Does Google actually care where your web site is hosted? Do they care which domain extension your using? People often ask these questions and I think it’s time for some answers. You can also find further SEO tips and information within our forums where I will be working as hard as I can to keep you updated with the latest tricks of the trade.

Google and your hosting provider

Today Google is using geo-targetting more and more within its index, meaning your search engine position will be effected by the location of your web sites IP address. Some argue that this has a marginal effect, personally I think it can have a broader effect. Either way it should be taken into consideration, especially when there is a competitive market for your chosen search terms. Being a UK hosting provider we would actually recommend that all non UK websites go with hosting company’s that are local to them as this will give them a local IP to aid there SEO efforts.. Of course we would also recommend that any UK based sites host with us which will give them a Nottingham based IP.

Domain extentions and Google

I would always recommend to our customers that you purchase a geographic domain name. For example, if you are setting up a UK based web site you should purchase  UK domain such as .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk etc.

We want you to be able to share your knowledge and experience with other members, so the blog is now open for user contributions! If you would like to submit content for any of our blog categories please send your article to us using our contact form. We are looking for well written, informative articles so we may ask you to make changes to your submission before publishing it. If your article is published you will receive a credit for one month of free hosting just to say thankyou. There is no limit to the amount of articles you can publish so if you publish one a month you’ll never pay for hosting again!

What can i write about?

Anything internet related! We’re looking for;

• Web Design Tutorials
• Programming Tutorials
• Photoshop Tutorials
• IPhone App Reviews
• Webmaster Resources (Review your favorite sources of info)
• SEO Tutorials
• Your Own Web Site (Send us a full write up explaining why people should use your site!)

If there’s anything else you feel is worth knowing about feel free to send us your suggestions, if its useful we’ll blog it.

Keyword research can be a very boring task, but using the correct tools can produce some great results as part of your SEO program. Using the wrong tools can produce some highly unrewarding results. I find that Google are becoming more and more helpful towards webmasters and searching the webmaster tools sections can reveal some very handy information regarding most SEO subjects, including keyword research!

Google Search-Based Keyword Tool

Google has its own keyword research tool which you can narrow down to UK or US searches as well as various other metrics, making it a much more accurate research tool. You can also export reports, view keyword competition and lots more. Although this tool is developed mainly for PPC, it still shows the searches made.

http://www.google.com/sktool/

Other useful links/info

• Wordtracker Keyword Expert Newsletter which publishes like clockwork and offers a wealth of knowledge with every publication. Its a free resource so you might as well use it.

• SEOMoz provide lots of SEO advice and tools, you can get some extra info on your keyword research in the blog.

• SEOBook offer a keyword research tool which provides some in depth information for US based searches.

Everyone wants there web site to be popular, and your sites popularity heavily depends on inbound links coming from popular web sites. If your currently working hard to increase your websites inbound links you’ll need a tool to keep track of your progress. I would recommend something like Link Popularity Checker which you can download here. This tool scours the major search engines for your site and any competitors sites to provide you with an overall comparison.

Increasing Link Popularity

Increasing link popularity is no simple task, well its not rocket science but it takes time and effort. You need to find web sites with a Google page rank of 3 plus that are within your niche. For example, if you sell DVD’s you would link with movie review sites. A great way to check a web sites page rank in seconds is to use the Firefox Swoosty SEO Tools plug-in which displays the Google page rank and Alexa rank of every site you visit in the bottom right corner of your screen.. I’m all for these plug-ins as they save a lot of time.

Increasing Link Popularity through blogs

Yes, commenting on other peoples blogs will contribute to your linking strategy. Bookmark a load of blogs that have high Google page rank and take a few minutes each day to see whats being posted and leave a useful comment. To help you get started, take a look at this list of high page rank blogs that DOFOLLOW below..

