Thrudigital

I don’t buy links because there is no guarantee that such links will improve my rankings. This is the great secret in link-buying. Today I found buyblogreviews.com which offers quite cheap links. Spending $200-$300 on new incoming links wouldn’t kill me, but I don’t believe that such an investment will do much good. Let me explain…

Firstly, if you can buy a link on some blog, your competitor can do the same. So can thousands of others. So as time goes by, a post that contains a link to your website will appear several clicks away from the homepage. On blogs with more than 1 post per week it won’t be impossible to find older posts 40+ clicks from the homepage. In my opinion this doesn’t offer value for money, or good quality links. If you are spending $200 a month, the destination URLs should generate good revenue in order to make buying links worthwhile. However, there is one major advantage of links from blogs: the price is incomparable to that of pay-per-month links.

Pay-per-month links are often too expensive for an ordinary webmaster. If you only bought one or two links, they won’t probably increase rankings of the destination URLs enough to achieve top rankings for any competitive phrase. Usually it’s necessary to buy (or acquire in other ways) 20+ links to achieve reasonable rankings. When you’re going for very competitive phrases, then even 200-300 links of superior quality are necessary. Spending $10/month/link (usually at least $20/month/link, but let’s calculate using this simplified example) will mean $2000-$3000/month in links only. That’s a lot of money. The only party which profits from this is the broker that mediated the sale. Webmasters will not earn enough because you won’t buy 200 links from one website, and you will spend a fortune on inbound links each year.

But to prove my negative opinion about buying links accurate, I think that it would be a good idea to buy a few links and show you the results. Before I come to this stage, let’s analyse some other facts:

In the past I never bought a link that would point to this domain (web-developers.net). Despite this, it already achieved top rankings in Google. With no bought links, all we did was a natural (“organic”) SEO. Of course, making a few directory submissions may sound little spam-like, but I made an effort to diversify our SEO methods, and submissions to directories were only a secondary effort. To be honest, some positions could still be better. But one cannot be satisfied with the existing results, otherwise things will quickly start to crush down.

I also haven’t bought any links to point to aqua-fish.net, my primary domain. Once again, to be honest, some links resulting from sending donations to dog pounds could be considered as “bought”, but I didn’t request any special anchor text or other details. All in all, there are probably only two or three such links, and that website still receives high traffic.

It may be old-fashioned, but I still think that the best links are those acquired for free and without any contact with webmasters. When someone wants to link to your pages, you cannot stop this process. Links from educational websites (such as “the website of Mr John Doe’s class“) are free and I value them much more than other links, even links from DMOZ. Just imagine this: I place some useful PHP code on this blog, something that hasn’t yet been shared on the web yet, and some teachers find my solution. They then link to that page from their university websites, they tell other teachers about your site and the solution. Such popularity is very valuable, but to create something useful that can be discussed at universities or schools, it is necessary to write or create very unique and professional content (or tools, etc.) You will not simply succeed with another general “get loans fast” website. This is why many websites must buy links; because they won’t gain links any other way.

After I have explained how I work, it’s time to buy some links to prove or disprove the concept behind link-buying. I am going to spend $100 on links from blogs and we will see if it helps me to achieve better rankings. The result will appear on this page as soon as I notice some response from search engines (let’s try Google and MSN). I’d rather not mention details about which URLs I am going to buy links for, since someone very wise could report me to Google… it’s just a single-shot test.

Update 1 (Oct. 25, 17:44:39 UTC ): I have finished buying the first links. Up to now it has cost $45 and they should be online soon. More updates with further developments.

Update 2 (Oct. 26, 09:40:49 UTC ): I have placed nine orders, adding up to $100 in total. A few minutes ago I had to request corrections in one paid post since one of my website’s articles was copied, and links along with anchor texts were inserted randomly. Poor quality, but we will see how it goes since I am not going to pay for copy-and-paste posts. More updates coming soon.

Update 3 (Oct. 27, 08:31:20 UTC ): OK, more links are now online. The major problem is that some bloggers are not willing to write unique posts, and they simply copy-and-paste content from already existing articles. On the other hand, some bloggers posted unique posts which have been already indexed by Google. At the moment, my rankings are up: they have moved by between one and fifteen positions in Google for search phrases that refer to the anchor text. However, this may be a fluctuation, since the rankings are never static. It is still too early to judge accurately. I am still waiting for the rest of the bloggers to post their reviews.

Update 4 (Oct. 28, 10:19:08 UTC ): No progress yet. The positions are the same like before. Some links aren’t online yet because bloggers seem to be lazy (so why do they bid if they’re not willing to do the job fast?). I am sceptical about this thing, but let’s wait for MSN to react on these links.

Update 5 (Oct. 30, 22:06:06 UTC ): Some progress in MSN. Positions in Google are still the same. In addition, Google doesn’t react to modification of content (the age aspect). In MSN one page went from 5^th to 3^rd one. However, since I bought links for 3 articles, I am not yet sure about efficiency. Two paid blog posts have been picked up by MSN already, and some bloggers don’t mind writing the posts even though they placed bids! I will probably have to choose others. More updates coming soon.

Update 6 (Nov. 01, 21:43:14 UTC ): In MSN all rankings have been positively affected. More information coming soon (it’s too late for a well-written report).

