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Every website needs a reliable web server to be hosted on, so that it can be accessed via internet users. Today, in web hosting market there are many types of web servers available running on different platform to select.  types are There is a wide range of web servers running on different platform to choose from within the web hosting market today. As per the Netcraft, a company that keeps statistics on the leading web servers and the platforms on the Internet, the most popular platforms and web servers are:

• UNIX and Linux running Apache web server

• Window NT/2000 running Internet Information Server (IIS)

The other web server includes WebLogic, iPlanet, Sun ONE, Zeus and etc… Given the widespread popularity of Apache (closed to 60% market share) and Microsoft IIS (approximately 30%), you can almost guarantee you can find these two platforms are supported by most of the web hosting providers.

Operating systems are an importance piece of software that is required by each computer to be installed before it can function properly. Today, most of the personal computers are running on Microsoft Windows operating system: Win98, WinXP or Win2000.

Likewise, all web servers need operating system to perform different functionalities and different web servers run on different operating systems (or so called platforms). One of the most commonly found platform is UNIX that comes in various varieties that are popular with web hosts, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux. Another popular platform that has gained strong ground as a platform for web hosting market is Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

How do you choose your web server platform?

If your website is purely make up of static web pages (i.e. HTML files), then any web hosting platform will work fine for you. However, if your website allows dynamic content, you will most likely need to run specific server-side functionality such as CGI scripts, JSP, ASP, SSI or PHP. In this case, UNIX platform web hosting will be ideal for your requirement.

On the other hand, if you need to use specific applications that require Windows to run such as ASP, .Net, MS Access, Microsoft SQL server or Cold Fusion, then you will need to find a web hosting providers that support Microsoft’s Windows NT platform. Otherwise, all other server-side functionalities such as PHP, Perl and MySQL can be supported by UNIX platform.

While common programs such as Perl, PHP, Flash etc run on both UNIX and Window platform. Many other free open source software programs are available only for UNIX than for Windows. As a result, UNIX hosting is less expensive than Window hosting. So, if hosting cost is a big concern to you, then you should consider UNIX or Linux hosting.

If you have already decided on the type of design on your web pages, make sure you can find a web hosting plan that support your needs by reading the full features of the web hosting plan before you sign-up.

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In today’s business world around 60% of success depends upon the company’s appearance. The biggest mistake overlooked by the beginners is when they build their business and tries to put an artistic look over the functions of the website design. However one should make sure that it is very much important to make your site nice and lovely that will look pleasing to the visitor eyes. In short a simple and attractive website which will influence the search engines and easily get indexed by them.

There are three fundamental steps that must be followed while designing a pleasing website.

• Titles, Keywords, Descriptions
• Clean Design
• Page Names

The first words a search engine spider fetches from your website are Meta Tags – Titles, Keywords and Descriptions which are located in an html page. These tags play a very significant role in getting your website indexed by search engines. If these Meta tags are done correctly, the search engine spiders will get a clear picture of your website and may get indexed quickly. But still many site owners don’t know the importance of these tags and put unnecessary and ineffective information that can’t help you for better search results.

A typical web page design contains a title that either shows the name of the page a visitor is on or the name of the company itself. Unless your business is nationally or globally known, for example Ford, there is a good chance you won’t be seen by Web users searching for your services. A good SEO plan will include a title that fits your site’s target keywords and keyword phrases.

Keyword Meta tags are useful to reinforce the keywords and phrases you want to have indexed from your site. This will aid to a boost in your search engine rankings as well. Be sure that words used in the keyword tag are also found throughout the content, otherwise the words in the keyword tag will be useless.

The Meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your website that spiders will place into the search engines. Typically, a wise strategy is to either include the first couple of lines in your content or a brief summary about the page itself with a few keywords. A good description also doesn’t need to be a whole paragraph of information. Usually one sentence of 7-15 words is all that is needed.

As mentioned earlier, a common pitfall with many designers is the strong focus on looks without clean functional code that search engine spiders can easily read. What would be the point of creating superbly optimized content if it is hidden and broken up with lines on top of lines of coding? Thankfully, there are methods of Web design that don’t include “messy” code for the spiders to read. However two commonly used methods (Flash and JavaScript), although they contain less lines of code, mean absolutely nothing to a search engine.

