pilkster.com » Hosting and servers http://pilkster.com SEO & marketing scrapbook Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:19:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Firefox Cache To The Rescue! http://pilkster.com/firefox-cache-to-the-rescue/ http://pilkster.com/firefox-cache-to-the-rescue/#comments Mon, 12 Feb 2007 08:21:07 +0000 pilkster http://pilkster.com/firefox-cache-to-the-rescue/ Earlier today I ‘lost’ an account on my server (OK, OK I deleted the wrong one). The problem was I had no backups of the site, it was a Wordpress blog that I had written 6 posts for – and you know how long it takes to write a really good quality blog post – but I hadn’t taken a backup since. In a situation like that the first response is to panic, but there are several places that you can look to find and recover the lost documents. I found the posts in my firefox cache using the about:cache command (just type it into the address bar and it allows you to browse your cache), but other places to consider are your RSS reader (for recent items) or archive.org if the site is static and has been online a while. Certainly beats re-writing the stuff.

It reminded me of my college days when losing a floppy disc (yes I am THAT old!) could mean rewriting a months work, and my backpacker days using the old yahoo webmail that didn’t autosave in some cheapo internet cafe with 20 people sharing a dialup connection…

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]]> http://pilkster.com/firefox-cache-to-the-rescue/feed/ 1 Optimizing For UK And Local Search Engines http://pilkster.com/optimizing-for-uk-and-local-search-engines/ http://pilkster.com/optimizing-for-uk-and-local-search-engines/#comments Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:24:08 +0000 pilkster http://pilkster.com/optimizing-for-uk-and-local-search-engines/ Although I live in Australia at the moment, I am an Englishman and most of my SEO and marketing has been done in the UK. I consider UK engines to be much easier to optimize for than US engines as the competition is less. It is possible therefore to be successful working with a broader niche when marketing using natural search in the UK as opposed to the USA.

When marketing to a local audience (and by local here I mean anywhere but the US) most marketers overlook the fact that your whois information is freely available in most cases to the search engines, and that other factors such as the location of your hosting are easy to determine.

Local engines already give trust to ccTLD’s (country code Top Level Domains), and I predict this is set to increase as search algorithms improve. Consider this before you buy domain name. Most local engines are not as advanced as global engines, and often the marketers working these areas are not as sophisticated as those playing in the big money arenas.

Last year I had a great deal of success with MSN UK. The weighting given to UK domain names and especially UK web hosting by MSN was unreasonable; I could rank first for some fairly major keywords by using a UK domain registered at my UK address, UK hosting, and a few low quality inbound links (just to get indexed). No real on-page optimization was necessary, and the quality of content did not seem to be relevant at all. Although MSN’s traffic levels are nothing like Google’s, being in the top spot for many high value keywords made me some good money :)

There is no geographic restriction on owning a UK domain like there is on owning .us domains, and registration is cheaper than .com’s. Nominet, the UK domain registry, give non-trading individuals an ‘opt-out’ option on whois.

If you are serious about doing business online in the UK from abroad, consider registering a UK Limited company. It is a fairly cheap and simple thing to register a UK Limited company online. Most ‘company formation’ companies offer a registered address service which is a UK address at their offices that will suffice for the purposes of registering and administering UK domains.

Having your UK domain registered to a UK address, or your whois information hidden, may be a good thing in the eyes of the search engines. If they aren’t using this information in their ranking algorithms for local search now, it would make sense that they will in the future.

One way for your link monkey to hunt down other local sites to beg links off is to use a reverse IP lookup on a small site that is hosted in the correct country. Small sites tend to be on shared hosting and many shared hosting packages also share IP addresses.

In summary, when marketing to local search engines:

  • Register a ccTLD (possible bonus points for local address for the registration).
  • Host within the country.
  • Aim for a good proportion of links from sites with the same ccTLD you are working with & also hosted locally.

