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24 Questions to Ask Your Web Hosting Company

January 21st, 2010

Any business these days requires a website. It has become an expectation. Herewith, a list of 24 questions that you should ask your web hosting company before you purchase web hosting.

Technical Support:

Technical support must be available to you.

1. What do they provide?
- SoftSmart.co.za provides live chat (link available through all pages of our site).
- We provide telephone support (numbers on our contact page).
- We provide email support which is tracked via a support ticketing system.
- Knowledge base with FAQs.

2. When are they available?
- Telephone and live chats are available from 8H00 till 17H30, Monday to Friday, and usually beyond that.

3. Does tech support cost extra?
- There is no fee for tech support

Storage:

Ensure that you have enough space to expand in the future.

4. How much storage do they offer? (A typical Web site uses between 20-30 MB)
- LOADS. Our smallest package is 500Mb of disk space

5. Do they offer enough extra space for your business to grow into? 100MB is a good starting point.
- Sure. Our largest package has 10Gb disk space. If you need it, please email us to find out about dedicated hosting.

Domains:

Getting a Domain name for your business is one of the most important things you could do.

6. Will they register your Domain name on your behalf?
- Yes, when you order your hosting package, you enter the domain name of your choice.

7. How long will it take?
- Average time is < 2 hours.

8. Is there any extra cost to you?
- Most packages include a free domain name for the first year. Thereafter domain names cost R100 (+- $15) per year.

Design:

There are 3 basic website design options. 1) Hire a web developer to design the entire website. 2) A template solution that is inexpensive, but designs are not unique.

9. Do they have a builder that you can manage easily?
- Yes, we have Site builder (link to demo here).
- We have thousands of FREE web templates within our CPanel area.
- We have a great online tutorial for web authoring (link here).

10. What type of computer background do you need to design your site?

- Dependant on what option you prefer above.

11. Do you have control over content and updates?
- Yes, your site is loaded via FTP, so you control every step.

Email:

12. How many email aliases comes with your package?
- This differs with the packages, from 5 to unlimited.

13. Will your emails have the domain name in them for a more professional appearance (eg, [email protected])?
- Is there any other way???

14. What is the cost to add extra emails?
- You can easily add up to your package maximum in CPanel at no cost

15. Are there any additional costs?
- No!

Cost:

Make sure there are no hidden costs.

16. What are the initial setup fees and what do you get exactly?
- We charge no setup fees.

17. Are there any additional charges?
- Not really… If you go over your data allowance (which is huge, 5Gb on the smallest package) for 3 consecutive months, we will require you to upgrade your account.

Contract:

18. Am I locked into a contract?
- No, you pay per month.

19. May I cancel at anytime?
- Yes you can! (to paraphrase president Obama).

20. Are there any penalty fees for switching or closing my account?
- Only that you loose out on great service.

21. What happens to my content?
- Your content is yours. You can simply get it all via FTP (or as a backup from CPanel) before cancelling. Your      domain will also be transferred (note that some registrars charge about $10 to transfer domains, so you may need to pay that to them directly).

Value:

22. What makes them better than their competition?
- We provide great support. We use our own servers for our own websites and we have all the value added services, like web development, custom software development, graphic designers, etc. Because we are software / web developers we can answer technical question which extend beyond just hosting support

23. What exactly sets them apart?

- We believe the old adage that the “customer is king”, give us a try. Mail us and ask about your first 3 months ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!

24. Does the web host provide the features that you need for your web site?
- We have many free scripts like ecommerce applications, Wordpress, etc for free and easy to setup in CPanel.

 


 

Using keywords in your seo campaign

January 16th, 2010

Using Keywords to Improve your Search Engine Rankings

In order to be successful online you have to increase the natural search engine results for your website.
Some sources suggest that the top three natural search results on Google get more than 60% of all clicks. How far down are you in the search engine listing?

This article will be a multipart, where we will focus on specific areas of SEO.

In this, the first part article on search engine optimisation, we are going to take a look at how keywords affect your search engine rankings.

The biggest mistake you can make is using keywords that YOU think are relevant. Remember that your clientelle may not know the industry like you, so they may not know the “correct” keywords to use, but they are the ones using them, so you had better learn what they are.

If your web hosting company gives you access to log files (webalizer, awstats), then you will be able to see a list of keywords that were used to get to your site. If your web hosting company doesn’t, then its time to move your website.

An important point to remember about keyword optimisation is that you should try to focus on one (or maybe two closely related keywords) per page. In other words, Lets say in our dog grooming business we have facilities to groom big dogs, as well as little dogs, plus we sell accessories (leashes, shampoo, etc), then we should setup 3 different pages to target those categories.