Update 7 (Nov. 03, 14:25:38 UTC ): As promised, here’s the latest news. In MSN all positions for primary phrases are better. One URL jumped from 5th to 3rd place. Another moved from 4th to 2nd place, and one URL which wasn’t ranked in the top 50 is now in the top 20. In Google the changes aren’t visible yet, although one URL has jumped from 5/6th position to 4/5th. Another which was 9th for a long time is now at 7/8th. The last is also ranked better, though nothing significant has happened yet.

Now it’s clear that paid links help, so why am I still against bought links? Imagine that a completely useless website is given a lot of paid links. Sooner or later it achieves high rankings in MSN, and possibly in Google too. Useful websites will be moved to lower positions. Websites with high information value will be nowhere in the top 10, because the top positions will be occupied by sites benefitting from bought links. My question is this: what must happen in order to lower the importance of links?

I’ll keep updating this page as frequently as possible, or until rankings change.

Deep links can determine the success or failure of every website. In this article I will tell you how to get deep links with almost zero effort. But first, let’s talk about why deep links are so necessary. Imagine a website (say, “website A”) with thousands of external links that point to the homepage, but with no links from external domains pointing to its own pages. This is unnatural behaviour that looks like spam, because if “website A” contains content of good quality, why is that content only on the homepage? Do the site’s other pages contain lower-quality content? It simply looks suspicious. Generally speaking, deep links are more valuable than links to the homepage for a number of reasons.

No matter whether you sell items or show AdSense ads on your website, deep links are needed because of positions in search engines. Each deep link gives a page more weight. It usually works this way: a homepage is an entry point, while internal pages create profit. So if you want your website to receive targeted traffic and to increase sales, it is necessary to get deep links from other websites. Once internal pages of your website acquire inbound links, you will notice a reasonable increase in traffic. The problem is that people tend to only link to informative pages. Then there is another type of linkers: the paid ones. However, to pay for links of good quality, it is necessary to spend a minimum of $200-300 each month. Once you want to acquire 50+ quality deep links, that cost will rise to around $500.

Fortunately, there is more than one way to get deep links: you can exchange deep links with related websites, you can leave signatures in forums, you can place links to related forums, you can post comments on blogs, you can even buy new hosting accounts and host domains there, with content containing deep links to the pages you are aiming at. However, with the exception of the first option, these are more or less spam techniques. So is there any other way? The answer is yes.

A long time ago, I started opendirectory.services-seo.net. As time went by I added to the script, but eventually found the directory idea disappointing. However, after revealing that submitalink.net is available for registration, I decided to move the entire directory to that domain. The point is this: a directory is free, but submitters must provide a link to some URL in order to be considered for review.

Your website will not receive thousands of deep links overnight, but it will gather links from websites which would never link to it otherwise. Unique IP addresses, unique C-Class IP addresses, unique topics.

This is the easiest way to acquire deep links with minimal effort! Of course, you must maintain the directory, and it requires a good PageRank to be liked by visitors. Nowadays many webmasters do SEO for their websites, and many of them don’t mind placing a link on their pages, because if they want something from you, they should do something for you too.

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I decided to write this article because I am tired of reading useless articles about SEO for MSN, in which I struggle to find even one genuine tip. Tips such as “optimise title tags, keyword density is important” and so on are completely useless because there is nothing like “a title of 6 words is worse than a title with 5 words within”, or “each important word’s occurence should be between 3% and 4%”. All you can find are outdated or overly-general tips.

In this case, I am going to show you two examples of how websites (the second example is from another website that doesn’t belong to me) achieved higher positions in MSN. Please be patient, as I am going to explain you every step in detail. First, as an SEO newbie, I tried everything from putting words into the first and last sentences and paragraphs, and also tried to increase the density of important words up to 8% or so. I tried to modify meta description tags to see if it helps, I put words into bold, italic, h1 and h2 headings and so on. None of these methods worked the way I wanted. I have heard that it is easier to get good rankings in MSN than in Google. Eventually I gave up on MSN and focused solely on Google, until now.

All that has changed during the last few months was the geographical location of my website (aqua-fish.net), but look how it affected traffic from MSN:

I moved the site to the USA in August 2008 and it took more than 4 weeks until changes were obvious in the rankings. Of course, I am expecting higher traffic from MSN as time goes by. Bear in mind that the statistics from the last day (on the image) aren’t complete yet, therefore October 23th doesn’t look as good as days before.

Since nearly every website is hosted in the US, not every webmaster can use this technique. The second key area is your domain name. The domain name plays a very important role in MSN’s algorithms. A few weeks ago I sold “security-doors.org” to a friend of mine. Look at its rankings in MSN:

It is 6th. Moreover, the site is already receiving traffic from MSN, despite there being no content at the time of writing. But what is amazing about this fact? First, that the website has no content whatsoever (though the new owner is going to publish technical articles here eventually). Secondly, the domain is still very young (it is ranked nowhere in Google). Third, that the website has only a few incoming links (I linked to that domain from one of my sites when I bought it). Despite all this, it is still ranked 6th for a competitve search phrase. This means that if your website receives little or no organic traffic, and if you do consider buying a new (keyword-rich) domain, that it will have no negative effect in MSN.

