the future of smartphone growth makes some bold projections:

By the end of this year, there could be more smartphones on the planet than humans, and by 2016 there could be 10 billion smartphones. That’s 1.4 mobile devices per capita.

In its global mobile data traffic forecast, Cisco predicts that a solid chunk of growth will come from the Middle East and Africa, with a compound annual growth rate of 104%, followed by Asia Pacific with 84% growth.

What will people be doing with their smartphones in the coming years? Cisco predicts that by 2016 two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be from videos, increasing 25-fold between now and then. ^[1]  source

I knew YouTube had grown to the second largest search engine in the world, surpassing Bing, Yahoo and Facebook, but these numbers are staggering.

Cisco’s prediction includes more than just smartphones, though. It also takes into account tablets, laptops, handheld gaming consoles, e-readers, in-car entertainment systems, digital photo frames, cameras, and machine-to-machine modules.

Cisco believes all of these gadgets combined will put the total number of mobile-connected devices over 10 billion by 2016. This expected 18-fold growth by 2016 is certainly believable, given that in 2011 global mobile data traffic doubled for the fourth year in a row. ^[2] source

App developers have to be loving these predictions.

River City Internet Group

River City Internet Group (RCIG) is an Internet delivery ‘holding company.’ RCIG (http://www.rcig.net) is a Missouri Corporation founded in 2001 that owns or invests in companies that are predominantly focused on providing Enterprise and Carrier class Internet solutions.

Through its wholly owned companies, RCIG offers a broad array of Internet solutions.

• Internet Access- MetroEthernet, OC3, DS3 and T-1 (Primary Network)
• Hosting - Colocation, Dedicated Servers and Shared Hosting (Hostirian)
• Network Monitoring Management (NPG)
• Off site data protection (E-Backups) for a variety of of industries including financial services, legal, health care, banking, state and local government, and manufacturing.

River City Internet Group is committed to fulfilling solutions for their customers in a complete, flexible, scalable and professional manner. Their customers rely upon Hostirian’s expertise in enterprise hosting, as well as other technicial matters – offering superior network connectivity, an unmatched guarantee and accommodating terms, making RCIG a logical business partner.

Hostirian

Hostirian (http://www.hostirian.com) is a leading web hosting and colocation provider in the Saint Louis area. By focusing only on web hosting and colocation, Hostirian is able to provide a level of customer support and consultation that remains unmatched by other providers, and at a cost substantially less than national web hosting companies. Hostirian offers shared and fully managed web hosting services, and colocation to businesses operating mission critical systems. Hostirian also offers web hosting services to a growing number of application service providers, enabling them to more efficiently deliver application services to their customers over the Internet. Hostirian also offers related value-added services, such as fully managed firewall services, and consulting services (including capacity and migration planning).

Hostirian provides 24x7x365 live telephone technical support, including customer requests for server re-boots (provided at no charge). Hostirian also manages two network operation centers, monitoring servers – then notifying customers when alerts are necessary - to ascertain what course of action the customer desires Hostirian to initiate. Hostirian guarantees a 15 minute response time to begin evaluation of any problem (24x7x365). The customer is given an Escalation List that contains the office and cell phone numbers of the actual engineers responsible for and most familiar with their hosted architecture.

Hostirian manages three data centers. See Tour and Technical Specifications at (www.hostirian.com/tour/)

• Network Services Headquarters
  11756 Borman Drive
  Saint Louis, Missouri 63146

• Bandwidth Exchange Building
  900 Walnut
  St. Louis, MO 63102

• Globe Building
  710 N. Tucker
  St. Louis, MO 63101

Hostirian understands bandwidth and network redundancy requirements. In it’s downtown data center, Hostirian offers free cross connects from the ‘meet me’ room for providers who supply an extension to the customer’s rack or cage. Current promotions include an assortment of plans with 2U, 10U, rack or full cage options – ranging from $99 to $4000. Each plan has an allotment of bandwidth in Mbps, power, set up options, and guaranteed uptime SLAs.

Hostirian is the fastest growing and most reliable web hosting company in the Saint Louis region. It is profitable, consistently adding significant new web hosting business each month. And it has a track record of greater than 99.9% uptime.

More importantly, every customer receives the ‘home town’ and individual attention that it deserves – so that they can do what they do best – run their business.

Have you ever wondered why Google loves WordPress sites, and why they seem to get indexed faster than other sites?

Even Alexa shows greater movement in traffic trends for new WordPress sites. New sites are currently ranked at about 21,000,000 on Alexa (not good). Put just a little traffic on a WordPress site though, and it’ll jump to the one million mark in a couple of weeks.

What helps generate that traffic? The answer is the blog’s ability to PING.  Its an incredibly powerful tool.

Whenever a blog pings, multiple background processes happen which get your blog quickly indexed by search engines as well as bringing traffic from many other sources.

There are tons of blog directories and ping services which accept pings. When you add a new post on your blog, it sends a ping to all these websites saying, “Hey, I’ve just added a new post in my blog”.

The downside is that every time you edit a post on WordPress, it pings that revision (by default) – and that can get you banned from ping services (not good).

How do you prevent this? Download and activate MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer 3.0. It’s been tested through the current version of WordPress. This plugin will manage your pings so you won’t get banned.

The ping services we use on WDTalk are listed below. Once you’ve activated the plugin, simply insert the following services and save – and you’re off to the races.

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/

What is Google looking for – pretty simply, results that are helpful (in the user’s locale or their peer groups). When their raters are researching queries and landing pages, they want to find useful relevant content.

We all hear about Google’s algorithms, but what’s the big picture? In the basic framework of rating a site, if your landing page is off topic or contains useless content, you won’t score many bonus points (and maybe lots of negative points).

If you site is deemed to be of little benefit to very few or no one, or gets flagged as “maybe” spam (or straight up spam), has porn or malicious content – don’t expect to rank very high in SERPS (search engine results pages).

Google doesn’t just look at the query. They look at the intent of the query. The same query in different locations can mean very different things. A great example would be American versus UK football.

Sometimes, their interpretation of a query will be very clear, but more often than not, it’ll fall into a general or common interpretation. What they look for is intent, in terms of action, information or navigation.

Tip: If a query’s intent is determined to be directed to your official (desktop) website, but instead takes the user to your mobile site, that’s not good.

