web hostingMarch 26, 2007 1:20 am

Contributor: ebonk

Sudah setahun terakhir ini saya mendapatkan bahwa kualitas layanan hosting di Singcat makin memburuk. Tidak ada peningkatan yang berarti. Berikut beberapa yang saya alami sendiri.

1. Server Singcat Sering Down

Saya tidak tahu apakah Singcat Premium mengalami hal yang sama. Setahu saya semua account saya di Singcat Standar USA sering down. Dampak down server Singcat membuat situs tidak dapat diakses. Akhirnya banyak pekerjaan terganggu. Klien komplain, tapi kita tidak bisa melakukan apa-apa.

2. Support Singcat Lambat

Lewat email, submit ticket, kirim ke mailing list Singcat, sama saja. Bisa butuh berhari-hari situs kita bisa muncul lagi.

3. Staff Singcat Tuli dan Arogan

Kalau ada masalah, tidak merespon. Jika dikomplain malah arogan, seolah-olah customer Singcat itu orang bodoh yang tidak mengerti setting DNS, traceroute dan ilmu TCP/IP lainnya. Seolah-olah customer Singcat itu anak kemarin sore yang baru belajar PHP/MySQL dan tidak tahu cara upload pakai FTP.

4. Update software Cpanel Singcat terlambat

Sudah sering ditemukan bahwa software Cpanel, terutama Fantastico, sudah ketinggalan jaman. Rilis lama yang vulnerable masih digunakan dan updatenya belum dipasang.

5. Konfirmasi pembayaran ke Singcat lambat.

Jika domain maupun hosting jatuh tempo, dan transfer sudah dikirim, konfirmasi sudah dikirim lewat form di web Singcat, bisa butuh lebih dari 1 hari untuk memprosesnya. Pada masa tersebut, account di Singcat masih disuspended.

Saking frustasinya, satu account klien di Singcat telah berpindah ke server hosting lain yang walaupun mahal tapi supportnya tokcer dan servernya oke.

Catatan: mungkin ini hanya berlaku di server standard USA.

web master, search engine optimizationAugust 21, 2006 8:07 pm

The Importance Of Sound Website Design & Search Spiders to Internet Marketers

Contributor: ebonk

The Importance Of Sound Website Design & Search Spiders to Internet Marketers
By James Opiko (c) 2006

Google currently is reported to have indexed 8 billion pages and counting. Google utilizes an array of bots A.K.A. spiders or crawlers.

Among the specialized bots Google uses include: The web spider Googlebot, the Adsense spider MediaBot, the image spider ImageBot, the AdWords spider AdsBot, the RSS feed spider FeedFetcher-Google, and Googlebot-Mobile spider for mobile devices. MSN & Yahoo, the other two of the ‘big three’ have their own proprietary versions of spiders.

Why is it important for an Internet Marketer to know how spiders crawl your website?

A search engine crawler is your best visitor. Giving a crawler easy and uninhibited movement in your website is necessary for good search engine rankings.

Your website must be spider (search engine) friendly if you want any traffíc from the search engines. A search engine spider does not read your website the way we humans do. The spider reads web-page source code (HTML) that renders your page, therefore ‘bad code’ can be an impediment to the spider, sometimes causing it to give up crawling your website.

Spiders love content (text) and do not read JavaScrípt at all, therefore a website that is packed with images with no ALT tags to assist the spiders, and heaps of JavaScrípt may not be indexed successfully. So, when designing your website you must incorporate structural website design principals that elicit search engine friendliness.

An astute marketer should also desire to see how search engines see his or her site. This may be accomplished by a Lynx Viewer which is a text-mode web browser. Additionally, a Lynx Viewer can help you determine if your web pages are accessible to the vision impaired, an assemblage of visitors that should not be ignored —yes, there are millíons of visually impaired people surfing the Internet regularly.

A quick search in Google for “Lynx Viewer” will yield numerous sources from which you can download this important tool for your use.

Even though you must design your website with your visitors in mind first, it is crucial that you accord the search engines top level priority too, since the vast majority of these visitors will arrive via search engines. Practice good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but not at the expense of your visitors’ experience — it is a balancing act that must be accomplished with prudence.

Also of significant importance is the fact that web browser standards are not yet fully harmonized. A web page that looks great in Internet Explorer might look atrocious in a Mozilla based browser like Firefox or Netscape. Additionally, with the proliferation of hand held devices for browsing the Internet, compliance with W3C standards is becoming more and more critical. A marketer must therefore be conversant with the intricacies of cross-browser design — designing for one browser (IE) is no longer ideal, as the Google backed FireFox is eating up Microsoft�s browser turf at an alarming rate.

Anybody can “whip up” a web page in FrontPage without sufficient knowledge of HTML, but may not be able detect and correct the messy code that FrontPage generates underneath the page, some of which is proprietary to Microsoft. Consequently a website that looks superb in Microsoft Internet Explorer may look and load dreadfully in Opera and/or some other browser, denying you visitor traffíc.

Nevër use a Word Processor to design your website. Word Processing software generates tremendous amounts of code that is not search engine friendly. If you cannot hand-code using a text editor then it is necessary that you use authentic and industry standard web design software that incorporate the most up to date design principles. Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and the latest version of Microsoft FrontPage are good candidates with Dreamweaver getting my partisan nod.

A first-rate design strategy should include the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and valid XHTML, the most current in the HTML generation of standards. Websites designed in strict W3C standards tend to be lighter, faster and cross-browser compatible. This is not to insinuate that table based design is going anywhere anytime soon, for it is my humble disputation that if strict W3C standards were to be enforced in browsers, 95% percent of websites would go out of business, furthermore the lack of inter-browser synchronization just worsens things.