Flash is an animation program that has increasingly been utilized in Web design. If done properly, a Flash design can be a visual masterpiece of the Internet. However, when a website is built entirely with Flash the html says absolutely nothing of the site itself. The figure below shows how the code is only written to load in the movie. There is no content or links that spiders would use to index the site. So now the owner has a great looking site and no one to visit.

Usually, a web page design, pages are named to match what the menu button or text link says. For example, a page button labeled as “Services” will likely go to a page named http://www.example.com/services.html. When utilizing a professional SEO strategy, basic page names will not help index your site into the search engines. It would be better if you use the keywords in the page name you want to target.

For example, if you are a web hosting service provider located in UK you don’t want to simply name services page as services.html, a better choice would be web hosting-service-provider-UK.html. This will fit better with target keywords and will likely be included in the content as well.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

Why my website pages are not getting indexed by search engines? This is a very common issue people faces. Search engines will not index your website pages unless you make sure the following things.

There can be several reasons:

For Search engines the HTML Code doesn’t matter much, it’s just meaningless to them. They use a simple software programs to index your website pages. A simple web page that looks great to the human eye may seem meaningless to search engines.

Search engines are unable to read the content that is presented in images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc.), Flash elements, JavaScript and other script languages or other multimedia file formats.

If you use JavaScript links for your website navigation then search engines might not be able to find your website page.

Check your web pages with a search engine spider simulator. Spider simulators will show you how search engines see your web site.

HTML Errors is also a reason that can prevent search engine spiders from indexing your website pages. While most search engine spiders can deal with minor code errors, some of them will send faulty information to search engine spiders.

For example, your web page could contain a tag at the top of the page that tells search engines “the web page ends here” although your main content has not been reached or there may be some tags which are not closed properly.

To make sure your website doesn’t have any errors, check your website’s HTML code with the W3C’s HTML Validation Service.

To rank high for a special keyword this keyword must appear in the right places on your web page. For example, it usually helps to use the keyword in the web page title.

There are many other elements that are important if you want to have high rankings.

Check the HTML code of your web page with software like IBP. This software will compare your web page with the top ranked pages and it will tell you in detail how to change your web page so that it can get top 10 rankings.

Sometimes the web servers’ sends wrong status codes upon a web page request from your site by search engine spiders. Upon a request your web server sends a response code to search engine spiders. The code should be “200 OK”.

Unfortunately, some servers send a “302 moved” or even a “404 not found” response code to the search engine spiders although the web page can be displayed in a normal web browser.

In such case, search engines will assume that the web page does not exist and will not index your web page.

Use the search engine spider simulator to find out which response code your web server returns to search engines. If the response code is not “200 OK”, you can check your status code with the free HTTP Server Response Code Checker.

If you want to get top rankings on Google and other search engines then you must make sure that search engines don’t misunderstand your pages.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

Understanding your business goals is what makes us different. It is very necessary to improve the website quality to be a successful leader in the market. Spending time on improving the quality and PR of the website is always worth, instead of listening to some smart geek and using the unethical methods means to expand the websites short-term popularity.

To make SEO work you need a complete approach focusing few important things. Lets checkout the 8 things that makes SEO work.

• Your Keyword Selection, Prioritize your keywords
• Registration of your domain, Domain name including a keyword, Keyword in filename, Website Address Length
• Proper Placement of Keywords in title tag, Meta Description tag, Meta Keyword tag, Keywords in Content H1, H2 and H3, Keyword Font Styles
• Linking Tactics – Avoid the use of unethical methods

1. Internal Links – Keyword in links to internal site pages, valid internal links, Efficient linking
2. External / Outgoing Links – Quality Links, Inspecting your Links, Title and Description, Limit number of links on a page
3. Incoming Links (backlinks) – Quality of Referrer, Trend of link popularity, Anchor Text, Age of Link, Number of Outgoing Links on Referrer Page, Position of Link, Trusted Websites, JavaScript/Flash Links