Google has changed its algorithms – over 200 times recently, in an effort to return the most relevant results to search queries. Link farms are in their cross-hairs now. In the headlines, J.C. Penny and Forbes.com were both penalized, the former for using paid links to advertise their website and the latter for selling links.

What worked well in the past – will not necessarily work well going forward, especially if you used the following methods to increase the ranking of your website:

• Keyword stuffing
• Fully automated, unrelated and centralized link farms
• Cloaking
• Pages loaded with irrelevant content
• Hidden text
• Made for AdSense sites that consist entirely of scraped content
• Hidden links
• False redirects
• Link wheels

Who wins with this most recently tweak – of Google’s algorithms?

• First, Google wins because HUGE advertising revenues are at stake, and this makes them more relevant and marketable.
• Searchers win because they’ll receive more relevant results to their search queries.
• Ethical website owners win because they’ll receive a more targeted audience open to the products and services they offer.

What should you focus on going forward? On page and off page SEO optimization remain as primary ingredients in any marketing strategy. Optimize your existing web pages, title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, keywords and content. Follow that with steady growth of organic (high quality) inbound links from relevant sites.

Google’s take on link farms

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

I watch and participate in a ton of webinars, but the latest one I tuned into talked about automating stuff like distributing your YouTube videos to different video sites, and the same with PodCasts and on and on. The one site they discussed that caught my attention was Fiverr.com, “The world’s largest marketplace for small services, starting at $5.”

Then this morning, one of the threads I read posted a number of other sites similar to fiverr, which I’ve listed below.

Each of these were highly recommended, but to be honest, I haven’t used any of them quite yet. I am leaning toward contacting Fiverr first, then if that works, possibly trying some of the others. Which of these would YOU recommend?

Exchange4Me is one of a number of social media Exchange systems, and our first to review on WDTalk. Basically, the site is designed to help you increase your site traffic and popularity “FAST and FREE” through the use of coins that are can be used to get traffic for your links.

What can you do with these coins? According to Exchange4Me:

You can use the coins in your balance to place a value on your site or video. For example, you have a fans page you want gain more fans, so you set your page to give 5 Coins for any person who become fan, everytime one of our users become your fan, 5 Coins will be deducted from your account. In other words, if you have 5000 coins in your account and you set to give 5 coins for each view, that means you will get 1000 fans automatically.

You will earn coins for every Like, Follow, View, +1 or visit from you, to our users. Everytime you LIKE a page, watch a youtube video, press +1 on someone’s google plus or visiting a fellow visitor’s site you gain Coins.

Out of curiosity, I checked Exchange4Me’s Alexa ranking, which currently stands at 42,603 globally – impressive! Any time your Alexa rating ranks in the top 100,000 sites, you’re doing something right.

With so much information out there - it’s hard to narrow down any search query to the relevant few you’re truly interested in. I recently found a great list of blogs that are both interesting and successful. I had already been reading some of them, but this is a diverse group with a ton of in depth observations. See my PS: on marketing blogs.

PS: If you’re interested in top performing marketing blogs - see the Power 150 at AdAge Digital. They currently list 1121 marketing blogs (and growing) ranked by a number of indicators including:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• StumbleUpon
• Alexa Points
• Yahoo Inlinks
• Todd Points

Click on the link and it’ll show their last posts.

Just today, I was asked for a recommendation in coming up with a name for a new forum - in a custom niche. I know this sounds easy, but it seems that every conceivable combination of English words has been taken, and is currently either active or parked. The registrar always suggests other combinations, but I’ve yet to find one in my queries that fits what I’m  searching for.

Maybe this is just one of my many pet peeves - but an astonishing number of domains are parked, especially with highly competitive keywords. Cracking that egg requires a sledge hammer the size of my SUV. I did find one this morning I really liked, but the sale price was over $6000.00. My budget is around $12

There are services where you can sell and purchase domain names - like SEDO, but then I’d miss the challenge and frustration, and sometimes the thrill of finding a name that is actually available.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world - which is owned by none other than the largest search engine, Google.  Volumes have been written about video optimization, but your core objective should be about the quality of each visitor experience.

I ran across this bit of code on - Web Hosting Talk this morning (OP did not list the source), where the script sets up a YouTube video to autostart only one time, then if the visitor comes back on that page, the video will not start again.

<script language=”Javascript”>
function played(){
var ca = document.cookie.split(‘;’);
for(var i=0; i<ca.length; i++) {
var c = ca[i];
while (c.charAt(0)==’ ‘) c = c.substring(1,c.length);
if (c.indexOf(“played=”) == 0) return 1;
}
var date = new Date();
var days = 7;
date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000));
document.cookie = “played=1″+”; expires=”+date.toGMTString()+”; path=/”;
return 0;
}
if(played()==0){
document.write(“<embed src=\”http://www.youtube.com/v/W5E2Q6PW&autoplay=1\” type=\”application/x-shockwave-flash\” wmode=\”transparent\” width=\”740\” height=\”400\”></embed>”);
}
else{
document.write(“<embed src=\”http://www.youtube.com/v/W5E2Q6PW\” type=\”application/x-shockwave-flash\” wmode=\”transparent\” width=\”740\” height=\”400\”></embed>”);
}
</script>

Replace the YouTube embed with a valid URL.

Please let me know if this works for you (Or Not)

Revised January 18 2012

By default, WordPress blogs use a rel=”nofollow” attribute - so when you read of Do Follow Blogs, these are blogs that have used a plugin that removes the nofollow attribute. Comments then that contain links back to the poster count as backlinks for their sites.

To the Search Engines – these links then are simply links. It’s up to the search engines rather to follow that link and pass value to the poster’s site. There is no “do follow” attribute to instruct a search engine that these links must be followed or assigned value. Why DoFollow versus NoFollow? The NoFollow attribute was introduced in 2005 to discourage comment spam.

Quality Backlinks - To a large segment of SEO experts, a quality backlink is a one way incoming link from a relevant (respected) site with higher PR. It’s a link you earn via hosting a great site that delivers useful information (the stuff that people want to link to).  These are also known as natural (real) links. The theory is that more natural links help boost your site’s popularity and Page Rank.

