As you might have heard, we recently moved our website to HawkHost. The shift was based on the fact how unreliable our previous host was, their service was just appalling. Anyway, it made me realize how important it is to choose the right host that best suit your needs.

I used to go for cheap services (first for price, then inevitably quality), but after my horrific experiences,  I’ve learned my lesson - just pay more and have a peace of mind.

It’s not a surprise to know that your website needs a web-server, which is provided by either direct hosting companies, or resellers. They “host” your website on the internet, and naturally you would expect it to be up most of the time, if not all the time.

Unfortunately, this cannot be guaranteed because there’s bound to be crashes or server upgrades, but you can minimize this downtime be choosing the right web-host. There are myriad companies offering all levels of service, but which one is right for you? Arm yourself with the following tips before you go looking for a home for your website.

What are YOUR requirements?

It’s important that you realize the most significant factors before committing to a service. These factors can range from customer support to contract lengths, all depending on your preference and requirements – however, here’s a die-hard list of the most basic yet crucial attributes that you need to keep an eye out for.

Customer Service

Hosting companies can sometimes try to hide their technical support staff (if they have any) behind FAQ lists, contact forms and even premium-rate phone numbers. You are likely to need help, especially when setting up your first website, so find out what level of support you can expect before you choose. It’s worth paying a little bit more if it means you’ll get a better service.

Shared or Dedicated?

Web-hosting services range from “dedicated hosting”, where your website is the only one on the whole machine, thus reducing any lag or interference with any other websites on the same server. Obviously this will be heavier on your pocket, but if you plan to run a busy website you’ll need dedicated server sometime down the road.

Similarly, “shared hosting” is exactly what it is. Your website “shares” the server’s resources with several other websites. Even though it’s a cheaper option you might figure out its not suited to your needs, especially if your web-host OVERSELLS and cramps up the servers – you might experience a lot of downtime.

A really big-downfall in shared hosting is that if any sites on your server gets banned from Search Engines for whatever reason, you might unfortunately cop the consequences too – so it’s better to get at least a dedicated IP Address.

One, two or more domains?

Do you need your server for one site. or do you want to make more? If you do plan to make more sites in the future, you need to make sure your web-host provides the feature to host multiple domains. Usually a “site” is denoted by the fact it has a unique domain, such as “www.blogussion.com”.

Money talks, so make your host walk

In today’s world, with economies crashing and prices soaring – you need to make sure your getting a bang for your buck! The range of possible costs for web-hosting is immense, going from free services to as much as you want to pay!

Free services (there’s a million) can be perfect for simple projects, but as soon as you grow past the ‘simple barrier’ you will realize the restrictions. There is ALWAYS limitations or other downsides to free-hosting, whether it be a service-advert posted on your webpages or restricted FTP access.

Just keep in mind, that you get what you pay for and don’t expect perfect hosting for $0.99/month either. Sometimes it just pays to pay.

Your needs, their services

One of the most important steps prior to building a site, is planning. Once you have decided on the features/facilities you will need for your site – make sure your hosts provides them.

Little-little things like add-on email addresses, multiple FTP accounts, multiple MySQL Databases and such need to be verified that your host provides. Try your best to eliminate any features you don’t want, because you shouldn’t be paying for things your not using.

Always read a review or two!

It’s important to read how satisfied/dissatisfied previous customers were in your potential web-host. It’s absolutely vital that you read a couple of ‘unofficial’ reviews at least before committing to anything. A good place for feedback from other people are DigitalPoint, WhirlPool and WebHostingTalk.

Crack-down on CHEAP Hosting Companies.

Just like anything in life, you get what you pay for. The rise of unbelievably cheap hosting services seem to be growing exponentially and when I mean cheap – I mean dirt cheap. Some of these services are going for just a few cents a month!

I seriously cannot see how any host can profit this from directly, unless they were cramping the servers 10x over their limits. As shocking as it is, I even saw a service at DigitalPoint offering “unlimited everything” for $0.99/YEAR! You tell me what you can expect for that much..

Stay clear of any “unlimited hosting packages” because it’s not possible to have that, no matter how technologically advanced your host is. Ignore the marketing mumbo-jumbo and take my word, it is non-existent.

Many webmasters believe that they have the liberty to upload anything in their space and the “unlimited” hosting account can handle any kind of big traffic; but it is false. Most of the time, it’s too late when they realize that their CHEAP OVERSELLING HOST just suspended their hosting account.

As a webmaster you need to understand that the price is a reflection upon the quality of the service your getting. You cannot expect a 99cent host to even come close to the services offered by BlueHost, Hawkhost and such – it’s just not practical.