• On-Page Factors – Home Page: Over optimization penalty (OOP), Getting Reported, File Size, Freshness of Pages, Frequency of Updates, Website Age, Dynamic Pages, Texts inside Images, Excess JavaScript, Inline Frames and Frames, Hidden links / texts, Cloaking, Duplicate content, Understandable Content
• Off-Page Factors – Traffic Buying, Link Schemes, Minimum one backlink, Buying Links, Server IP Address, Links from bad websites, your web server Reliability and Uptime
• User Activity – Search Engine Traffic, Click through Rate (CTR), Time spent on page, Managing Bookmarks, Leaving the Website
• Gathering Links, Collecting Links, Unique Content, Articles, Press Release, Forums, Blogs, Sponsoring Directories, Link Exchange and much more

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Posted under SEO Tips, Search Engine Optimization

Basically, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple style sheet language which is used to add the presentation (i.e. the look and formatting) of a particular document or web pages. It’s most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML pages. The CSS language lets you to build fast loading pages, increases your search engine ranking, and modifies your complete website using one style sheet.

Most of the people don’t use CSS as because they have got so much familiar with html design and are afraid or too lazy to upgrade their skills. Even by merging CSS with the functionality of a Content Management System (CMS) a considerable amount of flexibility can be planned into content submission forms. It allows the user who may not be familiar or able to understand or edit CSS or HTML code to select the layout of a web page they are submitting on-the-fly, in the same form.

Advantages of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

• Separating content from presentation – using CSS you can easily separate your HTML markup, text, graphics and multimedia from the presentation.
• Consistent site wide look and feel consistency – CSS file saves your plenty of time, especially if you had to edit every page separately. It is very simple and easy to apply one style for 100’s of web pages all at once. So if you need to change the color of all pages on your site, you just have to edit one style sheet.
• Web site maintenance – apart from being able to make site wide changes easily through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Properly marked-up web pages permit them to be maintained by more than one person. It will also work in more browsers. Web site redesigns will take much less time.
• Improves search engine ranking – search engines generally spider the code at the top of your web page first. For most sites that means the navigation bar will be spidered first (resides at top of page code). CSS enables you to position the code for your content at the top making your page search engine friendly. Properly marked up HTML pages can easily found and properly categorized by search engines.
• Fast loading – CSS reduces the amount of tags used therefore producing clean code. Table less design can reduce your load time by 25% to 50%.
• Reduces bandwidth – compacting the amount of code used will reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to host your web pages. Therefore you won’t have to pay higher fees when adding more web documents to your site.
• Accessibility – increasing accessibility with CSS means being able to serve web content to a larger audience, increasing web site usability, even for non-disabled people. Content can easily be formatted for projection as well as screen display. Table less layouts display well on hand-held.
• Improves the printing of web page – most printers will only allow you to print a portion of the web page. With CSS your whole document can be printed.

When you use CSS it becomes quick and easy to apply new styles that not only effect all styles on your web page but also your whole site.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

People who say that Flash is not SEO friendly are absolutely wrong. It is just a myth that Flash is SEO unfriendly. Creating accessible flash content for search engines is crucial for you to preserve your online presence and drive traffic to your site. Follow these Flash Optimization Tips to get most out of the major search engines.

Adding SWF content to your HTML source

An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWF Object to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.

Keep your URL unique

If your site is just one big lump of Flash in an HTML template, your page is never going to refresh. Consider having a different URL for each page of your site’s Flash content. Each page would have its own HTML source title, “H1” and body copy containing the keyword you want to rank.

Use source content dumping

A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) will not be SEO enhanced simply by adding the content for each section of the Flash application into the HTML source for this page. Doing this doesn’t establish any prominence of content, as there are too many competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.

Keep an eye on new initiatives

Adobe has been working with Google and Yahoo! to make the Flash file format (SWF) search engine friendly. This will enable the engines to see what’s inside a SWF’s content and index it. However, the use of Flash Player technology by search engines is still developing and so can’t be relied on as the only step towards optimizing your project for SEO.

Add text to your Flash applications

A simple Flash SEO enhancement is to use Flash-generated text in your creative when displaying or animating type. You can do this instead of using text that’s a flattened bitmap. Flash text can contain keyword-based messages, which help increase traffic. Include this text in the HTML source of the page as well.

Remember that search engine spiders hate pop-ups

We’ve all visited sites that urge us to click to launch Flash content into a new window. This removes any chance of the site’s content being picked up and indexed by search engines. In addition to search spiders not being able to see them, pop-ups suffer from being blocked by many browsers.