I could test things such as filenames, title tags, meta description tags and many more, but I suppose it’s roughly the same for every search engine. The goal of this article was to show you the two most important factors in SEO for MSN.

Now I’m wondering how my submitalink.net will be ranked for phrases “submit a link” and “submit link” after MSN recrawls it…

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Every webmaster faces the problem of increasing their site’s traffic. Moreover, this traffic needs to be targeted in order to assure that the traffic will generate conversions (whether you’re aiming for sales, clicks on ads, or whatever.) Basically you can choose one or more methods to improve your rankings, and thus your traffic. The first and the easiest is to buy traffic: it’s possible to get 10,000 guaranteed visits for about $8 or $10. But, think… if it’s so easy to get 10,000 views, why not buy 1,000,000? The problem with this kind of traffic is that your web site is shown to people who are not at all interested in your site, and these people may often be paid for having a browser window open. In these cases, the browser is open, and websites load for between 30 and 60 seconds each. So, your unique “visitors” are paid simply for having a browser open. All in all, you will gain nothing from this in the end, and your money was wasted. For example, try to open www.surfjunky.com. It promises money for surfing, but no-one has ever been paid (Google the phrase ’surfjunky scam’ for proof of this.)

The second way to increase targeted web site traffic
Pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-impression (CPM) advertising programs work well, though you may be concerned about click fraud or the reliability of the company you are dealing with. Some advertising networks allow you to show ads as a pop-up window, or proxy web sites. All this costs money, but there is one simple way to get targeted visitors to your web site for free. Let’s talk about it:

The easiest and the guaranteed way to increase traffic on your web site
It is SEO. However, I am not going to share the usual theories about what SEO is, or how to do it. Instead, I am going to show you a method that cannot fail. There are slightly different techniques, depending on certain conditions, but the general process remains the same. So, if your web site already receives some organic traffic, you should check your analytics and find search terms that lead to your site. Otherwise, skip this section and move to the next paragraph. So, returning to the original point, these phrases can be from Google, Yahoo! or MSN, or from a cross-section of search-engines. You simply need to find phrases that contain question terms: which, who, what, why, when, etc. Now, answer some of these questions and publish the answers on your site. Since all questions have already been asked, it is very likely they will be asked again. After new pages (I strongly recommend that you only publish one Q&A per page) are indexed by search engines, your chances of further visitors are much higher. However, this may not bring an increase in sales. So what is the ultimate point of this strategy? If new visitors come to your site and find it useful, they are likely to link to it. Your web site will garner more and more links as the number of answered questions increases. The more incoming links your web site has, the better positions in search engines it receives. Higher positions mean increased targeted traffic. It will be targeted because you’re targeting each page to a specific kind of visitor. Informative pages are for those who want information, product pages are for those who want to buy things. At the moment you just don’t have enough top 10 positions. With question-and-answer pages, you can! If you’re wondering how many visits a web site can receive via “question-like” phrases, then skip the following paragraph (it’s for those with low organic traffic) and check the snapshots. Bear in mind that if you answer only 5-10 questions, your web site will not receive a large traffic boost. Try to think in terms of thousands of questions, and everything will make sense.

Now imagine that your web site receives little or no organic traffic. In order to increase it, you need to analyse what people want the most. They’re often looking for answers, because the internet is full of free information. If I had to start a web site from scratch, I’d use the question-and-answer format. It’s impossible to predict all potential questions asked, but you consider what is likely, and you cause Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. So how easy is it in reality? Look at the snapshot below, and you can see the potential of this technique. Then, re-read the paragraph above, which will help you understand how it all works.

And now some more snapshots, from the statistics for aqua-fish.net. Snapshots show traffic between September/16/2008 and October/16/2008.

Of course, some phrases may be sections of longer phrases. For instance, “who” is a part of “wholesale”. It’s up to you to select the phrases, but this SEO technique can bring real results very fast, because people often neglect to focus on long phrases. However, rankings for short phrases usually come after those for longer phrases.

Answering questions is a tedious and ultimately endless process, and your time could be wasted for several weeks, but building a website’s traffic through satisfying visitors is the best way to achieve your goal. Of course, there are many ways to increasing your traffic, which I will focus on in later articles.

If you are planning to sell your website, make sure that you really have no other option. Selling your site is a worthwhile way to escape from income or traffic fluctuations. This is why you rarely earn more than 20-25 months’ revenue when offering your site for sale. Brokers know this, and you can’t expect them to behave any differently. Before I move on to my strategy, allow me to demonstrate with an example: a couple of months ago I sent an enquiry regarding www.aqua-fish.net to one company. They were generous and offered me £16,000. I chose not to accept this offer for a few simple reasons. Firstly, I had plans for the site, including an investment of £3,500-£7,000 in order to increase revenue (I am now finished with the investment and it is generating revenue as time goes by). So, from this point of view, when you know that a minor investment will generate more money in the future, why would you choose to sell the site now? Secondly, I was aware that the time is the best factor in SEO, and that therefore my current traffic was not the peak for the site. Now, several months later, I can honestly say that I was right. Traffic has increased by an additional 20% since then. Third, what would I do after receiving this £16,000? It is easy to spend it then, but my website would no longer belong to me, so I’d have to create a new project. No-one knows how things will develop in the future: there is no guarantee that I can build a website with similar success. These three reasons played key roles in informing my decision to reject the company’s offer.

