Hosting is an important part of your website setup, so when your hosting company has some downtime, it is very frustrating!
So what separates a good web host from a bad one?
Well, firstly I think it is important to understand that there is no such thing as 100% uptime for a web host. Every host will (or should) update software for security flaws and as such, I believe the server should be taken down during that time. Please correct me if I am wrong!
We all make mistakes in our respective lines of work, and as such, there are likely to be mistakes made in web hosting – those mistakes being power-outages, software or hardware failure for example.
When these things happen, it can be very frustrating for a website owner. It can mean loss of revenue for an online shop, or loss of visitors which could affect advertising revenue.
It is therefore important to choose a host who has a good uptime record.
But while it is frustrating to experience downtime, I believe it can be offset by a good host providing information and making sure their customers understand what is going on.
There is nothing worse than encountering a problem and not knowing if your hosts even know about the problem, let alone have an estimated time for fixing the problem.
A good host will keep you informed of what is happening – even if they still can’t find the root of the problem. A status update of “still looking into the cause” instils a confidence that the support team haven’t just nipped down the pub!
I have always worked to this philosophy myself. People like to know what’s going on, even if you have nothing new to tell them. A quick phone call or email to confirm nothing’s changed but you are still working on the problem goes a long way to keeping your customer happy.
So next time your web host goes down, check and see if their own website provides a status update or way to contact them to find out what’s going on. It’s should be a standard feature of website hosting for website owners who are serious about their business.
We’ve all encountered that page…the annoying standard “The page you are looking for cannot be found…”, but you don’t want your visitors to find those pages on your site do you?
As hard as you might try, if you have a big website or have changed the url structure, or even removed content, can you be sure your visitors are not seeing that annoying, and frankly useless, page?
Why not create a custom 404 page? Style it in the same manner as your website, and quite often having a funny tagline on the page amuses users, but most importantly, they have remained on your website despite not finding the content they wanted.
Now is your chance to re-engage those users by offering them the content you think they may have been looking for.
There is a second reason to customise your 404 pages – and that is for the friendly spiders that visit your website!
If a spider follow an internal link on your website and comes to a standard 404 page, it will end it’s crawl as there is nowhere for it to continue onto. Having a 404 page that has your site menu and/or links to different content will give the spider somewhere else to go!
Of course, you need to ensure that the page returns a 404 and not 200 status, and you should remember to noindex the page, or block it with your robots.txt file!
I read SEOmoz on a regular basis, and today read a post about getting links to your websites.
One resource they recommended really stood out as being useful for both the website looking for links, but also for writers looking to validate their content.
At Zemanta you can submit your RSS or Atom feed, then as bloggers write their own posts that have access to a list of media items and related articles they can reference in their own blog.
Obviously, there is a plugin for WordPress, but there are plugins and extensions for a variety of blogging platforms, included hosted wordpress blogs and blogger, as well as an API for blogs that don’t have their own plugin yet.
I can see it as a great resource for verifying your information and finding new resources for good information!
I really like the concept and am trying it out in this post. Let me know what you think!
- 4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic & Whitespark) (seomoz.org) – this was the blog post I originally saw and have been able to add this link at the click of a button!
This week, Google launched their instant search.
That is to say that Google starts showing results as soon as you start typing, and refines the results as you type more.
Organic Search
My fear for organic search is that if your site is not shown above the visible screen fold, people will continue to refine their search rather than scroll. In other words, people will prefer to click/type rather than scroll. It means that it’s going to get harder to get organic traffic.
This is going to take a little bit of research!
Paid Search
This is a clever ploy by Google as it will likely mean that there will be an increase in people using shorter tail phrases in their adwords accounts which will push the cost per click up. Hey presto, Google makes more money.
Google has also stated that an advert has to be shown for 3 seconds for that advert to be counted as an impression. At least Google has thought about that aspect.
At present, to my knowledge, instant search is only available on the actual Google search page. Typing your query directly into the url bar, or using a toolbar search box will act normally, until you get the results and refine the query on the results page.