A Word of Caution - Blog spam is rampant, especially for Do Follow blogs. There are some “do follow” plugins that allow you to set how many comments a visitor needs to leave (with the same domain URL and/or email address) before their comment link will follow. The DoFollow Plugin for WordPress options:

Timeout

Comments

Pingbacks, trackbacks and other special comment types

My Recommendation

• Use a Do Follow plugin for your WordPress blog if you enable comments
• Do not add the “NoFollow” attribute to inbound links.
• Only add the ‘NoFollow” attribute to outbound links in widgets like Subscribe or Bookmark Me.

Center Your Pages – Pages that are left or right aligned don’t work well with larger PC monitors, and often look out of place due to the large amount of space left to one side.

Use Ample White Space – Resist loading up your pages with everything imaginable. Focus is important. Use white space to guide visitors as they navigate your site. Clutter simply invites confusion.

Consistency – This reverts back to short term versus long term memory retention and branding principles. Try to use the same terminology in your prompts and menus.

KISS – We’ve all see the term. Keeping it simple works. Highlight the key products or services you offer on your home page, then provide more in-depth information about them deeper in your site. Don’t try to squeeze everything onto one page that scrolls forever.

Embrace all five senses – reach out to your visitors in a way that they’ll best understand what you have to offer. Use a mix of graphics and short blocks of text to capture their attention.

Employ analytics – to determine how visitors reach your site, how long they stay & if they return. If your site has a high bounce rate, perhaps the search query doesn’t match well with your content, or the content may need to be revamped.

Enhance Credibility and Trust – Add an About Us page. In a era where we’re being warned to avoid certain websites, as they may infect your computer with all sorts of malware, it’s important to convey credibility at first glance. Let’s face it – the design of your site directly relates to the perception of your professionalism.

Color and Layout – speaks volumes about your business. Color themes are perceived differently in global markets, so it’s vitally important to understand your target audience. What works for car dealerships doesn’t necessarily work for furniture retailers. Research your competition – emulate success.

Online Store? Increase your conversions with options, discount codes and freebies. I know if I’m comparing products and one vendor offers an immediate rebate, I’ll opt for that every day over the option to mail in some coupon and wait for weeks to get a check back.

Xen™ – is a virtual machine environment that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with outstanding levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Servers with – quad core processors and GB’s of RAM are ideally suited to employ virtualization to present the illusion of many smaller virtual machines, each running a separate operating system.

Virtual machines – on one dedicated server are isolated from one another, allowing concurrent execution of multiple operating systems – without allowing the execution of one to adversely affect the performance of another partition.

XEN Hypervisor – is a layer of software running directly on the server’s hardware, replacing the operating system, which allows that server’s hardware to run multiple guest operating systems concurrently. It becomes the interface for all hardware requests such as CPU, I/O, and disk for the guest operating systems.

Server virtualization benefits

• dynamic fault tolerance against software failures (through rapid bootstrapping or rebooting)
• hardware fault tolerance (through migration of a virtual machine to different hardware)
• the ability to securely separate virtual operating systems
• the ability to support legacy software as well as new OS instances on the same computer

I remember when I first learned how to use print screen - to capture screen images. I thought to myself, “Wow, imagine the possibilities!” Technology has advanced so rapidly, it’s impossible for one person to keep pace with new developments and software, even with something as seemingly simple as screen capture programs.

Doing a Google search for “screen capture programs” just now returned over  – 37 million results. Some of the more highly recommended programs are:

SnagIt 10 by TechSmith® (free trial/$39.95)

Snagit gives you the tools you need to create engaging images for presentations, feedback, tutorials, and training documents.

The only con I saw was that it could only save video files in .AVI format.

FullShot 2012 by InBit. (free trial/$49.99+)

FullShot is a professional screen capture (print screen) application designed for any Windows user who needs an effortless, effective way to take screenshots of Windows screens. It’s perfect for capturing on-screen images you want to include in manuals, training handouts,presentations, marketing materials, and web pages.

Cons - This product doesn’t seem to offer the ability to capture video clips.

Jing and Jing Pro - by TechSmith® (free versus $14.95/year)

Jing Free - SWF Video | 5-Minutes of Screen Recording | Mark-Up Tools for Images | Screencast.com Free Account

What do I use? – the FREE version of Jing because it fits what I do for now. If you need to produce MPEG-4 videos, I highly recommend Jing Pro as it offers the best combination of features vs price.

Every successful business has its niche -  (a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fit). Marketing materials are carefully written to emphasize a business’s strengths and their competitor’s weaknesses. A great example that comes to mind was one brand of typesetter which was capable of producing point sizes in tenths of an inch (unique to that brand).

Another was capable of zooming horizontally independent of vertical - in one percent increments (great for Rx labels). When the time came to upgrade or renew leases, thousands of existing documents had been produced using their unique parameters. To maintain uniformity, all new bids had to confirm to those same standards – effectively locking that client into their brand. In document imaging, one brand of copier can produce banner advertisements. Another can direct print PDF documents without opening them first. My point? There is a niche unique to your industry. Have you identified your niche, and are you marketing what makes your products and services unique?

The niche doesn’t have to be technical in nature
A niche could be how fast you deliver, the quality of your work, the level of support you provide, your pre-sales advertising venues, and any number of other things – anything that sets you apart from your competition. In web hosting, most niches relate to more bang for the buck – in bandwidth, RAM, disk space, add-ons and so forth.

The Web Hosting Industry
The web hosting industry is fiercely competitive, just as in many other industries. Web hosting continues to be a mystery to most new entrepreneurs though, even as prospects are rapidly becoming more computer and Internet savvy.  My own grandchildren are extremely Internet savvy, but couldn’t tell you the difference between Linux and Windows, or ASP and PHP.  Most prospects understand the need for an online presence, but are lost when it comes to how to select a decent provider.

Branding
In terms of mass appeal, branding is paramount. Here again, an integral piece of branding is your niche.  I can think of a few web hosting providers who own their niche, not financially, but in the mindset of prospects, just as Kleenex and Xerox own their niche.  If I were to ask someone if they’ve heard of your company, would they be like, “Yeah, they’re highly recommended,” or “Never heard of them.”  Getting from Point ‘Unknown” to Point “Highly Recommended” requires more than competing with similar packages, which I see a lot of online. When prospects compare your website against all the other sites they’ve just visited, is there anything that definitively sets you apart?