Instead of trying to earn a smaller amount right now, you should always think about potential. Once you understand the potential, and can accurately appraise your website, then should reject any offer lower than 25 times the net monthly revenue. Of course, an important prerequisite is that your website must be worth investing in. Don’t wait for someone to offer you £100,000 if the site only draws 1000 visitors per month.

The first rule of selling your website
Always sell a fully-developed website with real organic traffic. Organic traffic, as frequently mentioned in this blog, is free traffic from search engines. It is very difficult to attract thousands of unique visitors to your website each day, but this is the first pre-requisite to succeed in selling. You could have developed a fantastic core with unique features and technologies, but as long as there are no visitors, such a website has no value.

The second rule of selling your website
Original ideas are worth much more than duplicate websites. If you’re starting just another phpBB forum, it can be hardly worth millions. I can buy a web-hosting and a domain-name and install phpBB there. Then I can start an AdWords campaign in order to generate some traffic and some active members. But you can do the same thing, and the guy next door can too. Anyone can do it. In the past, when web-hosting wasn’t available to everyone, it was easier to think of a unique idea. Now, times have changed and anyone can start a website, copy and paste articles from other websites (although it’s illegal!), and make money on the internet.

Unique websites are the only ones worth buying.

The third rule to sell your website
Now we’re finally coming to “how” instead of “why” and “when”. After your website becomes more established, you may start to receive offers from other websites in your site’s niche. Often, these offers come from online stores. For example, if your website is focused on mobile phones, then you’ll receive offers saying, for example, “place a link pointing from your website to ours and we will pay you” since online stores all want to be well-ranked in search engines. After 5 or 10 such enquiries, it is clear who has money and who has not. For example, if one website offers you a link for £5,000 per year, and another offers £500, it’s clear which is the one with the funds, and the potential to buy out your site later.

At this point you should create a list of potential buyers. In order to succeed, they must clearly understand your website’s traffic. Nowadays there is nothing better than Google Analytics for tracking visitors. Be prepared to offer them access to these statistics (Google Analytics allows you to share your websites’ data with others). As you probably understand, it’s a good idea to sell your site to a company whose business is focused in the country that generates most of your traffic. It makes little sense to sell a website with a primarily UK-based traffic to a company dealing with customers from Australia. Always make sure that you’re handing over your site into the right hands.

You can start building your list of buyers using Google, though you won’t have any idea about ability and willingness to buy. Companies which are ranked above your website are unlikely to be interested in the additional traffic, especially if your site’s traffic is lower than theirs. And companies which are ranked below your website could be having difficulties finding money to invest (as rankings determine traffic and traffic determines sales). This is why I had to mention the first two points: your site will only be bought when it’s worth it.

Now let’s analyse why it’s wiser to offer to companies instead of brokers. A broker doesn’t usually sell online. That’s why they’ll often offer 25 times your monthly income. They will just take the site and let it earn, without further development. Compare this to a company dealing with real products: again, we’ll use the mobile phone example. If you’re earning £50/day from advertising, then the company would turn off the ads and use the space to sell their own products. In this case, I guarantee they’ll earn more than £50 a day. Even though some days will be better than others, they are unlikely to lose money, assuming you sold them a website of good quality, with organic traffic and search-engine authority. Moreover, such a company will continue selling well beyond the next 20-25 months.

The fourth rule of selling your website
As stated above, you should contact potential buyers directly, preferably through email. I don’t like auctions because they tend to be full of brokers and worthless websites. Instead, establishing a personal contact will help lead to deeper discussion. Your email should contain these facts: when you started the website, where it is located right now, how much your hosting fees are, what technology is used (PHP and MySQL for example), and how much bandwidth per month it uses. These details should be mentioned after more important facts, such as why you want to sell your website, why you started it, and how it can help the buyer to reach new customers. All this information is more crucial in the initial email than discussion of price.

Never mention the expected price in your first email. This is not advertising, you’re not selling ad space or links. One seller could offer you more than you can imagine, and another one could offer you a tenth of what you expected. You must be prepared to accept that the sale may not happen. It all depends on what the potential buyer wants to do with your website, and their plans for monetising it.

Payment
As in every business, payment is the most dangerous part of the deal. It’s hard to know when to transfer the domain: after receiving ½ of the price, ¾ of the price, when? It is very difficult to make this kind of transaciton online, so ideally you should meet the buyer personally. Sign an agreement, have it verified by a third party, and never trust the buyer 100%. I strongly recommend that you transfer the domain only after receiving full payment. If buyer is serious, he will understand this point of view. Otherwise, you’re taking a huge risk.

Further support
Many unique websites are built upon specifications that differ from ordinary scripts available on the internet. In order to ensure continuity, you will be probably asked to create some kind of documentation, or to help the buyer after the sale. Depending on traffic, core and plans, you could spend 10 days helping the new owner with maintenance, or 200. You must clarify these terms before selling: either that you will be paid per hour for any further help, or that you will include futher help in the selling price. If you don’t, you could yourself spending many days working for free.

The final word
Selling a website isn’t always a wise solution. If your site works and still generates traffic, you should consider maintaining ownership for the next few years, as you never know what’s going to happen in the future. As time goes by, more and more companies will invest in their online presentation, and may need links or advertising. Also, methods of revenue-generation may change and the income could improve. Selling is only really right for those who are being offered £75,000, but preferably £500,000 or more.