Useful links:

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]]> http://pilkster.com/optimizing-for-uk-and-local-search-engines/feed/ 1 Check Your Webhost Speed http://pilkster.com/check-your-webhost-speed/ http://pilkster.com/check-your-webhost-speed/#comments Wed, 20 Dec 2006 06:56:45 +0000 pilkster http://pilkster.com/check-your-webhost-speed/ Sponsored post:

Rate My Webhosting is a handy online app from Hostgator. Just by adding a snippet of javascript to you enable your sites visitors to rate the load speed of your page on a sliding scale (1-5 stars). Hostgator provide you with a secret link to a Google maps mashup with your visitors locations overlaid, and a breakdown of how they rate you. This should be a useful tool to run on any site that is geotargeting ~ if you are located in Europe paying for North American adwords traffic and have a host in Asia it is good to know how well your site is responding. Sites that are slow to load lose traffic, and a lot depends on the location and quality of your host.

You can see my secret link here (I’m not too worried about showing the stats on this blog, although I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone working in a competitive niche).

I liked this little app so much that I wrote a Wordpress plugin for it. Wordpress can be a pain when it comes to adding javascript snippets, so hopefully this will make it quick and easy to add Hostgator’s tool to your site. If you want a copy of the Wordpress plugin please contact me and I will make it available to you.

Don’t forget to rate my webhosting whilst you’re here!

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]]> http://pilkster.com/check-your-webhost-speed/feed/ 1 4 more getups http://pilkster.com/4-more-getups/ http://pilkster.com/4-more-getups/#comments Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:29:50 +0000 pilkster http://pilkster.com/4-more-getups/ Ok so I am reduced to dialup because goddamn freaking metronet are so lame that they have a traffic cap of 2gb or some ghey sugar that i bounce off every month around the 2nd ‘cos i have backups to run and stuff… anyway here I am on dialup with accomodation to organise, people to speak to etc. etc.

Anyway, whats new?… had an enjoyable evening with SEOidiot on Friday… mmmm

Was doing some research into the paid blog industry before… it is wide open for anyone who has the time (not me ATM as you can guess). Maybe this is going to be one of those ‘if only I knew then what I know now’ things like we all say about the dotcom boom, housing boom, general stuff we should have all done.

Following the links out of the PayPerPost thread this scared the sh1te out of me… I followed the link expecting to find a professional outfit to help me with customer relations, but I think not! Especially scarey to think we will be in Thailand in two weeks with martial law and all.

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]]> http://pilkster.com/4-more-getups/feed/ 1 Choosing a host http://pilkster.com/choosing-a-host/ http://pilkster.com/choosing-a-host/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:55:19 +0000 pilkster http://pilkster.com/choosing-a-host/ Choosing a good webhost seems to be really difficult when you get to the point of needing a dedicated server. There are loads of pitfalls, and many questions that need to be asked. For a total hosting novice like me it seems really daunting.

How come some people know so much about hosting? It seems to be a whole other world. Choosing a shared host seems pretty easy really as all shared hosts manage and patch their own severs. I dont even know how often that is required!

I know I want cpanel/WHM as I have a reseller account with jodohost that uses something else called H-sphere which is horrid. I have to use jodo for that site though as it is coded in asp and requires windows hosting. I really must rentacoder to convert it to php & put it on a linux server.

Questions to ask include:

Is cpanel/WHM included?
Is fantastico included?
What level of support is included?
Are backups included?

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]]> http://pilkster.com/choosing-a-host/feed/ 0 A busy week http://pilkster.com/a-busy-week/ http://pilkster.com/a-busy-week/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:47:07 +0000 pilkster http://pilkster.com/a-busy-week/ What a week it has been since getting back from Portugal last Saturday. I found out (much to my dismay) that bestreseller had suspended one of my sites for over use of resources on the shared server. They didn’t bother to tell me… I only found out when investigating why my revenues were down by $20 per day or so.

So off into the deep and dark world of choosing a new webhost I went, deciding this time that I would rent a server to myself! As usual, the forums provided a lot of conflicting opinion, and I found myself getting confused. Dedicated servers are expensive too!

Eventually I decided not to decide and signed up for (yet another) shared hosting package. Memset provide a twist on the shared server theme, calling it a miniserver, which shares resources in much the same way as a VPS. I am hoping that this package will host the site until I learn a bit more about server packages and working. So far so good anyway.

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