Below I’m going to go through some of the keyword processes for large dogs, but the same knowledge applies to our little dogs and dog accessories pages.

Title Tag

An extremely important SEO element is the page title, ie, the <title> tag found in the header of your page. This title should be short, descriptive and well thought out. Don’t repeat words too many times and don’t write your entire site’s content into these tags.

For example, in our large dog page, my <title> tag might be <title>Large Dog Groomers | Grooming your Doberman</title>

In the example above, I’ve used groomers and grooming, two closely related keywords. Notice also that I said “Doberman”. In otherwords, depending on how popular certain breeds of dogs are in your neighbourhood, you may want to set up muliple large dog grooming pages, ie, <title>Large Dog Groomers | Grooming your German Sheppard Dog</title>,<title>Large Dog Groomers | Grooming your Rotweiler</title>.

Just be careful with this technique though. Google does penalise duplicate content, so you cannot just copy the content from one page to another. Also, and more importantly, your users are not stupid. They don’t want to go to page after page that is exactly the same content. Rather, find info specific to each breed, and include it there.

Headings (H1 Tag)

The <h1> Tag (and to a lessor extent H2, H3) tags are very important to the search engines. Just like you would see the heading of a chapter in a book as an important indication as to what the chapter is about, so google sees the H1 tag as a clue to the content of your page. Make it short and sweet, but very targetted to your keyword you are optimising for, eg, <h1>Large Breed Dog Grooming</h1>

You should consider using the <h2> or <h3> tags as subheadings for paragraphs (just as we’ve done here!).

Again, each page should use unique heading tags.

Keyworded URL

Where ever possible, you should use keywords in your URL. This is a great indication of what the page is going to be and lends alot of weight to your SERP (search engine ranking placement). So, our web address may be www.citygroomers.com. For our large breed page, we may use www.citygroomers.com/dog-grooming/large-breeds.html.

It is better to use – to seperate keywords than _. There is some debate about whether its important at all as google has become very adept at resolving largebreeds.html as two words. However, in my opinion, I still like to seperate words for the sake of less intelligent search engines, as well as for clarity. As an example, a very popular and well known IT professionals site is www.experts-exchange.com. As far as I know, they used to be called www.expertsexchange.com. However, how should google interpret this? As “experts exchange”, or as “expert sex change”? Rather different isn’t it?

Obviously a keyword in your domain name is first prize (www.dog-grooming.com), but in my opinion I feel this is less important as I’m sure google takes into account that for a given keyword, there can be only one exact domain name matching it, and it might not be the most relavant!

Meta Tags

The Meta keywords and meta content tags are less important to google, but still very important to other search engines. You may argue quite correctly that for a search engine to rely on the meta data is inferior, and we would agree. However, it is what it is and you need to decide if you’d rather put in the few minutes extra and increase your exposure, or not. Also, no-one’s saying that meta data doesn’t help at all with google.

For keywords, stick you your keywords for that page. Your content tags should be a short description (one that the search engines might display in their results).

Keyword Optimised Content

Your content is the MOST important part of on-site optimisation. As google always says, make content for users, not for search engines. It is amazing to see how often this is not the case.

So, while using your keywords is important, google WILL eventually penalise you if you over do it. They call it keyword stuffing and its just not worth it.

You should try to use your keyword as soon as possible in your body text.

As an example for our large dogs keyword, I might start my page like this:

“Grooming for large breed dogs presents a particular challange because….”

As an example of keyword stuffing (which you should not do):

“Grooming large breed dogs presents a particular challange because of large breed dogs weight. We groom large breed dogs with our specialised large breed dog grooming equipment.”

This just sounds like it was written by an illiterate. Humans don’t like it and neither do the search engines. You need to bear some facts about the search engines in mind before embarking on a keyword stuffing campaign. Google has alot of money! Google has many employees who get paid alot of money to find sites like this and to make corrections to their search algorithm, so even if it works in the short term, it WILL negatively impact you in the long term.

You should probably aim to use your keyword 3 or 4 times in the body. If it needs to be more to make it readable, then so be it, just make sure that it sounds natural.

Alt Attributes

The alt attribute is an attribute used in your image tags so that google can “read” what your image is. As you might imagine, if you have a pic with a large breed dog (a rotweiler for instance), how does google know what’s on the image? Well, they don’t. You need to tell them. That’s where the alt attribute comes in. You could use it like this <img src=”largedog.jpg” alt=”Large dog breeds”>.

All search engine spiders will now be able to apply your keyword to the weighting of the keyword within that page.

Which keywords to Use?

As I mentioned right at the top of this page, a really big challange is to determine which keywords to use.

