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How to Automate Your Hosting

Prashant — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:36:06 +0000

If you are planning to start a hosting service or you are already running an hosting company, you would agree with me when I say that accounting becomes very difficult when you cross a certain number of customers.

You have to constantly take calls, sign up customers manually using your web hosting management software and send out invoices and if this was not enough, you will have to keep a track of payments. Don’t forget marketing, if you don’t do that, there is no way you would be able to grow your hosting company.

If all this is scaring you away, don’t be afraid. There is a simple solution. You can install WHMCS (Web Hosting Management Complete Solution). This incredible software can be installed on your server and can be configured to be able to automatically set up account, create invoices and email them. Keep a track of your clients and many more features.

WHMCS can also be used if you are selling other services, it is very flexible solution. It really helps when you sell domain names along with hosting services.

You can test ride the hosting solution here. You can buy it on a monthly basis of $15.95 which is much cheaper than what it offers you.

Google Suspends Adwords Campaign With Trademarked Keywords

Prashant — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:06:04 +0000

If your have got the email from Google regarding your Adwords campaign, don’t think it is a spam.

Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. After reviewing your account, we’ve found that one or more of your ads or keywords does not meet our guidelines. You can see your disapproved ad(s), the reason for disapproval, and editorial suggestions, from the Disapproved Ads page within your account.

You might be using a trademarked keyword in your Adword copy and due to that your ad. might have been suspended.

Adwords editorial guidelines have changed and you can read them in detail here http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6118. Google takes trademark complaints very seriously so it is better if you don’t mess with them.

How to Check if your Site is Banned?

Prashant — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:20:45 +0000

There is a quick way to see if Google has stripped your site of the ability to give and receive PR, in other words… if your website is banned.

Go to Google webmaster tools and visit the “links” report. Check your internal links if they are set to zero which is the same as your external links despite of your website having both incoming and outgoing links. Then chances are that your website has been banned.

When is the Next PR Update?

Prashant — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:44:50 +0000

Usually PR update happened every couple months and since the last one happened in early January 2009, I predict that the next one should be coming by mid of March. The periodic updates are the major ones, however minor adjustments keep happening in between also. If you start a blog, most likely your page rank will change from NA to 0 in a matter of a week. This does not mean that there was a PR update, it merely shows that Google knows about your blog. I have also seen pagerank drop or go up when there are no signs of any PR updates.

How to Use Google Alert to your Advantage

Prashant — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:42:01 +0000

Ever wondered if people were talking about your website or not? And if they are, then wouldn’t you want to know who is talking about it and what are they talking about.

You can easily find this out by signing up for Alerts on Google Alerts. Just enter the keyword and your email address, choose the frequency of getting an email and the source… that’s it, your done!

Give it a try, the app is still in beta but it works great!

Using 301 Redirects for Better Page Ranking

Prashant — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:19:20 +0000

By default, websites / blogs can be accessed by with or without the www in the front of the domain name; however search engines see this as two different domains. One with the www and one without. To avoid content duplicity it is advisable to choose one and to stick with it, this way SE’s can consolidate all links to your domain whether they are with or without the www and give you the maximum link juice.

There are many ways to accomplish this, you can find in detail on this website. You can also use Google Webmaster tools to tell Google your preference so that you are nicely covered in the biggest search engine.

How to Check Your Competitors Traffic

Prashant — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:18:12 +0000

Alexa.com: Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

TrafficEstimate.com: Use the Traffic Estimate tool to find out approximately how much traffic a website gets by entering the URL of the web site.

CheckSiteTraffic.com: The tool uses various information about a website and calculate the traffic based on complex formula. This webmaster tool is extremely useful to use before buying a website. You can also calculate what profit you can generate from AdSense based on the traffic results.

Updating the Copyright Year in the Footer

Prashant — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:29:03 +0000

Most of us forget that we have to change certain things on our blog at the end of every year, certain things like the footer which contains the copyright year of the blog. Now most theme on WordPress have the year hardcoded, meaning instead of a php code which would display the year it is simply coded 2008 or 2009. This means that at the beginning of every year that information has to be changed.

You can do this by logging on to your WP admin and then selecting the editor of the theme. Click footer and the find the place where the copyright notice has been placed. Either you can change the year to 2009 or let this be taken care of automatically by using this php code.

If you are using the php code then this is would be a one time change as the year will be automatically updated from now on. However you would need to do this again incase you change the theme. Also note that your date settings should be correct in the settings tab otherwise the year could be displayed wrongly.

And You Thought Meta Description Tag Was Dead

Prashant — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:57:52 +0000

If you are managing a blog, Meta description is probably as important as the title itself. In WordPress by default only the Title tag is used, which is copied from the title of the post / page itself. This is ok for most users but the problem comes when you want unique description Meta tag on each post. Now most would argue that the description tag is dead and search engines don’t take that into account, you could not be further away from the truth… If you login to Google Webmaster Tools, you will see that Google runs a diagnostic on content analysis and determines if your meta tags are ok or not.

Look at the image below, this is from one of my WordPress blogs and it shows that there is duplicate Meta description on 378 blog pages.

Why is the description same on all pages when WordPress does not include a Meta description tag? The reason is that I had hard coded the header.php of my theme with the description Meta tag.

How can this problem we solved?
Do not hard code any Meta tags and if you have then remove them from the header.php. Then go ahead an install All in One SEO Plugin for WordPress. You will find all the info you need on their website.

Note: I know it is a tedious process to enter title and description every time you write a post but this is very important for ranking on searches so why not spend an extra minute and do it properly. If at all you leave the title, description and keywords blank in then they will be automatically taken from your post. This will ensure that you still have unique descriptions for every post.

Rel NoFollow Tag

Prashant — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 03:38:20 +0000

I am sure you must have heard about this a lot. Apparently Google advices you to use this tag whenever linking out to a websites so as to save you from your page rank being drained as well as keeping the link juice from being passed on.

Why was this initiated by Google? A lot of bad websites were getting top ranking in Google searches simply by having a ton of links from every possible source and to keep their search listing credible they came out with the rel=”nofollow” tag.

When should you use it? Whenever linking out from your blog make sure you use the nofollow tag, unless you are sure the website you are linking to does not fall under bad neighborhood.

Personally I would not mind passing on the link juice to websites who have PR 6 and more and therefore not use the nofollow tag for such websites.

How to use?
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