1. http://dag.wieers.com PR6
2. http://www.bumpzee.com PR6
3. http://www.figby.com/archives/2004/11/29/more-skepticism-
4. on-blogging-for-dollars/ PR 6
5. http://www.universalhub.com/node/12757 Domain PR 6
6. http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/good-news-and-bad-news PR 6
7. http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/off-on-holiday PR 6
8. http://heiseidemocracy.com PR 5
9. http://www.expertcruiser.com PR 5
10. http://www.shandyking.com PR 5
11. http://www.dotsauce.com PR 5
12. http://sphinn.com PR 5
13. http://randaclay.com/blog/i-follow/ PR 5
14. http://www.thedigeratilife.com/blog/index.php/2008/01/
15. 21/are-you-depressed-today-youre-not-alone/ PR 4
16. http://blogs.speech-writers.com PR4
17. //www.searchenginepeople.com/blog PR4
18. http://freeadblogger.blogspot.com PR4
19. http://allrealestateproperty.blogspot.com PR4
20. http://www.ptank.com/catsynth PR4
21. http://endangeredspaces.blogspot.com PR4
22. http://www.planetsaedel.com/2007/11/02/why-you-
23. should-not-avoid-negative-people.php PR3
24. http://www.wordpressmax.com PR3
25. http://www.rosshetherington.com PR3
26. http://www.howtospoter.com P3
27. http://blogs.speech-writers.com PR3
28. http://www.dollarsblog.com PR3
29. http://www.fabiozanet.com PR3
30. http://www.blogsthatfollow.com PR3
31. http://shannonxj.blogspot.com PR3
32. http://advertising-for-success.blogspot.com PR3
33. http://cooladzine.blogspot.com PR3
34. http://pixietail.com PR2
35. ttp://tiptail.com PR2
36. http://mythoughtsideasandramblings.com PR2
37. http://davedragon.rilysi.com PR2
38. http://www.fatmanunleashed.com PR2

Increasing Link Popularity through forums

Another great way to increase link popularity is through forum contributions. Why not sign up with a few forums and get some free advice at the same time as you build your links? I have listed a few DOFOLLOW forums below for you to get started with..