Some problems include:

  1. Rubbish keywords – You optimise for a keyword, and guess what, you’re in the search place on google for that keyword BUT you’re the only one searching for it.
  2. Too broad a keyword – Your keyword is too broad, so even though your site ends up at the top, the visitors may not be interested in your content at all (for instance “large breed dogs” would probably be too broad by itself).
  3. Wrong keywords. You may be optimising for keywords that your users are not using.
  4. Too much competition for a given keyword

But, don’t worry, there is a great tool to use, straight from the horses mouth:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Go to google’s keyword tool. There are various methods to search, but I would recommend putting in your web address (or a specific page on your website). Google will give you a list of keywords that it thinks is relavant to your page. This is a fantastic tool. It will give you keywords as well as how many times they get searched for.

As an aside, if it gives you keywords that are completely irrelavant to your site, don’t get angry with google. Thank them that they have given you this tool because you have just identified a major flaw in your optimisation (if this is the case, maybe its best you mail us for some advice!!).

The method we use is:

  • Pick one keyword with visits between 500 and 2000. That will take care of the problems 1, 3 ad 4 above. You know people are searching for them, but its not the most competitive keyword with 10000000 searches. Point 3 will still require you to apply your mind to the keyword you actually pick.
  • Now, go straight to google and type in that keyword (or key word phrase). Take the top 5 listings in the search results and view the page source code. Paste it into notepad and save them (individually).
  • Open these 5 text documents, as well as a 6th one which will be the basis of your new optimised page.
  • Copy the title tag text of each of the pages into your sixth page. Now, based on your own keyword, and on what is working for these sites, make up your own title tag.Example:For the keyphrase “large breed dog groomers” the top 5 site’s title tags were:
    1. Dog Training | Dog & Puppy Obedience Training | Dog Grooming
    2. Large Dogs – Your Large Dog Breed Information Gateway
    3. large breed dog house’s Search Results
    4. Dog Grooming | Non Shedding Dogs
    5. Hugo’s House | Dog Sitting in the Comox Valley

    Right, the only title tags that seem to be related to grooming are 1 and 4. Notice that most of them use | to separate search terms which is good practice.

    So, for our phrase of “large breed dog groomers” and the above, our title text might look like this:

    <title>Dog Grooming | Large Breed Dog Groomers</title>

  • Do the same for meta keywords, meta description and the headings (<h1> <h2>, etc).
  • Look at the first sentence of every page and make your first sentence impactful as describe above when we spoke about content.
  • Now write the rest of your content.
  • Name the page according to your keyword (www.mydomain.com/large-breed-dog-groomers.html).
  • Lastly, go to google, yahoo, bing and any others you want to. Type in your keyword or phrase. See if you are already listed somewhere there and note what page you were on and the date. Don’t go past page 10 of the search results (unless you really want to).You will from time to time repeat point 9 to see what improvements have happened in the SERPs.Look at this post http://www.softsmart.co.za/blog/web-development/seo/can-google-see-your-website. Use the text based editor to see more or less how the search engines see your page. This will help you find missing alt text for images, etc.Stay tuned for episode two, or sign up to our newsletter.
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    Starting Windows Services in VB

    January 16th, 2010

    At times it may be necessary for you to control windows services in your visual basic code. For instance, one of the applications I had written used various software modules to write to and read from a MySQL database. I then used IIS to connect to the database and display reports to users on the network in a web browser.

    The problem came in when MySQL version 4 must have had a little bug, and it did not work very well with IIS. When there was a relatively large amount of data in the recordset, MySQL would fall over with the annoying little message: “MySQL has gone away”. Later on, when version 5 became available, I installed that and it solved my problems, BUT in the interim I had a problem. I couldn’t tell my clients to wait around for newer versions of MySQL, and I also didn’t want to rewrite components to use another database.

    So, the solution was to trap the errors that MySQL crashes generated and automatically restart MySQL as a windows service. This could be any service though, I just happened to use it for MySQL.

    If you go to control panel –> administrative tools –> Services, you will see a list of services there with their service names. Use this name with the code in the download below to stop, start or pause your windows services. I am not going to give a detailed description of every line of code (because honestly I don’t really know most of it, its alot of API calls!). Instead, by supplying the source code, I hope that you will be able to modify this and use it in your own code.

    Restarting Windows Services with Visual Basic Start windows services in VB

     


     

    Visual Basic Chess Game

    January 14th, 2010

    This source code for a chess game written in visual basic is another tutorial that is dumped into the intermediate category, however, I think it could really fit into the beginner and advanced categories too. The reason for this is that there aren’t really any advanced things going on here in terms of strict visual basic code, but the logic may be a little tough, especially as this was one of my early projects, so in some cases the naming conventions suck, ie, are really non existent, and some things are just done the long way round. However, having said that, it still works and that’s pretty cool.

