Archive for the ‘ Webmaster ’ Category

Virtual Server vs. Dedicated Server vs. Shared Hosting

Monday, July 26th, 2010

A Virtual Private Server, or vps, is a hosting alternative to dedicated servers and shared hosting. Vps, as its name implies, is a virtual server, whereby you have all the conveniences and power of a dedicated server, but without the higher cost and the hassles that come with the latter.  Vps is also a big step above shared hosting, the cheapest hosting choice that comes with all the problems inherent in sharing a computer with a large number of users.

Latter day virtual servers enable hosting companies to give you an exclusive block of disk space and limits each customer’s RAM usage, unlike in a shared hosting situation. The server’s cpus are used in the same way as for shared hosting, however.  The way top vps hosting companies insure that your web sites’ traffic spikes and those of other customers do not result in performance problems is by using burstable memory. That is, when memory usage reaches a threshold, reserve memory will be used.

When you are logged into your virtual server, it is hard to differentiate the experience from that of having a dedicated server, since the file system and the applications look identical. Everything you can run on your own dedicated machine you can also run on a vps, with very few exceptions. Since a vps runs within its own “jail”, anything that transpires within your vps has no effect on the host machine, so if your virtual kernel crashes, you will just remote reboot it just as you would if it was a dedicated server.

So, which should you choose? If you want to host a slew of different sites, or run your own server applications and scripts without any restrictions, or have a site with a serious amount of traffic, that pretty much eliminates shared hosting. The big advantage of vps when compared to a dedicated server is that if you need more ram or disk space, you don’t have to copy,  reinstall and re-configure everything on a new server, or pay big bucks to the hosting company to install more memory chips or an extra disk. Instead, you just bump-up your hosting plan. In addition, maintaining your own server means acting as your own sys admin, which is time consuming and more involved than what you are looking for.

Next time you are looking for hosting, consider the vps option

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Which Traffic Stats and Auditing Tools Should you Use for your Web Site?

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

All webmasters need to know what kind of traffic their web sites are getting. The choices to keep tabs on site statistics are varied, but there’s three that are completely free and among the most widely used: Awstats, Sitemeter, and Google Analytics. Awstats is a program written in perl for all platforms, while both Sitemeter and Google Analytics are web-based tools requiring no installation.

Image by Christian Ferrari

If you don’t run your own server, and your hosting company doesn’t provide Awstats pre-installed, it isn’t going to be your solution and you’ll have to use one of the web-based services instead.  If you do have a shell account but are too intimidated to do anything that involves typing commands into a non-graphical interface, then once again stick to the web-based options. If you’re looking for the most comprehensive statistics, Awstats does  generate the most in-depth reports for a single site.  Awstats needs to be set-up as a daily recurring job (crontab in Linux/Unix servers), and uses your server’s log files. It supports Apache style logs as well as those produce by IIS (Windows) and even parses and produces statistics from mail logs. You run an interactive non-GUI configuration script to install Awstats on your server. If you want to get more sophisticated geographical statistics, you’ll need to install one of the geo plugins (perl modules, in reality) and the corresponding database. MaxMind offers its free geoip database and perl module. Because Awstats uses your web server’s logs, it won’t have any statistical holes such as can happen with web-based services. With a web-based service, the visitor’s browser could fail to download the javascript, either accidentally or by  filtering it out, that is needed to report the user’s activity back to the stats provider’s site. Awstats can also give you statistics on the many robots that visited your site, whereas a web-based tracker can’t provide such data since spiders don’t download javascript files, let alone interpret them.

Sitemeter has been around for many years and until Google Analytics came along, it was the favorite statistical tool used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers. All you have to do to get this free service is to sign-up on their site and then paste a bit of javascript in your site’s footer, so that accesses to all pages get metered. Each account you open can only cover one site, thus if you have ten sites, you’ll have to register ten times. To view your sites’ statistics, you have to log-in to their web site.  Once there you can view details on the most recent activity on your site. Statistics for previous days or months are limited to totals. A lot of the other statistics are limited to the last 100 visitors to your site. Thus, you can see that someone from Japan visited recently, but you can’t tell how many Japanese visited in the last hour, day or week. You can get enhanced statistics only by upgrading to a more advanced plan, which of course involves a monthly payment. Apart from these limitations, Sitemeter has  been frequently criticized for throwing a copious number of tracking cookies at your site’s visitors on behalf of an advertiser, SpecificClick.net.