1. Warrior Forum – A Very useful internet marketing forum with a great community.
2. 5Star Affiliate Forum – There Administrator’s are especially helpful. You can learn a lot from them.
3. Ableton – Music an Audio Forum
4. Abestweb – Affiliate Marketing forum, which is actually good for both begineer and pro internet marketers
5. Abundance – Free advertising forum – An easy way to plug your site.
6. Addicsports - A big sports forum.
7. Affiliateseeking.com – A really good affiliate and webmaster forum.
8. Acorn Domains – A Domain Name Trading Forum, this one is fairly new but growing well.
9. Admin Zone Forums – Info for webmaster Administrator’s.
10. Affiliates4U – The UK’s biggest Affiliate and Marketing Fourm available.
11. Allcoolforums - Online discussion forum, lot’s of variation going on here.
12. AMD Forums – The Official Athlon Processor Support.
13. Baseballtalkpro – Sports Forum – Mainly Baseball.
14. Blogger Forum – Mainly on Blogging, you can learn a lot here worthwhile to any blogger.
15. Business Forum – business forums
16. BZ Image – Web Design Forum, also dabbles into SEO and Webmaster.
17. Clickbank Success – A forum specific to clickbank users
18. Clicks Forum – Business Forum For Internet Marketing
19. Cnet Forums – Tech Forum
20. Code4gold – Webmaster Resources, most of which are free.
21. Comic Book Resources – As the name suggest, this is all comic book talk.
22. Deviantart – Biggest Art Forum in the world.
23. Digitalppoint – One of my personal favorites – SEO, SEM and anything else Internet Marketing related.
24. DirectoryJunction – A recently started but great webmaster forum
25. Discuss Names – Domain Sales and Discussion
26. DN Forum – Domain Sales and Discussion
27. DN Lodge – Domain Sales and Discussion
28. DN Scoop – Domain Sales and Discussion
29. Dreamteam Money Forum – Moneymaking forums. One of the vest money making boards offering dofollow forum signature.
30. Ecauldron – Religon Forum
31. Ewealth.com – Internet Marketing and webmaster forum.
32. Filesharingtalk – All about sharing files.
33. Free Ad Forum – Dofollow free advertising forum
34. Geek Village – Large make money online board
35. Gento Forum – programming board.
36. Golden Talk – High ROC forums
37. Googlecommunity – About the mothership “google”.
38. GPT Boycott Forums – Get-paid-to forums and ratings.
39. Harmony Central – Musicians Community Forums
40. Hotsurfs – Autosurfing and how you can make money with it.
41. HTML Forums Webmaster advice. Very useful.
42. HYIPs Talk – High ROC Programs forums.
43. IDN Forums – International domain names forums, sales, appraisals, and general discussion.
44. Intel Forums – Intel Board
45. Internet Marketing for Business – Internet Marketing and SEO Webmaster Forums
46. IQ 69 – Webmaster
47. Iwebtool – Offers preview of site in signatures.
48. Live Journal – Community forum.
49. Microsoft Forum – The Microsoft support forum.
50. Money Maker Group – A board regarding HYIPs.
51. Movie Lists - Movies
52. Moneyfanclub – focusing on HYIPs and autosurfs.
53. Mygamebuilder – Games Board
54. MySQL Forum – programming and database forums
55. Namepros.com – Domain Name Trades
56. Online Books Club As the name suggests, Books and Reading (Boooring…hehe just kidding)
57. Oracle Forums – Oracle Support
58. Payment Processing – Ecommerce forum.
59. PhpBB Forum – Support forum for PhpBB users.
60. PokerBRB Forum – Poker and other gambling board
61. Search Engine Roundtabe – SE Board
62. SEO Chat – Programming and development forum online.
63. SEOForum – Australian SEO Forum (they seem to talk about Fosters quite a bit…)
64. SEO.com Forum – SEO
65. Sidetalks – Anything and everything.
66. Simplemachines – SMF support forum.
67. Siteowners – Webmasters forums
68. Sitepoint – Webmaster and programming forums.
69. Small Business Forum – A “dofollow” business forum for small entrepreneurs and startup.
70. Startups – Business start-up
71. Static-Subs – anime forums
72. Submitexpress – SE forum
73. Talkfreelance.com – Freelance webmasters, webdesign, and seo community.
74. Textpattern – Textpattern Help Board
75. The Free Ad Forum – Largest free advertising board and it also has a “dofollow” signature.
76. The V7 – Webmaster Board
77. TheHYIPforum – Another “dofollow” forum. Best if you are promoting a HYIP site.
78. TriPHP Webmaster Forums – TriPHP Webmaster Board
79. Ubuntu Technical Forum – PC and tech related Forum
80. Webdegity - Webmaster Forum, I have used this one quite a bit, has a great community
81. Web Design Forums – Web design
82. Web Developer – programming and scripting websites and other money related topics.
83. Webicy – Webmaster
84. Web Life – A HYIP forum.
85. Webhosting Canada – Industry Discussion, Webmaster Forum.
86. Webhosting Talk – Geared towards hosting resellers
87. Webmaster Forums Online – News and Discussion Forums for Webmasters about SEO, Internet Marketing and Advertising.
88. Webmaster-talk – Programming and webmaster forums. Big Forum
89. Webproworld – Ebusiness professionals board.
90. Webtalkforums – Webmaster Forum is a revenue sharing
91. Windows Forum – Microsoft Windows Forum
92. Winamp – Official winamp forum.
93. Work at Home Moms – Moneymaking forum for Mums.
94. Work-at-Home Moms – Internet marketing message boards for mums.
95. World of Warcraft – MMORPG Forum
96. Xandros – Web Design.
97. Vuju – Classifieds
98. AllcoolForum – Anything and everything

If your looking around for web hosting the chances are you already have a web site or domain name with another hosting provider that you need to move. We often receive emails from potential customers who are don’t know how to move websites or domains. As a direct response to this we now offer a completely free domain and hosting transfer service.

Also, where possible we will also re-install your web sites software applications e.g blogs, forums etc and re-create MYSQL databases using data from your previous provider.

To take advantage of this service just sign up and then raise a support request telling us what you need us to do, we will then advise on the best possible transfer options with minimum downtime.

Free webmaster tools are available all over the web but do you really have the time to trawl through hundreds of sites looking for the ‘cream of the crop’ ? As a webmaster myself I certainly don’t so I’ve collected a few sites and tools together for your convenience. I’m starting with one of the most important tasks any webmaster needs to do which is validation.

