Archive for February 8th, 2006
In part 1 of the series on increasing Search Engine Rankings, I talked about an approach that some may consider a bit old fashioned. However, press releases and offline press coverage can be an effective piece of the search engine visibility puzzle.
In this post, I want to point you to a simple way search engines are trying to clean up their listings. Helping them eliminate or lower the visibility of low-quality sites will be to your advantage.
Over the last few months, Yahoo! and Google have both released or upgraded their local search capabilities. While I admit to a bit of hypothesizing here, I believe that a major goal with these tools is to provide a carefully crosschecked means of geolocation. By affixing a physical address to a Web site they can reward companies who have a good record online and actually prove themselves to be businesses that have nothing to hide.
Why is this effective? No one with something to hide wants to expose their physical location to prying eyes. By increasing the page rank of those who participate in the local search results, search engines can increase the probability of higher quality information.
Admittedly, there is a bit of conjecture here, but if you haven’t submitted your Web site to Google Local and Yahoo! Local, don’t wait too long. There’s always more benefit in being among the early adopters.
February 8th, 2006
This post was sparked by a thread on Jim Boykin’s blog where I’ve also posted a comment or two.
I resell Web services from site5.com and have found that they work quite well for many of my clients. There are always trade-offs in Web hosting, especially for those with limited budgets. Another hosting company I use is United Hosting from the UK.
My take on what to ask a Web hosting company is this: Ask them for features that you really must have (PHP/Mysql, Stats Reporting if needed). Then, of the companies that have those features, ask for uptime statistics and some referrals from hosting clients.
Usually, at the low end you either can get fairly decent stability with very few features (Hostasaurus) or many features with occasional stability problems and excellent customer support (Site5). Another notable hosting provider that has occasional stability problems but does everything they can to minimize them is 5 Dollar Hosting.
A word of caution about using returned phone calls as a barometer of reliability: Most hosing companies use email for support requests and handle them swiftly. For anything other than high-dollar hosting such as Rackspace, you will be hard pressed to speak to anyone on the telephone for support issues and really don’t need to anyway since email works so well. Of course during the inquiry phase, you are also judging the responsiveness of the sales department and not the support department.
Another way to go is with a hosting middleman like myself who handles phone calls and gets the tech support taken care of. In addition, someone like myself adds value by actively watching the servers for outages and submitting support tickets even before my clients call (though not always!).
Other recommended hosting providers are Dreamhost and Media Temple.
February 8th, 2006
Back in April of ‘05, I wrote a short post called How to Succeed in Search Engine Marketing without Trying, in which I proposed that the only viable (sustainable) way to boost search engine rankings is to create valuable content and keep it coming. What does this have to do with today?
As I mentioned earlier, I am reading Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel and a small statement caught my attention on page 29. “For now, it is clear that the shortest, cheapest, fastest, and easiest route to a prominent Google ranking is to blog often.”
I admit they said it better, but this is exactly the same point I made.
I’m validated.
Do you agree with this perspective? (Not on my being validated, but on content provision as the only viable way to boost search engine rankings!)
February 8th, 2006