Get robotic help

Robots.txt is a plain text file found at the root of a server. This tells search bots which content needs to be allowed or disallowed when it visits their website. If your Flash text content is the same as your HTML version, you could set the Robots.txt file to ignore the SWF content and push only the HTML content to the search bots.

Embed Flash content with SWF Object

SWF Object is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. Alternative (non-Flash) content is produced first, and then snippets of JavaScript are used to swap out the alternative content with the Flash movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without Flash will still see a working HTML page.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

Though the biggest search engine Google, says that you don’t need a dedicated IP address to rank better in search engines. But, I have noticed that after the recent Google PR updates most of the top ranking sites does have a dedicated IP address.

In this article, on UK Web Hosting Blog, I will explain you the advantages and the websites that will need to have a dedicated IP address to boost their search engine ranking.

If you are running an Anonymous FTP enabled website to allow your site visitors to download the files via your FTP server anonymously, then you are going to require a dedicated IP address. Typically, such types of sites are file sharing websites or big mirror download sites. Basically, you don’t need a dedicated IP to FTP files from a server through a username and password, but if you want your visitors to access files from ftp://yourdomain.com/file.zip without having to login, then get a dedicated IP.

For an e-commerce site, if you ever want to accept credit cards on your website, you are going to need a secure connection to do it. It is recommended as a website with a Dedicated IP address is considered to be more secured in comparison to a website with a Shared IP address. SSL certificate is what you will need to secure the customers credit cards details and to install SSL certificate you will require a dedicated IP for your site. So if you plan to accept credit cards through your website at any point, don’t forget to buy a dedicated IP. By installing a SSL cert, you can redirect visitors to the secure connection for your site.

Benefits or Advantages of Dedicated IP for SEO

Some people may say that having your website on a dedicated IP will give you a boost in search engine ranking results for that particular website. Well, I completely don’t agree with this.

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

Suppose you have 5 websites and want to make a 6th. Your 5 websites are ranked but are all on the same IP address. You place a link on each of your 5 websites to your 6th in order to pass on rank value to the 6th. The search engine will see that your new site has links from 5 websites. When it goes to check the IP’s for the sites linking to the 6th, it will find that they are all hosted on the same server because the IP addresses are the same. The search engine will assign less rank value to the 6th site because it knows that the 5 sites linking to it are all related / owned by the same person. If you put each site on a different IP, it will think that the sites are totally unrelated therefore assigning more link value to those links.

Also, according to a Google Engineer, when a Search Engine Spider first visits your website, it analyzes your website with basic HTML 1.0. If the Spider is successful in analyzing your website then it will go about and your website will get indexed. If your website will be hosted with a Dedicated IP address then it will get indexed directly as the spider will be able to resolve the website directly. Due to this the website will not be accessed with Basic HTML 1.0. Hence, if the website will be resolved soon, it will get indexed soon.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization, Webhosting

Uptime and Downtime is one of the key issues that many website owners face. If you’re thinking to setup a mission critical website or an e-commerce site then uptime and downtime is the thing you should consider while looking for a web host. You may have heard about it lot of time, but those who haven’t, this article will explain you the exact meaning and importance of uptime and downtime in web hosting.

Definition of Uptime and Downtime

What is Uptime?

Uptime, put simply in the context of web hosting, is the time during which your site is fully operational (viewable and usable).

What is Downtime?

Downtime, conversely, is used to refer to the duration of time when a system is unavailable. These figures are usually given in percentages.

For e-commerce sites uptime and downtime is highly relevant because downtime could translate to lost revenues, and in this highly competitive world, it could very well mean your business’ survival.

Hence, it is important that you choose a web host that has a high uptime guarantee (the higher, the better). An uptime guarantee of 99.5 – 99.99% is realistic and considered to be very good in most cases.

Tips to make sure that the host you choose offers the finest deal:

• Research your (potential) host’s uptime record and READ the fine print of their uptime guarantee (if they have, which you find in their Service Level Agreements).
• Ask about your host (-to-be)’s disaster plans, redundancy and backups.
• Re-check and make sure you get an uptime guarantee before signing and how reliable they are when it comes to refunding for and crediting downtimes.

Once you’ve found your host, it is necessary that you also monitor your site’s uptimes and downtimes to ensure you get what you pay for and also to see if they’re living up to their promise (so you can change hosts if they aren’t).