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In order to create a website you should understand (at least) HTML and CSS. With HTML you use elements, and with CSS you define the design of your website. It may sound difficult, but learning HTML and CSS will make everything related to your web presence much easier. There are many websites explaining the basics of HTML and CSS, so I’m not going to start teaching. Instead, I am going to tell you why you should use HTML and CSS instead of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. In the second part of the article I will explain why programming languages such as PHP and databases such as MySQL are also useful in building a website.

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Advantages of HTML and CSS:

1) You can control every aspect of your website’s code. This is important because absolute control is what you need. Other advantages stem from this: by comparison, WYSIWYG editors tend to generate unnecessary code, making the code longer, slower and harder for search engines to analyse/follow.

2) You are able to ensure that your site’s code is as clean as possible, keeping its size down (good for visitors with slow connection speed), and you can be sure that the website (from the end-user’s point of view) contains only the necessary information. Unlike WYSIWYG editors, human-created code allows you to delete, modify, and add things directly. For example, often when you delete content from an element in a WYSIWYG editor, the element itself is not actually deleted. Thus, the website may contain empty elements: tables, div tags, paragraphs, and so on. While this usually has no effect for the end user, it can have an effect on search engine rankings.

3) You can place any element anywhere, so what appears first on the page for visitors doesn’t necessarily have to appear first for search engine crawlers. This isn’t at all black hat (it’s legitimate, because the web page contains the same content for visitors and search engines), and it can help SEO since it is generally considered that the content closest to the beginning of the page is the most relevant, and is treated as more important than subsequent content. WYSIWYG editors don’t allow you to use this particular SEO technique.

4) Further coding is much easier if the code is human-created. Some webmasters outsource projects to foreign countries, but if your programmers need to use a WYSIWYG editor, it is often more expensive and your choice is more limited, because editors cost money, and not everyone will have the editor you need. If you outsource, always ask for manually-created code, rather than something generated via a WYSIWYG editor.

5) CSS code should be kept in external files. This makes the updating process easy, since you can easily modify everything from the colour scheme to the layout as a whole. WYSIWYG editors don’t always create external CSS files, and when they do, the code isn’t usually optimised. CSS optimisation is required because visitors don’t generally want to wait for the layout files to be loaded. For example: if your CSS files contain 200kb of data, it is possible to divide it into 5 files, so that each will contain approximately 40kb of data. Clearly, 40kb is more user-friendly than 200kb. However, this optimisation is not usually possible with a WYSIWYG editor.

6) With human-created code you can achieve complete cross-browser compatibility. If you know only how to use an WYSIWYG editor, it is impossible to achieve 100% cross-browser compatibility. As you may know, Microsoft Internet Explored causes problems for many web programmers. Combined with a WYSIWYG editor, it is nearly impossible to create a well-presented web design that works perfectly in all major internet browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.)

Disadvantages of using HTML and CSS manually
1) It requires no knowledge to create a website in the WYSIWYG editor.

2) This first advantage is actually the only advantage.

What is the difference between HTML and PHP, and what are advantages of PHP programming?
PHP is a server-side scripting language. You generally use PHP without anything to do with HTML, but you can also use it to generate HTML code. Moreover, you can also use PHP to generate CSS files. What’s the purpose of generating CSS via PHP? Say you want to modify colours or font sizes, preferably with a single simple change. This is not generally possible with a static CSS file, due to the necessity of further declarations for ordinary elements and for form elements too. The same applies to colours, andlikely to all other elements/classes. In addition, if two or more classes depend on each other (say that the font size for one element is 150% bigger than another), an ordinary CSS file will struggle to resolve this.

PHP is a scripting language, and HTML is a Hypertext Markup Language. Visitors of your website will see HTML, but they will not see any PHP unless the site is hacked/vulnerable, or unless it displays its source code.

PHP brings numerous advantages to the process of creating a website. The first advantage is ability to create content dynamically, and thus to make the website user-interactive. Consider a simple scenario, when a user wants to log in into a members’ area. This is impossible without server-side scripting. It doesn’t matter if it’s PHP, ASP, or any other language, but simple HTML cannot create this function. PHP and MySQL are the most used technologies for serving dynamic content.

So if you don’t yet know HTML and CSS, you should start learning. If you want your site to stay up-to-date, this is essential. Otherwise you’ll need to invest in outside expertise every time it’s necessary to something to your website.

Sometimes, though, a WYSIWYG editor is perfectly suitable for the task: if you’re not building a business-oriented or large-scale site, but rather a simple personal site that isn’t intended to showcase your skills or sell anything, you can use a WYSIWYG editor to create a site without much knowledge or investment. Otherwise you have only two options: learn or invest.