    This is not a tutorial in the sense that I am going to ramble on here about writing a chess game in visual basic. This is rather another tutorial where I say, here is the source code, step though it and see what you like, see what you don’t, see where you can improve, but learn from each of those steps. There really is just too much in the project to talk about here.

    I will just mention a few things:

    1) One of the things to learn from this code is drag and drop. This visual basic chess game uses drag and drop to drag chess pieces around the board and drop them into the square they are moving to. This is a little trickier than it may sound at first because often times the piece is not dragged and dropped cleanly into a single square. It may be 90% in a square, but not exactly. You will see that there is a little calculation that goes on to determine which square it was dropped into “the most”.

    2) Many routines simplify logic. I think that I probably could have even created more routines to simplify even further. Now I am not talking about arbitarily adding routines, I am talking about drawing a flow diagram with pen and paper (remember those??), and then coding the flow diagram. By making each routine as small as possible, ie, one job per routine, you simplify your logic because at a high level, you get code that looks like this:

    private sub MovePiece()
    IsThisAValidMove()
    MovePieceToLocation(x,y)
    IsPlayerInCheck()
    HasPieceTakenOpponent()
    End Sub

    This is NOT actual code from my source, but it illustrates the type of things I was trying to achieve (as I mentioned before, this was one of my first, so I might not have succeeded entirely).

    3) Move highlighting. Because of the modular style of writing this software as described in the point above, it was very easy for me to add “move highlighting”. For the colour whose turn it is to move, right-click on any piece, and it highlights all the possible moves that piece can make at that time, so this could potentially help someone to learn the game.

    4) There is no AI in this game yet. This game currently requires 2 people to play. There has not been any effort yet to add artificial intelligence for a computer player.

    PLEASE, IF YOU START THE PROCESS OF ADDING AI TO THIS GAME, I’D LOVE TO SEE IT.

    If you use this code as the start of your own project (with or without AI), PLEASE send it back to me. I will NEVER ask you for anything, ie, I don’t want your money, I don’t want royalties, I don’t even want acknowledgement in your product (although it would be nice). ALL I want is just to see where this code is going, and please, if you find this useful, please tweet about it @softsmart!

    Anyway, having said that, please download the code and happy coding / gaming….

    Visual Basic Chess Game Source Code –

     


     

    Converting Links in a text file to anchor tags usable in your website

    January 9th, 2010

    I recently answered a question about converting links in a text file, eg, www.softsmart.co.za to an anchor link that could be used in a website, eg, <a href=”http://www.softsmart.co.za”>http://www.softsmart.co.za</a>.

    I decided that since I was such an open source evangelist, the best thing I could do was whip up a little application to do this:

    Here is a brief synopsis of what it does (links at the bottom):
    It takes a text file that has one link per line.

    You can start the program in several ways (its a console program):
    1) Just start it and it will ask you to type in the full path and name of the file (unless the file is in the same directory, then name alone should be fine)
    2) You can start the program from a dos prompt followed by the name of the file in quotes, eg, c:\>UrlToAnchor.exe “C:\Folder 1\Folder 2\test.txt”
    3) Easiest method is open the folder that has this exe, then in a different folder open the folder with your text file, then just drag the text file onto the program.

    It will ask you 3 questions. These are related to what you want the resultant anchor text to look like:

    1) Do you want a title tag? If ‘y’ then it will place the title=”eee” into the tag, using the domain name as the title
    2) Do you want to use the title tag as the link text? If ‘y’ then the title tag is the link text, ie, what the user sees and clicks on
    3) Do you want the links to open in a new window? If ‘y’ it adds the target=”_new”. This is nice if you are placing these links on your own site but you don’t want people to go out of your site.

    I tested this on a very average machine (my laptop) with a file that had 200 000 dummy links. It ran that in just under 2 minutes.

    Ok, here is the disclaimer…

    1) I am giving this away for free, so there are no guarantees. However, if you need help or you want a feature added, mail me, I’d be more than happy to help. My time is very limited however so you may have to wait.

    2) I know that its scary using free software from someone you don’t know, so I’ll make this opensource. You can download the program and run it, or you can download the source and check it out, modify it then compile it yourself. Although I haven’t tested this on Linux yet, I do try to stick to ANSI C++, so this should compile on both (Please post here if you want me to compile a Linux version).

    What do I ask in return? If you want to make a comment on the blog, make it nice! If you do download the source and modify it (or post it on your own website), please respect 2 things:

    1) Please post back to my blog to let us all benefit from the mods
    2) Please keep my title info at the top of the source file (its only one file). You can add yours below!

    Click here to download the exe for windows

    Click here to download the source file

     


     

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