Five nines or 99.999% relates to - the up time availability of data centers. Prospective clients look for uninterruptable uptime as a prerequisite to constitute reliability of a data center, but what is acceptable to one may be inadequate to another. Accordingly, this expectation of uptime relates to a demand for computer reliability. Data center infrastuctures include a variety of critical physical layer environmental sub-systems that must integrate cohesively. Among those are power and cooling. If a system is deemed ‘fault tolerant,” this means it can sustain a worst case, unplanned event and NOT disrupt the end user.

The Four Tiers of Data Centers

Tier 1

It has non-redundant capacity components and single non-redundant path distribution paths serving the site’s computer equipment.

Tier 2

A tier 2 data center has redundant capacity components and single non-redundant distribution paths serving the site’s computer equipment.

Tier 3

A tier 3 data center has redundant capacity components and multiple distribution paths serving the site’s computer equipment.

Tier 4

This is a fault tolerant data center with redundant capacity systems and multiple distribution paths simultaneously serving the site’s computer equipment.

A tier rating for an entire site is limited to the rating of the weakest subsystem that will impact their operations.

When you publish your website - there are things you can do to get found and accelerate inbound traffic. I’ve seen a lot of SEO practitioners recommend submitting your site to Google and so on, but they’ll find you (quicker than you imagine). If you’re online, there isn’t much that gets by Google.

The following services are largely analytical in nature - with each of them providing some valuation of your site. Beyond that, researching your site at these locations actually helps get your site recognized and indexed.

Robtex - Swiss Army Knife Internet Tool

Alexa – is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. Search Alexa to discover the most successful sites on the web by keyword, category, or country. Use their analytics for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research or business development.

Quantcast - Quantcast Measurement provides free, directly measured traffic and audience composition reports. These reports are Media Ratings Council-accredited, ensuring that your traffic data is both accurate and reliable.

Web Worth - is a free and innovative tool to help find out a website value or worth calculation, estimations about a web site and SEO information about any web site the user submits – you could call it a Website Value Calculator

Cubestat - is a free tool for website value calculation, estimations and information.

Website Informer - is a special service for web masters that gathers detailed information on websites – general information, statistics, main competitors, similar sites, IPs etc.

PeekStats - estimates website value based on a wide range of publicly available statistics. They provide you with insight in all these numbers and the estimated results.

Markosweb.com - is a web service that collects and analyzes any data about domains and keywords they are optimized for.

Hostirian is named Best VPS Host by Best Free Web Space because of the quality of service and the best virtual private server (VPS) technology they use. In this Hostirian review we will take a look at some of the best web hosting services they have to offer as well as a little about the Hostirian company, in an effort to help webmasters figure out if this is the best web hosting service for his/her needs. Hostirian was started in 2001 and is part of the River City Internet Group. Hostirian manages over 5,000 servers in a 30,000 square foot datacenter, making it possible for them to offer top of the line VPS hosting options. In addition to top of the line technology, Hostirian focuses on providing the very best web hosting customer support.

At Hostirian,  customers will have the option to contact customer service through their toll free 800 number, integrated ticket system, and live chat options for both pre and post sales service. These are just a couple of the elements that Best Free Web Space feels makes Hostirian one of the best web hosting services around. In addition, Hostirian offers several web hosting options to meet the needs of the most customers. Choose from shared web hosting, cloud hosting, a virtual private server, dedicated server and more. Having so many options makes it possible for many different websites to perform very well on the Hostirian web hosting service.

VPS hosting plans start as low as $4.95 per month and include 256 MB dedicated memory, 10 GB disk space, 100 GB monthly bandwidth and a 2.4 GHz Xeon processor. In addition to the Hostirian VPS Starter Package they have four other VPS plans to choose from, each offering additional dedicated memory, disk space, monthly bandwidth, and Xeon processors. For a webmaster that has an established website that is having performance issues, because of the available resources on a shared web hosting plan, moving to a VPS plan could be the perfect answer. A virtual private server uses a partition to provide each VPS account with dedicated allotments of resources as well as the ability to choose the operating system, reboot the server, or take advantage of other administrative rights that one would usually only have with a dedicated server.

The fact that Hostirian has more than 10 years of experience in the web hosting industry is a good indication that they provide a reliable web hosting service that is stable and secure. Hostirian reviews from actual customers tell about the reliable uptime and exceptional customer service they have enjoyed with Hostirian.  Whether you are new to the web hosting business and just need a basic shared web hosting plan or if you have been around for a while and are looking for a more specialized service like a managed server, disaster recovery, cloud hosting and more; Hostirian offers affordable, professional services to meet all your web hosting needs. Signing up with Hostirian is easy and secure. Visit the Hostirian website to learn more about the best VPS hosting options. Watch for Hostirian promos like the current 20% off new VPS hosting plans, when you “like” Hostirian on Facebook.

For any other questions about the Hostirian service, contact them by phone, email or live chat. The Hostirian support is available all the time and they take pride in providing every customer with the tools and service needed to build and maintain a successful website. Take a few minutes to read the hosting articles and  the frequently asked questions to learn more about the Hostirian web hosting service.

What are 404 error pages anyway? From time to time, one of your links on WordPress may become broke. When this happens, WordPress looks for a 404.php web page, and presents that page to the visitor.

The good news is that you don’t have to settle for – the default 404 NOT FOUND page. Some themes make it easy to customize the 404.php file, but others do not. Regardless, leaving it at the default setting is counterproductive.  Why not add a message that helps your visitor or injects some humor to defuse the error?

To edit your Theme’s 404 error template file:

• Open your WordPress admin panel:
• Choose Appearance menu.
• Choose the Theme Editor page.
• Check to see if your theme includes a 404 Template in the list of files.
• Click the link for 404 Template along the right side of the page.
• Edit the message text to say what you want it to say.
• Save your changes.

While you are examining and editing your 404 template file – take a look at the structure of the default 404.php file. It basically features tags that display the header, sidebar, and footer, and also an area for your message:

In addition to adding a personalized message - similar to “something went wrong,” you should also include:

• A link to the site map – (if you have one) and the home page.
• A search box. If you have a site search, add it to your 404 page.

With shopping cart abandonment hovering - between 50-70%, understanding WHY could help you refine your checkout process and improve conversions.