People often don’t realise that a domain name is just one component of a website, and put too much effort into finding the perfect domain name, often at the expense of content. There are basically two ways to acquire a domain: it’s either available or it’s for sale. In the first case it’s very simple: you just have to find the desired name and register it (personally, I use GoDaddy). If not, you may be able to buy the domain directly, or you may have to enter an auction. Unless you are already earning money from your website (and you just want to change the domain), or unless you know that you’ll earn money from the domain you’re about to buy, buying domains is not generally recommended. Otherwise, I recommend you register a new domain name, instead of spending thousands of dollars to acquire one. So let’s quickly look at common mistakes people make…

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If .com is already taken, you can always try .net or .org This is usual for many domain names, as it’s nearly impossible to find one-word domains which are still available. Believe it or not, even words such as ordinarily.com (.net, .org) and customary.com (.net, .org) are already registered. Sometimes you can strike lucky and find less common one-word domains that are still available. As you can see, this site’s domain name is web-developers.net, because web-developers.com was unavailable when the site was being built. The website used to be thrudigital.com, but for SEO purposes we changed to web-developers.net. As you can see, the current domain name is more SEO-friendly, as it contains two very important keywords for our business.

You don’t have to own business.com to profit! It’s possible to do your business with any domain name (assuming the length and TLD are reasonable). Just avoid names like forstupids.com (.net/.org) because your visitors won’t feel comfortable when they see such a name in the address bar.

Hyphenation is not bad! I always wonder why many SEO experts say that a hyphen in the domain name is a bad idea.  During the last 30 days, I was able to attract more than 100,000 unique visitors to aqua-fish.net. Nowadays it’s very difficult to find a domain like “word1word2”, so why not buy “word1-word2”? Do you know why people often try to persuade you that a domain with hyphen is bad? Usually, because they own “word1word2” domains, and they’re trying to sell them on. They call such domains “premium domains”.

Personally, I like buying “word1word2” domains, but that’s just my hobby. I own about 30 domain names, and some of them would be suitable for this web-developers.net domain. For example, “ukwebdevelopers.org”, “londonwebdesigners.org”, or “webdeveloperslondon.org”. All three would be a good substitution for web-developers.net, but why change a domain when the current name is ranked well for many important phrases?

Long domain names may be bad, but they can be good too! Experts say that it’s hard to remember long domain names, and they’re right. But you can still achieve top rankings in Google with a long domain name. Right now, I see web-design-directory-uk.co.uk ranked 2nd for the “uk web design” phrase in google.com. So you can see, more hyphens, more words, and still perfect rankings!

In my opinion I wouldn’t buy such long domain names, but they can be just as successful.

Don’t think that someone is going to buy your new domain for thousands of dollars! People read “get rich fast” stories and think that some company will pay them virtually unlimited amounts for domain names. It’s actually very hard to sell a domain. So before you spend hundreds on buying domains, make sure that you have a plan for what to do next.

Don’t buy domains with typos! There are numerous articles on the internet talking about how ‘cool’ domains with typos are. They’re not. Firstly, people usually type correct domain name into the address bar. Secondly, typos are bad for SEO purposes. Thirdly, it’s hard to remember these domains. If a returning visitor wants to return without a bookmark, he/she may be frustrated by finding the “correct misspelling” to find your website.

Imagine this situation… IBM would buy YBM.com instead of IBM.com. It doesn’t make any sense and it didn’t make any sense to IBM too.

Numbers are OK! Of course, this applies to “natural” numbers such as 123, or a combination of numbers and letters such as “1st”, “2nd” or so. Domains like 568912.com are worthless unless the “568912″ is your company’s name. Sometimes a substitution works too. For example, business2customer.net, org can be good domain names.

Think about content Don’t buy ukcellphones.net if your website is going to offer content related to UFOs. I personally think that each domain should accurately reflect the website’s content. Here is a good example: solodvds.com is a website about aquarium fish (I found it because it’s a competitor to aqua-fish.net). But the name solodvds.com suggests it’s a DVD-related website. This causes two main problems: first, in terms of SEO it’s very bad because the domain doesn’t contain any important words. So if you’re going to link to this website, you have to use solodvds instead of a fish/aquarium related word. Secondly, if you’re an ordinary visitor, would you expect solodvds.com to offer fish-related articles?

Dedicated servers are good, but usually expensive. At least it’s customer who says what is expensive and what is cheap. If your web business generated $100 per month, then you can forget about dedicated server. Even a very cheap solution (which is not recommended, see this article) could bring no good at all. On the other hand, earning $10000/month allows you to buy virtually any dedicated server no matter if it’s managed or unmanaged, cheap or expensive, Windows or Linux. In the first part let’s talk about dedicated servers and the second part mentions a few facts about virtual dedicated servers.

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What is cheaper and why; Managed or Unmanaged dedicated server?
As with every hosting service, you pay more dollars for a managed hosting than for an unmanaged. But to be honest, you MUST ask yourself if it’s worth spending money on managed server or not. If you need only initial set-up and if you can do the rest, then why to spend hundreds of dollars each month? In many cases “the rest” means copying files and moving databases, eventually changing permissions of a few files/directories. I personally think that paying money for a few hours or work each month is not worth it if you CAN do the same thing too. Here are the reasons:

1) If you’re buying a managed dedicated server, where is your website right now? Is it already running on some shared hosting which doesn’t fit your requirements any longer? In such a case, why do you need a managed server? In my opinion, everything should work fine after move.

Secondly, isn’t your web application running yet as a website? Then where is it now? I suppose it can be installed on some local server at your firm or at home. But, think about it; It is running and you KNOW the configuration, you know which packages are installed on your server. So if you were able to install these things on your local server, why can’t you do the same on another server?