Quick Tips:

• Finding 100% (or 99.99%) uptime is not easy nor is it cheap
• Focus on quality of service and not on quantity. Don’t just look for hosts that offer you a refund for downtimes, instead, look for ones that actually live up to their ‘uptime guarantee’
• Look for providers with good hardware (as it goes to redundancy)
• SLA’s and ‘uptime guarantees’ could just be marketing trick
• Third party uptime measures are valuable resources
• Forums, although good sources of information, may not necessarily be ‘accurate,’ particularly when it comes to host recommendations
• To prevent downtimes, find providers that offer hosting on two separate machines and whose servers have automatic switchable mechanisms

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It has been proved by Search engine marketing specialists that period of domain registration matters a lot in search engine ranking. Google trust the domains more whose registration length is longer. Do you know why? Because, it shows you are really serious about your business. Business owners that registers their domain name for a longer duration are mostly considered as serious owners and have good long term plan for their domains.

It makes sense that throwaway or spammy domains are registered for a short time because the spammers do not have serious funding. It is common sense that any long term plans in attempting to spam search engines will not work because of algorithm continuous improvement. This makes domain registration length of spammy domains very short (at most 2 years).

Tips:

If you want long term ranking profit from search engines, then register your business domain for around 10 years.

Along with long registration period, provide compelling services and make it helpful to visitors. These are vital ingredient for long-term Google ranking success.

Note: Remember that the length of registration itself does not mean your domain will rank because of relevance. You still need a lot of SEO work to rank better in search engines.

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Posted under Domains

What is OpenVZ?

OpenVZ is server virtualization software provided by SWSoft, Inc. licensed under the GPL version 2. OpenVZ is the software that every system administrator requires. It allows you to host multiple Virtual Environments (Aka VE) on a single server. The only limitations are RAM and CPU.

OpenVZ is an operating system-level virtualization technology based on the Linux kernel and operating system. It allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, known as Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Virtual Environments (VE).

Unlike VMWare and Para virtualization technologies such as Xen, OpenVZ is more limited in that it requires both the host and guest OS to be Linux (although Linux distributions can be different in different VEs) under the same kernel. OpenVZ claims a true performance advantage. According to its website, there is only a 1-3% performance penalty for running OpenVZ compared to using a standalone server.

As OpenVZ employs a single kernel model, and is scalable as the 2.6 Linux kernels; in that it will support up to 64 CPUs and up to 64 GB of RAM. A single virtual environment can scale up to the whole physical box (known as a “heavy VPS”) i.e. use all the CPUs and the entire RAM.

OpenVZ is divided into a custom kernel and a number of user-level tools such as vzctl, vzstat etc. OpenVZ lacks some of the features of the commercial product Virtuozzo, such as the advanced vzfs file system, templating features, to save disk space, and additional user land tools and control panels (though third party ones have been written).

OpenVZ improves efficiency, flexibility and quality of service in the enterprise environment. Each Virtual Private Server is hardware independent and can be moved to another OpenVZ-based system in seconds over the network.

Some Important OpenVZ Commands:

1. vzlist -a : Shows list of all the VPS’s hosted on the Node.
2. vzctl start VPS_ID: To start the VPS.
3. vzctl stop VPS_ID : To stop (Shut Down) the VPS
4. vzctl status VPS_ID : To view the status of the particular VPS
5. vzctl stop VPS_ID –fast : to stop the VPS quickly and forcefully
6. vzctl enter VPS_ID : To enter in a particular VPS

Configuration Commands

1. vzctl set VPS_ID –hostname vps.domain.com –save: To set the Hostname of a VPS.
2. vzctl set VPS_ID –ipadd 1.2.3.4 –save : To add a new IP to the hosting VPS.
3. vzctl set VPS_ID –ipdel 1.2.3.4 –save : To delete the IP from VPS.
4. vzctl set VPS_ID –userpasswd root:new_password –save : to reset root password of a VPS.
5. vzctl set VPS_ID –nameserver 1.2.3.4 –save : To add the nameserver IP’s to the VPS.
6. vzctl exec VPS_ID command : To run any command on a VPS from Node.
7. vzyum VPS_ID install package_name : To install any package/Software on a VPS from Node.

Here VPS_ID refers to the ID of the Particular VPS.

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