Whereas getting from Point Query to - Point Buy (complicated checkout process) used to dominate shopping cart abandonment, today’s shoppers cite high shipping costs high on their list, followed by a desire to shop around. About 1/4 of prospects leave simply because the price is too high.

So, what makes your site unique - and sellable? How does it differ from sites your prospects just came from or are going to? If your strategy relies on lowering prices alone, you’re not necessarily missing the boat, but it’ s never venturing far from the dock.  If your product or service doesn’t require shipping and handling charges, offering a special coupon code helps.

Again, trust remains high - on everyone’s list. Do you have a return policy? Do you provide contact information on your site, like a brick and mortar mailing address and phone number? Do you reassure your shoppers by providing privacy and and trust language? Do you offer PayPal or Google Checkout – and why is that important? Some prospects aren’t comfortable entering their financial information on a site they just found that day, even if you’ve got the best deal.

I read an interesting approach to tackling shopping cart abandonment this morning – and that was to offer a discount in return for a customer review, outlining why they decided to purchase from you. Would that work? Maybe. I’d be thinking, “Did they write up a nice review just to get the discount, or was this really the best deal?” On the other hand, reviews do help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), especially on Google Places.

Updated Dec 27 2011

Web design is about perception (by the visitor) - so user-centric designs lead to more successful & profitable websites. The key here is to approach your design from your visitor’s point of view. How do you see them interacting with your site?

Just as in personal encounters – first impressions are killer. Load up your home page with clutter and you’ll lose your visitor faster than …. well, faster than my dog can woof down a hot dog.

Ponder this – what do you do when you stumble across a site that has long blocks of unbroken text on the home page? Most visitors simply glance at new pages, then maybe scan some text. They’re searching for something, so if they find that SOMETHING or even something vaguely similar, more often than not, they’ll skip everything else on that page and click through.

What are your visitors thinking? Basically, users’ habits on the Web aren’t that different from customers’ habits in a store. Once they find something of interest and click through, if the new page doesn’t immediate match up to their expectations, what do they do? HIT THE BACK BUTTON !! Why? Surfers have become accustomed to instant gratification, and if not on your site, certainly on your competition’s website.

Once you’ve captured their attention – what factors motivate visitors to convert? Converting to me could be giving up their email address, going to livechat to speak to an operator, filling in a quote request or actually calling via telephone for more info. Of course, ordering online works well also. Here, I believe great content out-trumps visual design. As far back as I can remember (in sales), solutions and NOT products or services carry the day. If your solution eases some pain & is reasonable, the odds increase exponentially that visitors will buy.

I read an article a few days ago describing in-depth comparisons – of the major search engines ability to recognize and combat phishing.  To my surprise, IE ranked much higher than Google, but since I’m always on Google, I thought I should research some third party tools to help secure my online travels.

The following four anti-phishing tools are presented for your review:

• AVG LinkScanner - AVG LinkScanner is a free must have for computer only running a traditional anti-virus program to prevent you from visiting bogus or infected web sites.
• TrendProtect - TrendProtect is a FREE browser plug-in that helps you avoid Web pages with unwanted content and hidden threats. TrendProtect rates the current page and pages listed in Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results. You can use the rating to decide if you want to visit or avoid a given Web page. To rate Web pages, TrendProtect refers to an extensive database that covers the following information for billions of Web pages:  Content category, Phishing scam detection, Site reputation and Page reputation.
• Norton Safe Web Lite – Norton Safe Web Lite provides a safer search experience by warning you of dangerous Web sites right in your search results, so you can search, browse, and shop online without worry. Norton Safe Web Lite is FREE to anyone who wants protection from unsafe Web sites and disreputable online merchants. It’s our way of giving back to the online community.
• BitDefender Anti-Phishing Free Edition - Committed To Stopping Cyber-criminals In Their Tracks! Whether you’re a current Bitdefender customer or not, our goal is that everyone remains safeguarded from cyber-criminals’ tactics. That’s why we offer free virus removal tools and other free antivirus products, to ensure that every journey online is a safe one!

Just this morning, I read an article on a web hosting forum about Keyword Research Guidelines - and was so impressed I considered asking the OP (original poster) for permission to use it on this blog. However, after performing a few Google searches, these guidelines have been circulating around the Web (verbatim) since 2003, and in fact, returned over 18 thousand results. I have no clue who the original author is, but the guidelines remain valid, nonetheless.

Many businesses recognize that search engines can - bring volumes of highly targeted prospects to their website, typically at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.

Unfortunately, these same companies often overlook - the most important part of their search engine marketing campaigns, which is keyphrase selection and evaluation.

Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to find products or services on search engines) are -  the building block of any search engine marketing strategy.

It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else - the remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows is a three-step process that goes over the process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating the ongoing performance of keyphrases for search engines.

1. Compiling a keyphrase list:

Usually, companies are sure that they already know their ideal keyphrases. Often, they are wrong.

This is typically because it is very hard to separate oneself from a business and look at it from the perspective of a potential customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a keyphrase list should not be, despite common practice, a strictly internal process.

Rather, it is best to ask everyone outside of your company for their input, especially your customers. People are often very surprised at the keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes dismayed to realize that an average customer doesn’t speak the same language that they do.

Only after you have put together a list of likely phrases from external sources do you add your own. As a last step, try to add variations, plurals, and derivatives of the phrases on your list.

2. Evaluating keyphrases:

Once you have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is time to evaluate each phrase to hone your list down to those most likely to bring you the highest amount of quality traffic.

Although many individuals will base their assessment of key phrase value based only on popularity figures, there are really three vitally important aspects of each phrase to consider.

a) Popularity

By far the easiest of the three to judge is popularity, since it is not subjective. Software like WordTracker gives popularity figures of search phrases based upon actual search engine activity (it also gives additional keyphrase suggestions and variations).

Such tools allow you to assign a concrete popularity number to each phrase to use when comparing them. Obviously, the higher the number, the more traffic that can be expected (assuming you are able to obtain good search engine positions).

However, this number alone is not good enough reason to pursue any particular keyphrase, although key phrase analysis too often stops here.

b) Specificity

This is more abstract than the sheer popularity number, but equally important. For example, let’s assume that you were able to obtain great rankings for the keyphrase “insurance companies” (a daunting prospect). Let’s also assume that you only deal with auto insurance.