Thirdly, if you’re a total greenhorn and there is someone who created your web application (since it doesn’t have to be a website necessarily), then better ask that person to move your website to a new dedicated server.

2) You should know better what is necessary to run your website properly than any other person. This is nothing personal against people who work as assistance teams for managed dedicated server plans, but you’re the one who knows all things. Even if your IT department created the application, they MUST know all details about the application. It is impossible that someone is a PHP programmer who doesn’t know anything about how to configure APACHE server or how to restart and configure MySQL. One doesn’t have to know everything, however even a small knowledge is a must. So once again; Why pay someone if there is already a team (or a guy, or it’s yourself) that can do the thing too. In addition, you may be paying these people already.

3) What is managed dedicated hosting in fact? Actually, it means these things: Someone from the hosting company is responsible for monitoring and patching services in your server. Bear in mind that these services are programs running on your server, they’re not services running within your web application. Imagine that your server needs regular restarts of httpd (APACHE), so someone will restart it from time to time. But you should ask yourself, why is it necessary to restart some service? Servers should be stable and they should offer 100% system uptime for duration of 1 or 2 years, eventually more! Also, if your server needs security updates, then it might mean that something is wrong with it. For example, picture this… Your server runs without a software and hardware firewall (very extreme case) and someone breaks through. But… Isn’t it normal to buy a secured server? In my opinion, it is. Sometimes cheap dedicated servers may come with old operating systems, outdated security patches and so on. Explained in a simple way: You have a 6-7 years old server, but you still want to make money from it. So you place an offer saying $30/month. Someone not skilled enough will buy it. But after a few days this and that goes wrong, no-one is happy. The customer feels upset, the seller lost the customer and probably receives bad review if that customer knows where to leave such reviews.

So basically, if you’re buying a newly configured and properly installed dedicated server, you shouldn’t have a need to monitor services or to install patches. After 8-10 months it can be different, however after 8-10 months you CAN buy a new dedicated server! So once again you will have latest versions of software and maybe hardware will be better too. And if you know how to install/upgrade applications on your server, then you don’t have to worry at all.

4) Linux dedicated server is usually CHEAPER than Windows dedicated server. Why? Just because Windows is not free. But in this case, I’d like to mention a few facts about Linux vs. Windows. Linux systems are: More reliable, Faster (if configured properly), Safer, Virus-free, It is possible to install many free packages there (unlike Windows where majority of packages are paid). So do not argue that Windows is better because you don’t know Linux. Nearly all websites need only PHP and MySQL and these two things can work on Linux as well as on Windows. But, Linux is cheaper!

Of course, if your web application was created for Windows servers only, then there is no way but choosing Windows dedicated server. To give you a comparison, on GoDaddy the same plan costs from $12.99 to $19.99 more if you choose Windows instead of Linux. Only Red Hat Enterprise (4 or 5) is more expensive than Windows. But you can have CentOS or Red Hat Fedora too, and they’re cheaper than Windows.

5) Hardware firewall causes the price go higher. The same applies to RAM, HDD, Bandwidth, SSL certificate, Control panel, Database server (MS SQL costs much more than MySQL! – MS SQL is for Windows, although MySQL can be on Windows too), Backups and other options. Some providers offer you unlimited traffic with a 10Mb link, some will offer you unlimited traffic with a 100Mb link, but usually this is not very important for ordinary websites (see this article for details about traffic).

Nowadays the lowest prices of dedicated hosting can be somewhere at $100/month. Is it cheap? Yes, it is. I don’t recommend you buying dedicated servers for $30 or $40 per month. Such prices say that something may be wrong with such hostings.

Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting
These are cheaper than dedicated servers, but they can be the gold middle way for many webmasters. If you’re earning about $500/month or $1000/month, then spending more than $100/month on webhosting can slower further investments into your web business. There is nothing special to mention but:

1) Again, Linux are cheaper than Windows (licences, MS SQL),
2) Virtual dedicated servers give you a dedicated IP address which is good for SEO purposes,
3) System uptime doesn’t achieve such a high values like a purely dedicated server does,
4) You can’t choose a hardware firewall since more users share the same server (but this doesn’t mean that the server is without that hardware firewall).

If you’re not sure, try a virtual dedicated server hosting and if you’re not happy with the result, use a dedicated one.

Today I checked my server’s log files and found an attempt to access phpMyAdmin, so I decided to take steps to protect that directory. phpMyAdmin uses password protection to ensure that only authorized users can enter the area, but it’s an ordinary protection based upon HTML forms. So, to stop sending requests, I protected the directory itself. So let’s go quickly through what you should do when you want to protect  a directory:

0) Login via SSH (type “ssh IP_ADDRESS -l USERNAME“; where IP_ADDRESS is the IP address of your server and USERNAME is your login), and enter your password. You will probably also need to login as root, so type “su” and enter the root password.

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1) Find the Apache’s httpd.conf, as it is necessary to modify this file. If you’re a newbie, you may find this command very useful:

find / -name httpd.conf

It effectively does what it says on the tin: it tries to find the file named httpd.conf on your server (this is specified by “/” – use another path if you know where to search).

2) When you know the path (say it’s /etc/httpd/conf), type this command:

cd /etc/httpd/conf

Once again, if your server’s installation is structured differently, you must use another path.