My only advie to you would be just forget about these sort of cheap hosts, unless your an established webmaster trying out and experimenting new things. It’s murky waters and can’t be nothing but trouble!

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Web accessibility is the practice of making sure your website content can be accessed and understood by as many visitors as possible, regardless of their physical ability or technological barriers.

As a webmaster, you must ensure that your website can be viewed by both human visitors and Search Engine crawlers, and at times it can get a bit tricky to please both types of visitors.

It may not be always be possible to make all types of content accessible to all your visitors, but as far as possible, you should try to make the meaning of your content understood by everyone.

The W3C Web Standards

The ‘WC3 Web Standards’ are an official set of standards that bring together commonly accepted rules by web-masters around the world. If you can make your website comply to these set of standards, you will greatly benefit by the fact that the spiders can easily navigate your content and your human readers can enjoy a nice-looking website.

What is “Web Standards?”

Web Standards crop up almost everywhere on the internet. The reason is simply that the web standards are incredibly useful and important. They help to ensure compatibility between different computer systems and browser versions, as well as aiding accessibility and search engine optimization.

Why your favorite tool should be the ‘W3C Markup Validator’?

The place to go for definitive information about the web standards is the website of the group responsible for setting them, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short. You can run your site through their online tool, called the W3C MarkUp Validator and pick up any attributes that don’t comply with the rules.

You’ll be laughing, ’cause it’s so simple!

The beauty of coding to W3C Web Standards is that you’ll find your sites are already well on the way to being accessible. In fact, a simple WordPress site will require little-to-no special attention to bring it up to the highest level of accessibility. However, dynamic and complex themes can easily alter that.

The Semantic Markup

The “Semantic Markup” is the technique of writing HTML code that describes the meaning of the content, rather than simple describing its layout or style. This allows both human readers and spiders to read and understand the context of the content. This context gives the content an extra layer of meaning. The following 9 tips should help you understand the simple power behind the Semantic Web.

#9) The humble “paragraph” tag

How can anyone forget the “paragraph” tag? Known as <p>, the paragraph is to a document as a brick is to a wall. So, whatever you do, don’t just chuck in < br /> tags to create the visual appearance of paragraphs; something that many web designers seem to do with alarming frequency. That would be like building a wall without cement. If you need more space between your paragraphs, look into your CSS file and make the changes there, not in your direct article.

#8) Fine-tuning your tables for SEO

Tables are another area where the meaning of HTML markup is often sacrificed for the designer’s convenience. Semantically, a “table” is a matrix of related data organized into rows and columns, like a list of product names associated with price and color options for example. Tales shouldn’t be used for creating layouts, as the fact that it’s a “table” implies a structured relationship between items in rows and columns that doesn’t  exist.

#7) Be strong, don’t be bold

A subtle, but instructive, piece of semantic markup is the <strong> tag. Most of the time this is used to make the text bold. So why not use the old <b> tag? Well, for one thing, it’s not web-standards compliant. More pertinently, it’s a “representational” tag, meaning it only refers to the way the content should look, rather than what it means. <strong> means that the content is “prominent”, a concept which could be represented in any way you wish, but not necessarily bold.

#6) If you can’t stand straight, use <em>

Similar to the <strong> tag is the <em> tag. Again, this is mostly used to denote the italic text, which used to be accomplished with the nonstandard <i> tag. The semantic meaning of <em> is “emphasis” whereas <i> just means “slopey text.” The fact that some text is “sloping” means nothing to a blind visitor like Google Spiders, however that it has “emphasis” means a lot. For the design savvy among us, there are lost of ways to give emphasized text a visual representation other than italicizing it.

#5) Perfecting your classes

The key to semantic markup is to make use of the existing classes provided within the HTML specification. The also saves you a lot of time! If you do need to represent something in a visually different manner you can still do this by adding a custom “class” to the standard tag, like this <p class=”affiliates-page”>, and creating a corresponding style in your CSS.

#4) Alt Text for Images

Use the alt attribute to describe the content of images, for web-crawlers. This can also help visually impaired users that use screen reader software which reads the text content of we pages using speech synthesis. If your images have no alt text then the meaning of such images aren’t available to both the impaired viewers and Spiders.

#3) Self-closing tags

Remember to “self-close” tags where appropriate. For example, to add a new line to a paragraph you could just add an old-style “break” tag: <br> However, the standards compliant version of the tag self closes, like this <br />

#2) The sub-ordinate headers

You can assign <h> tags to your content that will assign it value and weight, especially when spiders come crawling to your site. If you allow it to isolate important keywords by using <h> tags you are making them more prominent and stand out. You can use anything from <h1> to <h6>, but I’ve never used anything further than <h4>. Knowing this allows search engines to view the contents of the heading accordingly, and give those keywords extra weight.