Although “insurance companies” might have a much higher popularity figure than “auto insurance companies”, the first keyphrase would also be comprised of people looking for life insurance, health insurance, and home insurance.

It is very likely that someone searching for a particular type of insurance will refine their search after seeing the disparate results returned from the phrase “insurance companies”.

In the second, longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that a much higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what you offer- and the addition of the word “auto” will make it much easier to attain higher rankings, since the longer term will be less competitive.

c) Motivation of User

This factor, even more abstract than specificity, calls for an attempt to understand the motivation of a search engine user by simply analyzing his or her search phrase.

Assume, for example, that you were a real estate agent in Atlanta. Two of the keyphrases you are evaluating are “Atlanta real estate listings” and “Atlanta real estate agents”.

Both phrases have very similar popularity numbers. They are also each fairly specific, and your services are very relevant to each. So which phrase is better? If you look into the likely motivation of the user, you will probably conclude that the second is superior.

While both phrases target people looking for real estate in Atlanta, you can infer from the second phrase that the searcher has moved beyond the point where they are browsing local homes or checking out prices in their neighborhood- they are looking for an agent, which implies that they are ready to act. Often, subtle distinctions between terms can make a large difference on the quality of the traffic they attract.

3. Evaluating Keyphrase Performance:

Until recently, judging the performance of individual keyphrases was a dicey proposition. Although it is possible to tell from your log traffic analysis how many visitors are getting to your site from each keyphrase (valuable information, but unfortunately not enough to do much with), it was very hard to decipher which phrases were bringing you the most quality traffic.

Recently, however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have been developed that allow you to judge the performance of each individual keyphrase based upon visitor behavior.

This new software makes it possible to periodically analyze which keyphrases are bringing your site the most valuable visitors- those who buy your products, fill out your contact form, download your demo, etc.

This type of data, rather than the sheer number of visitors from each search phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining your search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard and replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort toward the phrases that are delivering visitors that become customers. This kind of ongoing analysis is the final piece of the keyphrase puzzle, and allows you to continually target the most important phrases for your industry, even if they change over time.

Conclusion:

Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign. While high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal, high rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver poor results.

Integration of this keyphrase process into your overall search engine marketing strategy can dramatically improve your website performance (and thus your bottom line).

First, RAID is not a backup solution – always employ disaster recovery options.

I field queries about – RAID 1 (mirror) software versus hardware solutions from time to time. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Some say adding a hardware RAID controller introduces another point of failure, but the most popular reason by far to use software RAID is cost. If you do go with hardware RAID, make sure that card is compatible with your motherboard.

With BIOS (basic input output system) RAID – you may encounter a few quirks. Essentially, it’s a poor man’s version of software RAID. Motherboards do fail, so if yours gets fried, you’ll probably have to replace it with a similar board. Taking a mirrored drive to another system won’t work if that system can’t track the drive’s volumes.

Do you want – redundancy or performance? Most of us would prefer both. I think software and hardware RAID solutions work fine for redundancy, but hardware RAID holds the advantage in performance, especially if your server is database intensive.

There are other perks to – hardware RAID solutions as well, like notification of specific drive failures. Software RAID solutions typically have problems identifying bad drives, and normally do NOT support hot swaps. The most obvious drawback to software RAID is that it uses cycles from your CPU to manage the array, and while this isn’t quite so bad in RAID 1, it can significantly slow down your server in RAID solutions that involve striping with parity.

For those of you who use multiple operating system environments, hardware RAID is the way to go. If you set up RAID using a specific operating system, only that operating system can (normally) access that array.

Software boot volume limitations – since the operating system has to be running to enable the array, (obviously) the operating system cannot boot from the array.

My recommendation – do what makes sense for your pocketbook and priorities. Software RAID is definitely less expensive, but has performance drawbacks. Hardware RAID costs more, but is feature rich and generally worth the investment.

I just typed in “Let It Snow” on Google – as recommended by a story in the Los Angeles Times.  Instantly, my screen started filling with snowflakes and in just a matter of moments, it fogged over. Fortunately, I could wipe the fog from my screen with my mouse.  I wonder – Is that causing condensation inside my monitor?

Anyway, once your screen becomes unreadable – there is a defrost button in the upper right hand corner that clears your screen.  They do this by turning up your internal monitor temperate remotely. NOT!

Tilt and Askew – Google didn’t stop there. Type either tilt or askew in Google and see what happens. Try scrolling thru the results.

There was also a time when if you typed the word “Gravity” into the search engine you’d watch all the copy on the page plunk to the bottom. It doesn’t do that anymore, but you can see what you missed here.

I’m constantly amazed at how technically advanced my grandchildren have become - I think because of their early exposure to TV and other visual medias. We’ve evolved into a visually rich society – actually a global community. It begins in the early learning and development years of our children. It imprints their thought processes.

Online Video Providers
Enter YouTube and other providers offering video channels, enabling small business to ramp up their marketing venues, giving them the ability to reach global markets, whereas only mega-businesses once ventured. Text is text, and a picture is worth a thousand words, but videos can propel your business to new levels.

Only a few short years ago - television commercials were financially out of the reach for the bulk of small businesses. With the development of high speed broadband networks, TV-like advertising via YouTube suddenly became affordable.

YouTube is a video sharing website - allowing its members to upload, share and comment on an expansive database of videos. While you may be struggling to increase page views to your website, YouTube registers billions of page views monthly. Why? Video sells! It’s RED HOT!

What’s the impact of online video?
I’ve seen studies that projected 3 of 4 adults have watched online videos and on average, nearly 20% do so daily – and just not by themselves. Nearly two-thirds of those shared that experience with someone else or a group. Online video ad spending is approaching $1 Billion annually, if not already there.

Why Use Online Video Marketing?

• They’re practical for businesses wanting to show demonstrations of products or services.
• They’re great for introducing your staff or doing a virtual tour of your facilities.
• They can drive prospects to your website, jumpstarting sales.
• It’s extremely cost effective compared to other advertising venues.

What is everyone watching?
News captures attention across all generations, followed by comedy or humorous videos. Still over 20% view educational videos, and all markets continue to grow exponentially as broadband expands its reach.