Google is the most trusted entity on the Internet, and thus it’s no surprise that its Analytics service has quickly become the main site traffic  tracking  tool used by most sites. Analytics requires that you register for a Google mail account and paste a bit of javascript into your site’s footer, similar to Sitemeter. You view your accumulated statistics via their web site, also like Sitemeter. The major difference between Analytics and Sitemeter, is that you can access all your web sites’ statistics via the same interface, whereas Sitemeter requires a different log-in for each.  Having everything in one place is a great convenience.  Analytics gives you every feature up front and free. No need to buy an upgrade.  You can review detailed statistics for any date or date range, even well in the past, something that’s not possible with Sitemeter’s free plan. There is one drawback to Analytics, although it’s rather insignificant: statistics are compiled only once a day. Sitemeter allows you to see the latest activity, but the truth is, that’s not so useful except to determine if there’s any problem with your site.  Many big name sites use Google Analytics.

To resume, a statistical compiler such as Awstats is a lot more complicated to set-up, but does provide the most reliable and complete data. On the other hand, web-based statistical sites are extremely easy to set-up and use, but can’t provide stats on anything that isn’t a web page, such as images, flash, or Java applets, and also can’t keep track of accesses by web crawlers. The best option among the web-based stats services is Google Analytics. However, if you have a site with a lot of traffic and need hard core traffic reports, use Awstats. You can still use Google Analytics as a secondary source of statistics.

If you also need  to have a credible external audit of your site’s traffic, perhaps to show the public, the competition, or a potential buyer that you’re a serious contender,  you’ll have to use a reputable web-based auditing service for this. You can sign-up for a free account at Quancast, or pay hefty fees to services like Nielsen, comScore or Compete. Typically, you’ll have to paste some javascript into your site’s footer. Hopefully, such code won’t clash with your Analytics or Sitemeter javascript, but if you really need an an audit service, it’s worth switching to using Awstats for your internal traffic reports.

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Should you Start your Own Directory?

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

One of the easiest web sites to launch is a link directory. Just download one of the free or inexpensive php software package, install, configure, add some categories, add some links and you’re off! Having your own directory isn’t a bad idea, for a number of reasons which I’ll outline.

Photo by Carl Dwyer

Directories attract motivated users, who are eager to promote their own web sites. Just today, there were almost 82,000* new domains registered in just six of the top level domains (.com,.net,etc.) Of these, a large number will surely wind-up being used for web sites. Add to that the thousands of new hosted blogs and web pages, and you have many thousands of new web sites being born each day, and therefore thousands of webmasters looking to generate backlinks to get their sites on the Internet map. All of them will surely submit their links to the big league search engines and directories, but a fair percentage will also seek to add them to as many not so popular directories. A part of this traffic could be directed at your new directory without much effort on your part. I don’t know of any type of web site that doesn’t contain nudity and can attract traffic so quickly.

Now that you know that your directory can be a traffic magnet, you can use it to increase backlinks and traffic to your other sites . One of the ways you can do this is by requiring or suggesting a “three way” reciprocal link to another of your web sites. Requiring it will lose you some people, but on the other hand some will comply, whereas if you make it optional, the vast majority will decline. If you prefer, you can require a backlink to the directory itself, but one way links are usually preferable not just for you, but also for the one submitting. You can also give your other sites a boost by adding links to them in the directory. Since you’re the boss, you can give them a more prominent placement by making them featured links. You can also add “deep links” to them, that is URLs other than the main one. Deep links are said to be rated higher as backlinks by major search engines.