Validation

W3C is kind of the ‘governing body’ of validation, setting the standards that today’s browsers adhere to (excluding internet explorer of course, which tends to do its own thing!). Get yourself to W3C and have your pages validated during the design process to pick up errors early. If you have an existing web site and find that you have lots of errors don’t panic, often fixing one error will have a nock on effect and fix dozens of others.

1. Firebug is a free extension for the popular web browser, Firefox. If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, it’s a must have tool and a VERY secure browser. To get Firebug go to the Mozilla Firefox website and search the add-ons section, or open Firefox and go to tools > add-ons > get add-ons.

Free Local testing servers

My next subject is setting up a local testing server so that you can develop your pages, applications and mysql databases and locally test them. Why do this? It’s a lot quicker than using a web server and uploading your work all the time.  You can have a folder directly linked into Dreamweaver and simply save and test.

1. WAMP Server is a fantastically simple, easy to use web server platform for local testing. It runs pretty much anything an Apache server will, has a built in mysql server and loads more. I’m not ‘clued up’ on installing servers by any means but this really was a breeze to get started with.

SEO

Not really an area for webmasters working as part of a team, but for us ‘one man bands’ we need to do everything from design to SEO so its always good to have a few SEO related tools under your belt.

1. PosiTracker.com tracks all of your positions at a very cost effective price. It goes 1,000 positions deep and provides a daily update with graphs.
2. GoogleMon is a 100% free SERP monitoring tool exclusively for Google. We all know that Google is the main search engine to optimize for.

PHP variables can be used for a number of different tasks, one of them being to add dynamic meta information to template web sites. For example, if you have a website that consists of a header, a main page and a footer (using includes) there is no way for the title to rotate between the pages of your website unless you use variables.

So, for this example i have the following structure:

header.php
content.php <- This is the element of the template that changes, the header and footer stay as they are.
footer.php

In the content.php we need to create the variables that we need, in this case im just going to create a title. This is what my title variable will look like..

<?php
$title = “Homepage”;
?>

Once we have created our title variable, we need our header.php to ‘call’ it and put it where we need it. To do this you need to add the following code to your header.php..

<title><?php echo “$title” ?></title>

The php code in bold will call the variable $title and the echo command will print it in between the title tags. Once you have done this, refresh your page and you’ll find that whatever you put as the value of your php $title variable will be printed into your title!

Since Hosted Web first began trading, i have always been looking for ways to make innovative products that can help people with low budgets. Today i would like to introduce my 100% free web domain hosting service to both new and existing customers. Being honest, this is a no frills hosting account that provides ‘exactly what it says on the tin’ but either way, its free and its a place to put your web site!

If interested please visit http://www.hostedweb.co.uk/free_domain_hosting/ and get yourself signed up today. If you find the service useful maybe you can consider upgrading to one of our paid plans and take your web site to another level.

We have just  implemented changes on our blog to allow you to read it easily from any mobile device. Simply browse to http://blog.hostedweb.co.uk from any mobile device and our blog will automatically apply the new theme so that you can enjoy all of our content!

These days its never been more improtant to keep your web site secure from hackers, spammers and other tricksters. Im writing this article to offer some basic advice on best practice.

Always keep your software (PHP scripts etc) up to date
This is one of the most important pactices, most good scripts are updated very often (every week or so) and these updates are often security fixes & bug fixes. Often people think that scripts are updated to cater for new features, athough this is the case please dont forget that security fixes are more important to think about. If your website gets hacked you wont have any features at all to play with!

Keep your sites folders secure
Sometimes we see websites that have set the permissions on there folders to 777, this is a definate no no! Having your folders set to 777 means everyone has open access to it.  You should never use 777, even if a script installation document tells you to. Instead use 755, if this does not work, i would reccomend finding an alternative script.

Rotate your passwords
Keep your passwords safe, never write them down and change them

As a web host we always ensure that our systems are up to date,  security patches are applied and firewalls are working as effectivly as possible, so as long as you follow the above basics your site should be secure from hackers.