Some Tips

• Be Entertaining: To maximize your reach for market penetration, your video must be entertaining and have perceived value to the prospects you’re targeting.
• Be Professional: Presently, over 60% of viewers prefer professionally developed videos versus those developed by amateurs. That gap diminishes with the younger generation, but still holds true.
• Focus on the core product or service you’re featuring: If you’re featuring dedicated servers, save shared hosting for another clip. Spreading your message across multiple platforms distracts your viewers.
• Be Consistent: Branding is important. We all know IBM, HP and Dell, but their marketing campaigns drive home their respective messages with regularity. Consistency is KEY to growing traffic.

My Recommendation
Have some fun. Be creative. Think out of the box. Break out of the direct mail, phone tag day-after-day routine of driving business. Video works! Like every other advertising venue, measure its results, then tweak your presentation and re-measure your results. Practice may not make perfect, but it will improve sales and your bottom line. And that’s where I want to be, right along with you.

A KVM switch (keyboard, video, mouse switch) essentially allows  - a user(s) to access multiple CPUs from a single monitor, keyboard and mouse. KVM switches are found in virtually every data center, because let’s face it; having hundreds or thousands of monitors, keyboards or mice in a DC is unrealistic.

Integrated KVM switching systems provide administrators – KVM, console, and remote power control of thousands of servers, which results in space savings, improved server management, reduced heat issues – and the bottom line, cost savings.

Data Centers typically use enterprise wide solutions – geared to Network Operating Centers (NOC), which allows their engineers to remotely access servers.

If you rent colocation space for your businesses rack servers – most KVM will usually take up 1U of space, up to a 42 port solution.  When ordering, be sure to remember rack mount kits and interface cables.

All KVMs are NOT created equal – variances can be in audio support, client platforms, supported operating systems, interfaces, sharing, remote power management and 208 volt power capability.

What about security? Enterprise level KVMs offer administrators complete control of all the devices that are attached, allowing them to set permissions for all other users.  They can create individual user profiles and assign access privileges. One example of an access privilege would be the ability to define which servers a user could view and access. Some allow time-out features for inactive users.

When you speak about the tradition of Internet technologies - you need only go back a couple of decades, but there is value to understanding the culture of your niche as a tool to connect with visitors on your website.

Staying connected entails identifying  - technologies, traditions or events that exist in your specific niche – that you and your audience find culturally significant. In other words, what has made your niche important to you and your visitors?

Websites with longtail (tradition relevant) keyword-rich titles – help draw a very targeted audience. When we speak of Internet technologies, we’re not necessarily spanning generations of cultures with regard to time, rather information.

Do you connect the vendor-client dots – via timetables, explaining how you, your clients or your industry have grown through the years? Taking this one step further, explain “why you now” concluding with a benefits statement and compelling call-to-action.

This is my Gravatar as the Editor for WDTalk. Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar, which is simply the small square image which appears alongside comments you leave when blog commenting. Gravatars are linked to specific email addresses.

In terms of know, like and trust - a personal Gravatar adds weight to your comments, making you appear more genuine.  Most spammers don’t use Gravatars, so not having one sets off spam signals for a lot of bloggers, including me.

Having a personal Gravatar attaches an image - to a name. So often, I see usernames like anoerzggzz145 and my first thought is that, “I’ve got another spammer.”

I’ll let you judge a few I’ve seen over the past few years:

Acaiberriesqx   - linked to obvious spam

Ford new car extended warranty  - Really? That’s your username? Linked to a sales page!

Zenoxskiiqqqw – Come on?!  Three Q’s? And the associated email address wasn’t much better!

Ok, I understand some visitors have some - pretty quirky usernames, but having a personal Gravatar makes you look less like a spammer and more like a member of the blog.

How to Get a Gravatar

• Go to Gravatar.com
• Click on ‘Get Your Gravatar Today’
• Enter your email address
• Click the link in the confirmation email
• Choose a username and password, then click ‘Sign Up’
• Follow the option to Add an Image
• Upload the best picture of you from your computer.
• Crop the image to your liking, then click ‘Crop and Finish’
• Choose a suitable rating for you Gravatar. (I recommend a G rating)

Know, like and trust are terms relative to - sales, not just face-to-face with a sales representative, but also the Internet. Billions of dollars are spent online every year, much of that with businesses we’ve never heard of – so if you’re missing the know, the like and trust need to be that much more compelling.

Social media sites – most noticeably Facebook, use the “like” button to convey trust, but most business websites rely on professional design, solutions content and competitive pricing to carry the day. And this is where online buyers can sometimes get into trouble.

The ‘lock’ icon and https: lend credibility - to the security of financial transactions, but even fraudulent (or less than honest) businesses can obtain SSL certificates. There are things to look for on sites that imply trust, like a brick and mortar address and phone number. It’s amazing how many ecommerce sites have NO contact information other than a general email address, or contact form. Plus, some use Domain Privacy to hide ownership information about the site itself.

Testimonials convey trust – but not so much if only first names are used, or if the hyperlink points to the site you’re presently visiting.

I once visited a site where the owner was inquiring - how to improve his ranking on Google. One of the first things I noticed on his site was that it had two testimonials from different individuals, but listing the same URL for each.

The first testimonial raved about a service they didn’t even offer on their site, which immediately seemed strange.

The second raved about their customer support. I was curious, so I did a WHOIS on the URL that was listed on the testimonials, and it turns out that domain has never been registered, and the site I was on has only been online for four months.

Would I trust my credit card with that business – not in a million years, and not because the site itself wasn’t professionally designed, or offered solutions that matched my specific requirements, or were even attractively priced. Their trust factor had been compromised.

Beware of red flags when – pondering whether to share your credit card info with businesses online. The Internet is littered with scammers like a minefield .. be careful where you step.

YouTube recently published a Creator Playbook – that delves (extensively) into how to BEST create and optimize your videos. Included are recommendations for metadata optimization, programming/production and social media connections.

Two key topics are “audience approval” and “relevance to query.”  Audience approval simply measures the popularity of your video in terms of views and playing time, and to some extent community factors like comments, subscribers and channel activity. Relevance to query ties into metadata and tags.

Unlike conventional search query - exact match titles carry less weight. You do want to position primary keywords at the beginning of the title, though and branding toward the end.