Always set your directory to accept only opt-in submissions. That is, submitters must include a valid email address and then receive an email with a confirmation link they must follow. By requiring an email, you build a mailing list which you can legitimately send messages to, being careful not to abuse this privilege. Such messages can have links to your other sites, or the directory itself, effectively recycling the submitters rather than letting them disappear forever. One way to keep in touch is to have an e-newsletter which provides directory or seo updates. If it includes interesting and useful content, adding advertising shouldn’t result in protests. Building email lists comes with a warning label: A fair number of emails you’ll get will be throwaway addresses that the submitter uses only for this sort of thing. In other words, the user won’t be reading your newsletters. You can safely presume any address containing the word “spam” is bogus, but beyond that it’s virtually impossible to filter bogus emails just using your eyes. Although it would be possible to compile a list of such domains and reject any address whose hostname part matches, your directory software won’t have support for such filtering.

Of course, you have to be careful to not turn your directory into a link spam generator. Start by making it a niche or language-specific directory, specializing in certain kinds of sites. The temptation is to accept all links submitted by making it a general directory in an effort to maximize the number submissions you get, but you can have it both ways: create a separate category tree for unrelated sites. Whatever don’t make a clone of Dmoz, or even a portion of Dmoz. Create your own original directory structure and populate the categories with your own carefully picked links. Human edited directories are genuine, whereas clones will tend to get sneered at.

You’ll need extreme patience managing your own directory, since you’re guaranteed to receive buckets of spammy links. You recognize spam when you see the same ip address for a big batch of submissions, or a bunch of sites dealing with the same or similar topic, or from the same description being used for a series of links. The proper course of action is to mark these links as spam, a function which your directory software should support. It’s unlikely the big name sites will submit their link to your lowly directory, thus in the interest of maintaining a high quality database, you should first populate it yourself with as many relevant , quality links as you can.

I don’t want to mislead you, any web site needs to be promoted to succeed, and directories aren’t any different. You’ll have to go through the motions and submit your directory’s link to a big bunch of other directories to get things started, and use every other means to get exposure. Listing your site in directories of directories such Directorycritic, is particularly important, as that’s where a lot of new site owners will be looking for places to submit their link. You could also suggest your directory to a multitude of site submission services and programs, but only do this if you have some use for the email addresses this will generate, since the people who submit to your directory via such services actually won’t visit your site. A robot will submit their data for them. Most submission services stick to the big name search engines and directories, but there some who submit to up to several hundred lesser known directories using a specific directory software.

Which directory software package should you get? Well, the choices are quite limited if you’re looking for something that’s relatively easy to install and configure, as well as having a lot of features. Almost everybody uses either Phplinkdirectory, eSyndicat, or Indexu, all of which are php-mysql based. eSyndicat sells for 75 USD for a one site license, Phplinkdirectory will set you back 80 dollars per site, while Indexu charges the most at 99 USD per site. However, Phplinkdirectory offers a cheaper version, at 30 dollars per site, but that means you’ll have to display a link back to their site. They also offer a free, much older version. Indexu is the only one that’s lets you try their full version for free., though the other two do have online demos you can preview. All three products have a variety of free plugins to extend your directory’s functionality, as well as templates. It’s very difficult to say which of the packages you should pick, though I would put Phplinkdirectory in the third spot owing to my personal experience with the product and the company, which I’ll be writing about in an upcoming article.

Now, go ahead and start your own directory!

* Source: domaintools.com

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How to Get Backlinks

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Promoting your web site takes a lot of work and even more patience. Your strategy should include finding ways to get other sites to link to yours, what is commonly known in web parlance as backlinks. Backlinks serve mainly in establishing your site’s reputation in the major search engines, especially Google. All backlinks are good, but not all backlinks are equal.

Google gives each web site a rating, or pagerank, to indicate its importance. The pagerank value ranges from zero to ten, where ten is the highest rank possible. The formula Google uses to derive the pagerank of your site is a well kept secret, but what is known is that it’s largely based on the number and quality of the sites linking into yours. Thus a backlink from a site with a pagerank of 6 will help raise your own site’s rating much more than one from a site with a pagerank of one. This doesn’t mean that you should reject a link exchange request from a site with a low pagerank, as that site could have a higher pagerank later on and every link that might send people to your web page has an intrinsic value.

Another factor affecting pagerank is the number of total links on a page that links back to yours. If there’s lots of links on a page, the value of the backlink is lessened. Therefore, you should concentrate on getting other sites to link back to you from their blogroll or from within an article, rather than a resource page with hundreds of other links. Over time Google has also started to penalize a site’s pagerank for such offenses as participating in link farms, which are directories that exist for the sole purpose of creating backlinks. What is and isn’t penalized isn’t clear, despite claims by hundreds of SEO (search engine optimization) sites.