#1) The King header

One of the most important guidelines, in my opinion, is that of the <h1> tag, which contains the main heading of the page. Everything else on the page is subordinate to the main heading. Put another, the main heading is the most important part of the page.

That’s it ~ If you can stay true to the above 10 tips and also follow some other minor yet important guidelines provided by the W3C, you will be rewarded for making the spider’s job easier.

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It’s so simple, just three simple methods – it’s a wonder everyone doesn’t do it! Search Engine Optimization is one of the most effective methods of gaining higher SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) – yet so many developers neglect the basics and only a handful utilize it. The techniques used by web-masters and bloggers alike today range from simple “BOLD” texts to black-hat marketing.

Today, maintaining an online community and writing content for your readers is easier than ever. Content Management Systems such as WordPress & Blogger makes it just too easy for one with an idea to share it with millions of potential readers. I think, given the simplicity of such programs, that most talented developers and even new comers to the game – tend to overlook the basic foundation needed to reach those “millions of potential readers.”

Almost every blogger, web developer and online marketer would try to reach the highest possible SERP for their selected list of keywords. This is natural, simply because traffic gained from Search Engine Results are extremely targeted. Nevertheless, it’s easier said than done – with almost every competitive keyword you can think of – ranking several hundred million results! Still, don’t let that throw you off course, because just THREE simple steps will have you raking in those loyal readers and potential clients.

Quality In-Bound Links

First on the Trinity of SEO is ‘Quality In-Bound Links’. Links to your site from external websites are very important for search engine optimization. Not only do they help the search engine find your site in the first place, they can also improve the ranking your site achieves. If a large number of sites with related content link to you, the search engines will look upon you favorably.

The core algorithm behind the infamous Google PageRank relies on in-bound links and dominates the minds of many website buyers across the internet. Scouring a few web-development forums, you will see that the majority of the questions or issues raised float around Google and its PageRank. The system depicts how important your website is, by assigning it a PageRank and this value solely depends on how many authority websites link to you.

A lot of the hype recently about “Do-Follow Commenting” helps a lot, where you seek out blogs that allow do-follow on your URL tag and comment on them. It’s one of the more recently appreciated methods of link-building because it can get you targeted links from related contextual websites, and can also bring in a visitor or two. The biggest positive is that, it’s FREE! Commenting on relevant sites is obviously free unless they have a paid-membership of some sort. The trick to this technique is to find authority blogs in your niche that haven’t been exposed yet as “Do-Follow Blogs”. It requires hours and hours of persistent searching… or at times – just a bit of luck.

Web-Standards Compliance

If your website is coded to comply with the W3C web standards it is more likely to perform well in search engine results or SERPs. The reason for this is simply that they are less likely to “trip up” on some code they don’t understand.

Search engines, especially Google, take notice of the HTML code that makes up your page. They are always on the prowl for out-bound links and new content. The more code there is relative to the amount of actually content, the worse your site will perform in the eyes of the crawler. So, you need to make sure that you have the minimum amount of coding required to meet the W3C Standards and also your expectations as a blogger. The less hassle for the crawler, the more favorable you are as a higher contender on the SERPs. Always aim to please both your readers and your crawler. I would recommend running all your websites through the W3C Validtor, to pick up any errors in your coding.

Allowing the crawler to understand your coding and also letting your readers enjoy a legible article was near impossible with ‘keyword stuffing’ back in the day. However, these days’ crawlers are much smarter and are able to pick up most of the content as a normal reader would. I said most, and emphasize on this because “Google is the web’s blindest use.” Even though crawler intelligence has grown exponentially, they still aren’t capable of picking up images, different coloring and styles etc., so ensure the meaning of such elements is also available in text format.

Relevant Text Content

Last but definitely not the least aspect of the trio is “Relevant Text Content.” The absolute number one thing your website/blog needs for good search engine performance and ultimately loyal readers – is unique relevant content. If your site is not about what it claims to be about then no amount of other tips and techniques will help you. Regardless of design and how visually appealing it is – your website won’t rise to the top if it doesn’t deliver content. In simpler terms; writing unique content on a regular basis is the key to success.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying “Content is King” and I couldn’t agree more. The many popular bloggers today have offered their readers something unique and special that simply can’t be found anywhere else. This is what made them famous, so you think about it yourself – what do you have to offer?

Search Engine Crawlers like coming across your unique content on a regular basis and that is why Google prefers blogs. If you can produce content that is appealing to your readers, and keep producing such content on a frequently – you will conquer the search results within no time!

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