A key variance from conventional search – lies with meta descriptions because they can be much longer, but here again YouTube recommends putting the most compelling information at the beginning (of course, using keywords).

A little research on what tags – your competitors are using to rank well goes a long way to enhance how your video will fare.

Performance Marketing Insider ran an article earlier this month - about the launch of WordAds by WordPress, wondering whether it could compete with Google’s AdSense.

While I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight - the article did make a couple of great points about the explosive growth of WordPress.

WordPress estimates almost 50,000 new WordPress sites start online every 24 hours. Alexa.com estimates that almost 15 percent of the top 1 million websites are WordPress configurations. The platform has morphed into the most popular full-fledged content management system on the web.

That’s over 18 million NEW WordPress sites each year! Even more significant is the Alexa estimate, based on traffic. Increasing numbers of businesses are upgrading their hosting platforms to WordPress because it has morphed from its early days as a blogging platform to a full fledged dynamic CMS.

Will WordAds succeed? Only time will tell, but my money is on YES.

As Google continues to refine its algorithms to return relevant results - I sometimes don’t want to see results based on where Google thinks I am, my past search history or what Google Plus circle I’m in.

In the graphic below, my default location - is Maryland Heights, MO (West St. Louis County). If my default location was Honolulu, or if I selected my location to be Honolulu, I’d see different results for the search query of “dedicated servers St. Louis,” even though my search was very specific to St. Louis. From Honolulu, WHT dropped from number 2 to number 5, Hostirian remained at number one on both, and a couple of local St. Louis firms moved ahead of WHT (using Maryland Heights).

In the following graphic, I’ve compared search queries, again using Honolulu versus Maryland Heights, but dropping St. Louis from the search query.

In this comparison, the query using Honolulu as the location showed NO results for Hostirian, a St. Louis dedicated server provider. However, the same query using Maryland Heights did show Hostirian on the first page at numbers 11 and 12. Worth noting is that by adding St. Louis to the search query, Hostirian ranked at number one on both, because it is a local St. Louis company.

Of course, if you’re using Chrome – and are logged into your Gmail account, throw all this out of the window. Personalized search takes over, making social book marking all the more important.

I just read an article on how the WordPress community has labeled - ThemeForest as its red headed stepchild, and somewhere near the end of that article they started doing comparisons to other theme services, and Thesis was mentioned a couple of times. Add that one of my favorite bloggers, Ana Hoffman, recommends Thesis, and I became curious how they differed.

While reading about Thesis - I subscribed to a free ebook from their site labeled Nonverbal Website Intelligence – the 5 invisible forces behind effective online marketing, by Derek Halpern. I highly recommend reading this report – all 33 pages.

Some excerpts from the report:

#1 Enlightening Images

Images are an essential element of engaging websites. They communicate feelings, fuel imagination, and immerse people in the story you’re sharing.

Oh, and did I mention, aside from your headline, they’re one of the first things people see when they load your page?

You get it – images are powerful. But let’s face it, not all of us can afford the time or money to pay a photographer top dollar to take the perfect picture. So, what can we do? 

A. Line of Sight

Imagine you’re walking down an empty city block and you spot someone curiously looking up at the sky. Would you quickly glance up to see what has their attention?

Probably. People, almost innately, follow the gaze of other people. Now you’re wondering, what does this have to do with websites?

#2 Effortless Navigation

When people visit your site, they’re trying to find something. It could be con­tent, contact information, or anything else your site may offer.

And, how do people find what they want? Your website’s navigation.

You may think you have this in check, but there are vital pieces of Nonverbal Website Intelligence that help your visitors find what they want in a more natural, effortless way.

Before I jump into the details, let me set the stage…

Step 4: The Complete Guide to Speeding Up Website Load Times

Recently, Willie Jackson, a speed optimization expert, prepared an article for the official DIYthemes blog, which shows you, in detail, how you can speed up your website. I highly recommend you read his article from start to fin­ish. If nothing else, you’ll learn exactly what you need to ask your web host or tech guy with regards to your website’s speed.

Performance Unleashed: How to Optimize Websites for Speed

They also offer tons of valuable content - on how to improve your website, including:

• Free Training Seminars

• High-Quality Workbooks and Reports

• Live Webinars

• Informative, How-To Blog Articles

• And Various Other Teaching Materials

Update: September 23, 2011

CALIFORNIA REPEALS THE AFFILIATE NEXUS TAX LAW

See this Press Release by the Performance Marketing Association.

PMA executive director, Rebecca Madigan stated, “The signing of this legislation means these 25,000 web-based entrepreneurs will be able to get back in business. For the PMA, this issue has always been about keeping the vibrant Affiliate Marketing sector of the economy strong and growing.”

Original article written July 19, 2011

Thousands of entrepreneurs market other vendors wares as affiliates - but it seems an increasing number of states are defining virtual stores as an in-state entity for the purpose of collecting sales tax, even though the affiliate may not have a physical presence in their state.

I can’t confirm the list below - but they have all reportedly terminated their affiliate memberships in California.

6pm.com   1-800-PetMeds   Amazon.com   Amerimark   Backcountry   Bag.com   BagsBuy.com   Barware.com   BedBathStore B&H Photo   Boden   BrickHouse Electronics   BuildDirect.com   Cabela’s   Calvin Klein Jeans   Candelabras.com   CD Universe CKU   Collections Etc.   Compact Appliance   Costume Craze   CreateForLess.com   CSN Stores   Cymax   Dermadoctor   Dr. Leonard’s   Endless.com   Eurosport   Fabric.com   Fingerhut   FootSmart   GAIAM   Garden.com   Gardeners Supply Gettington   GiftBaskets.com   Hayneedle Stores   Herroom   K. Jordan   Luggage Online   Maryland Square   MetroKitchen Overstock.com   Overstock International   PC Connection   Potpourri Group   Shindigz   Shoe.com   ShoeBuy.com ShopBop.com   ShoppersChoice.com   Silkpalms.com   SmartBargains.com   Spiritline   StumpParty   TABcom theWineEnthusiast   ThinkGeek   TimeForMeCatalog   Total Gym   Woot.com   Zappos.com

Understandably, these states desperately need to increase revenues - but I wonder with so many vendors terminating their affiliate memberships there, will California’s anticipated increase in sales revenue ever come to fruition?

Your thoughts?