Curiously, Google has said publicly that the importance of pagerank has been greatly exaggerated. Truth is, it has some effect on Google’s search engine results, but your content’s keyword relevance is far more important. However, since so many people use pagerank as a gauge of your site’s worth, you can’t ignore it and have to seek ways to improve your rating. Your new web site starts out with a pagerank of zero and will likely stay there unless you devote the time to promote your site in the right places.

Organic links, that is links to your Website that other people put just because they like your content, are the best kind, and they’ll come, but you can’t rely on them when you first start out. There’s a number of methods you can use to create quality backlinks:

1- DO Exchange links with other sites that are relevant to yours. You can do this directly by contacting the site owner or through discussion forums and social networks. DO NOT exchange links with sites that are totally off topic. DO NOT join a link exchange site, as the backlink will be likely lost in a sea of other links on the others’ sites, and for the high risk of being associated with a link farm, which could result in a penalty against your pagerank.

2- DO post in discussion forums related to your site’s topic. Answering someone’s question and including a link to a relevant article you wrote is perfectly acceptable. DO NOT put links to your pages just for the sake of creating a backlink. People aren’t stupid and you’ll soon be barred from that forum.

3- DO submit your links to as many directories as possible. There’s a great number of them that specialize in blogs, while others accept only RSS links. Do them all! DO NOT pay for a listing unless it’s one of the very top directories, or it will be wasted money.

4- DO submit your posts to article or “help” sites such as associatedcontent.com, zimbio.com, ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, squidoo.com and searchwarp.com, among others. The biggest article sites are crawled by Google every day, and some of them allow other sites to copy your article with your bio, which includes a link to your site, thus multiplying the backlinks and potential visitors. Of course, you have to mind your grammar and your posts usually have to be at least 500 words long. Some can just pick-up your RSS feed and do the rest.

5- DO submit your own links to bookmarking sites such as Digg. Not all of them will get crawled, however, but as we said before, all backlinks are good!

6- DO link back to your site from your own accounts on social networks such as Facebook. Again, some of them might not produce backlinks because the content is either dynamic or requires a log-in, but must I repeat that all backlinks are good?

7- DO link back to your posts from your microblogging accounts on Twitter and others. As you build a list of followers, this will be a solid block of visitors to your site every time you publish new content.

Finally there’s another kind of backlink that’s steeped in controversy: paid backlinks through services such as inlinks.com. DO NOT do it! This practice is poorly regarded and will probably wind-up being penalized by the major search engines once they figure out how to identify them. Your money would be better spent using advertising such as AdSense. It doesn’t do anything for your pagerank, but it does produce highly motivated visitors.

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Top Article Syndicating Sites Analyzed

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Syndicating your blog posts through article archive sites is widely recognized not only as a good way to create credible links back to your web site, but also as a means to get more people to read your prose. In January of this year I started submitting to the top article directories and I’ll save you a lot of pain and suffering by telling you what I’ve learned of each during this process. They’re listed below in order of popularity.

Image by Shlomit Wolf

Ehow: With well over 20 million unique visitors per month, this is one of the top sites in the world. I enthusiastically joined, but haven’t been able to post any articles as apparently there’s a bug in their system. On the other hand, over a hundred other users asked to become my “friend” in the first couple days after I signed-up, even though we don’t know each other from Adam! I don’t know yet what advantage they get from adding friends, but it’s likely because you can spam them! I must point out that you won’t be able to publish your article as is on Ehow, as its format requires you to enter step by step instructions on how to do something. You can adapt a lot of your material, of course, but it’s a lengthy process which can end in frustration if the aforementioned bug rears its head. Hopefully the problem will soon be resolved, or my participation in eHow will have generated no tangible benefits!

Ezinearticles: The grandfather of article archives! It even preserves intact the ugly look of yesteryear! While its readership has been steadily on the decline, its readership is still in the millions, and putting your articles here will get you quality backlinks overnight. The major difference between Ezinearticles and the competition is that your articles will always be reviewed before being published. Your accepted submissions will be syndicated by default.