3) Now modify the file httpd.conf. Before you do so, back up the existing file. So type these two commands:

cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.old
nano httpd.conf

4) When you’re done, you should see the content of the httpd.conf file on your screen. Find this part of the source code:

<directory>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
<directory>

The word “None” is bold because it determines that options like password protected directories are not allowed. Feel free to replace that “None” with “All” or “AuthConfig“. The “All” thing simply allows you to enable other features in the future, so I recommend it. Now, we have configured the default .htaccess file. Scroll down and you should find something like:

AllowOverride None

Once again, modify that line to:

AllowOverride All

This is all connected to the httpd.conf file. Press CTRL-X and you should be asked to confirm the filename and overwrite. Type “y” or “yes” and press ENTER.

5) Now change the current directory to the directory you want to protect. Say that you want to do the same thing as I did, and that phpMyAdmin is installed in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin. So type this:

cd /usr/share/phpMyAdmin

If you want to protect another directory, simply use another path according to your server’s configuration and structure of directories. Now, the very important part. Type:

nano .htaccess

If the .htaccess file already exists, you must add/modify a few lines. But let’s assume that the file doesn’t exist, so add this piece of code here:

AuthName “Password restricted area”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

Please note that the text in bold, has to be modified for your setup. In any event, you have to specify the directory where the .htpasswd file is stored. It doesn’t necessarily have to exist at the moment.

If you already see an .htaccess file in the directory which you want to protect, make sure that the above-mentioned lines are not declared more than once.

When you’re done, press CTRL X and confirm the filename.

6) Now let’s create passwords and users. Type this:

htpasswd -cmb .htpasswd USER PASSWORD

Again, the bold text must be modified by you. USER is your username and PASSWORD is the password for the user. Just to be sure, after typing the above-mentioned command, type this:

nano .htpasswd

This should display some content. If it doesn’t, something went wrong

7) Now, let’s test if the password protection really works. Type the URL into your browser. If you’re not asked for a password and login, you must restart httpd. This can be done easily by typing:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

If necessary, use find / -name httpd in order to find the httpd file.

After restart, the desired directory should be password protected.

There are many theories that explain various approaches to achieving high rankings in search engines, but only a few which explain methods that actually work. Basically, we can say that there are three main schools of thought: the first one is based on links, the second on content, and the third is a combination of the two. So these are the general practises: 1) you’re told to submit your websites into hundreds or thousands of directories. The concept isn’t bad, but the real situation is less than ideal. Often, this advice comes from people who own directories. It isn’t unusual to see some of them asking £50/year per submission. £50 is not a lot of money, but if there are 100 directories which you want to submit your website into, then it adds up, and there’s no real guarantee of success.

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Members of the second school say that it’s content which matters. Of course, without quality content, it’s very difficult (though not impossible) to achieve decent rankings. However, you can’t expect a site with good-quality content but no links to achieve good rankings.

So naturally we come to a mix of these two approaches. This is the golden middle-road, but there’s still something missing. Let’s imagine this situation: you created useful content, hundreds of pages which are really worth reading. You submitted your website into directories, and after time this starts to show results. You can see people coming from Google and Yahoo! coming to your site. What’s wrong with this strategy? Many free directories will become inactive after some time. A number of directories are born every day, but just as in life, not everyone succeeds. People will stop visiting and submitting, and eventually it is likely that the domain will expire and will not be renewed. All links will simply cease to exist, and as they disappear, your rankings (which were based on these incoming links), will start to worsen. You can easily make new submissions every day, but a new link never carries as much weight as an older link.

You can also hope that people will link to your content, and often they will, but you can’t tell when and you can’t tell how. In my experience only a small portion of visitors create links. First, because only a small minority of internet users have websites, and secondly, an even smaller proportion will have websites that are relevant to yours. Finally, a still-smaller proportion will actually be willing to link to your site. If we wanted to be pessimistic about it, we could also consider that few of these links will actually carry very much weight in Google. Free web counters are a perfect example of how to get links quickly and easily: You just need to tell people about your free web counter. Of course, I prefer to use Google Analytics, as it brings more comfort and usability than any free web counter.

Here are a few methods to summarise how to get free links quickly: first, launch a tool (it doesn’t need to be unique) and spread the word about it. You can even advertise it in AdWords. Before you start working on any such tool, make sure that people will want to use it. There is no guarantee, and it’s always risky. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Second, ask people for links directly from pages of your website. This is very simple, add a paragraph saying something like: “If you like this page, use this HTML code on your website…” Believe it or not, this actually works. You will achieve a few links this way and it takes virtually no time to add that kind of code to web pages. Third, create a quiz. It’s a perfect way of getting links because once people have completed the quiz, they can post a banner or text link saying something like “I reached 83% in some kind of quiz.” Again, it works perfectly. Moreover, you can get thousands of free and fast links this way

My conclusion is this: you have to make people want to link to your website. It’s nonsense to pay hundreds of dollars for submissions into directories if you can achieve better results faster and with a lower budget. All of the three methods mentioned above can work for any website, whether it’s dogs, kitchens, computers, cars or healthcare. Give your visitors what they want, and persuade them to want to link to your site.

Naturally, you may find other effective ways to achieve higher rankings in search engines. It’s really up to you.