Associated Content: A very credible archive, with the most polished look. At first, humans review your submissions, and they take a long time to do so, but after a few are accepted, inclusion is immediate. My first article was rejected for plagiarism, citing my own duplicate article I had posted at Ezinearticles! I eventually had them correct their mistake, but while you’re still in probationary mode, I recommend you submit to Associated Content first, and once its approved, then submit to the rest, to avoid any problems. Associated Content’s RSS feeds are picked-up by some othe major news sites, including USA Today.

Squidoo: Despite being on a site having millions of visitors, my Squidoo content took the longest to get crawled by Google, and some of it was mangled. Squidoo, although often referred to as an article site, is actually a kind of social network. You sign-up and create unlimited “lenses” which are pages where you stick any number of items via a wide variety of widgets. The only widget that serves our purposes here is the RSS one that you can use to display your posts, but since it’s dynamic content it won’t generate a bunch of backlinks. The number of people that read my lenses in two months is in the single digits, probably because there’s several other million lenses to compete with. Unless it’s for the backlinks you can put via some of the widgets, I can’t recommend you waste your time with Squidoo.

Zimbio: This isn’t really an article archive per se. You add your RSS feeds via your member interface and then simply choose which posts you want to include. You’re only asked to select an appropriate category and your content will immediately appear online. You’re given the option to edit the download text, which might be a good idea in order to avoid having duplicate content (see bottom of this article). In order to have the entire article text uploaded, make sure your RSS feed is not set to only use an excerpt. Despite its limitations, Zimbio shouldn’t be ignored, since it has monthly readership numbering in the millions.

Searchwarp: It has a rather outdated look, with ugly colorful icons and logo, but don’t let that prevent you from becoming an active member, as this is a credible site and the articles you submit here will be crawled quickly by the major search engines. Initially, all your uploads will be reviewed by Searchwarp staff, but they usually give you a quick approval unless it’s a weekend or holiday.Searchwarp bills itself as a writers’ community and for the privilege of publishing you’re expected to participate in a number of ways, all of which will add to your “community interaction score”. You need a score of at least 22 points to submit a new article. Not commenting on comments (!) on your articles is the main source of point deductions! The main activity is to review other members’ articles and assign them a rating for a variety of criteria. Posting a comment gives you more points, but learn from my mistakes by not criticizing even the worst articles, as that will beget threats of retaliation and insults, as happened to me. If you must absolutely let the author know how much it stinks, use the anonymous comment option! After a number of submissions, your articles will be automatically approved. Searchwarp does allow site visitors to copy its articles and put them on their own sites, if you enable that option on a per article basis. Searchwarp is like a social network for amateur writers, and thus requires the most time to be involved with.

GoArticles: Has only a fraction of the visitors of Ezinearticles, but its backlinks were crawled overnight. Unlike the other top article sites, this one never subjects your uploads to any scrutiny by their staff. It also makes money from content contributors by charging for preferential positioning.

An important point: if you’re going to participate in any of these sites is that duplicating your own site’s content in this manner will carry consequences with Google. Contrary to popular belief, Google won’t penalize your site’s pagerank rating, but instead will seek to not list the duplicated content in search results, thus likely resulting in your site’s version being omitted in favor of one of the more highly ranked article archives. The solution is to produce two versions of each article: one that appears only on your site, and another for syndicating. Each version should differ significantly from the other, although it need not be a total rewrite.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if other sites republish your material, they’ll rarely respect the terms of the article site’s syndication agreement. Even if they keep your bio, I’ve often found my articles with different titles and additional paragraphs tacked on. Content theft is of epidemic proportions on the web, and all of these article archives have a disclaimer absolving themselves of any responsibility. It’s incumbent upon you to find and contact any infractor. One way to locate violations is to search for exact phrases from your article.

For all these sites, the number of page views for your articles will probably be quite low, and clicks back to your web sites via your bio links even fewer. Several offer monetary rewards based on the number of page views your posts get, but it will amount to only a pittance even if you wind-up being one of the top authors. Post in article archives for the quality backlinks they generate, and for the joy of having others read your words!

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