According to some surveys, more than 86% of all people arrive at websites through search engines. In 2006, PC World, arguably the most authoritative and widely-read computer and business magazine, reports that Google remains the site of choice for most surfers.

“The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior,” says Ken Cassar, senior director of analytics at Nielsen/NetRatings. “Online search is the primary tool most people rely on to do everyday research,” he says.

So, from a marketing perspective unless your site appears in the top 30 listings of the major search engines & directories, you will hardly get any worthwhile traffíc. Therefore, Search Engine Positioning is vital to your marketing success on the web!

A top ranking in the search engines can bring you highly targeted traffíc. If someone visits your site after searching for a product or service that you are selling, it means that he/she is interested in what you are selling and hence is a potential customer for you. Thus, search engines send pre-qualified customers to you.

You can sell virtually anything on the Internet, but in order to succeed you must bring “targeted traffíc” to your website…. people who are ready to buy your products and services, the vast majority of who will arrive at your website through search engines. If your website is not designed suitably, Google and other search engines will disrespect your website. Respect brings in traffíc which translates into the all important Dollars, “Kwacha,” Euro or whatever you wish to call monëy.

Remember, search engine bots are your most important visitors, you must seduce, “open your doors” and accommodate them in order to gain any measurable success in your Internet Marketing endeavor.

Did You Find This Article Useful? Then Digg It.

About The Author
James Opiko owns AfroArticles.com, an article marketing directory. Dig here - SEO AND here: Search Engine Positioning for more articles on SEO and Search Engine Positioning.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimisation, SEO

web master, search engine optimizationAugust 20, 2006 10:28 pm

Outsource SEO vs In-house SEO

Contributor: ebonk

SEO is becoming increasingly important to all who look to do business and use the Internet as a marketing tool. It is the path in which your market finds your offering. It has become almost a necessity for businesses to incorporate SEO in to their marketing plan. Many companies struggle with the decision on whether to hire a firm or conduct their SEO in-house. Unfortunately many companies lack the knowledge about SEO and assume it will be cheaper for them in the long run to hire someone "in-house".

For some companies this may be efficient while others the overlooking the hiring of a professional firm to SEO can be costly. It is as critical to your business’ health as if you were to feel that you could heal a fatal disease yourself because you have access to the Internet and books instead of going to a highly trained physician. Now you laugh and say that would be absurd, but is the growth of your company worth the risk.

Knowledge Versus Cost Versus Time = Your Success

SEO is an ever changing business. Search engines change their algorithm frequently and new rules are put into place. One has to have the resources to find this information and understand how to implement the changes. An SEO firm is more likely to be aware of changes to search engine optimization protocols than an in-house individual. Many in-house individuals will focus on developing and implementing your SEO strategies but typically remain in the dark about what goes on outside your organization.

Outsourced SEO professionals must perform these same functions while constantly studying the industry, staying current with changing trends and familiarizing themselves with the latest SEO techniques. It is a part of their day to day business and necessary if they intend to compete in the marketplace and wish to survive.

What about cost? Surely the cost of hiring an individual is substantially less than the cost of hiring a company, right? This is a common misconception. Let’s look at it this way. You hire an E-Commerce Marketing Manager whose job is to develop and implements the strategic online marketing plan for an organization. Staying abreast of changes in the online marketing environment to best serve the objectives of the organization and adjusts plans accordingly. They may even be responsible for overseeing other aspects of the website such as the advertising and content components.

In most cases the individual will be wearing many hats spreading them thin. His or her base salary according to Salary.com on average would be $85,703. That is $7141.92 a month and roughly $42 an hour. This is for one individual with hopes that they bear positive results. Let’s say they do not. It will take 3 to 6 months to start to truly see if the individual is an asset or not. That is $21,425.76 if you decide to let the individual go in just the third month. Not to include cost of taxes and benefits. And if successful, your company just paid $85,703 per year for SEO.

The average SEO firm charges anywhere from $5500 to $35000 to perform the same task with a staff of highly trained professionals in the area of link building, writing, optimizing, web development etc. Even on the high end you are getting a staff for the entire year for around what it cost you to hire an individual in-house for a quarter. And if it does not bear positive results and you decide to terminate the relationship you will only have lost less than $10,000 if prorated based on the $35000. in most cases you can even get some of that back. This logistically saves you time and money.

Would you agree that having one individual do the job of five is rarely a good idea? Would you feel it cost effective?

Time is another concern with in-house SEO. Will one individual be able to optimize multiple pages, write content, tags, build links, run reports and perform other SEO tasks in a timely fashion? One person can only do so much. Would you agree that time is money? Most SEO firms can do in a matter of days what might take an individual weeks to do. Many companies who use in-house SEO personnel spend more than necessary to get the same amount of work done in a longer amount of time. Once again you have one individual doing many task versus many individuals doing one task effectively.

In any case, is outsourcing the right move for you or your company? Whether you choose to outsource or not, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Do your research by performing a simple cost/benefit analysis on what outsourcing versus in-house SEO will cost. It cost twice as much when you do it wrong the first time.

Results are all that matters. Top rankings for phrases no one is searching for means little, and shouldn’t be used as a guage of someone’s abilities. Ensure they can provide you with keywords that work for your business as well as a diverse plan of action. What do others say about the company or individual? Ask for references and check them. But even if they have limited or no reference don’t panic. They still may know what they are doing. Just test them on a small project and see if they bear results for you. This is a true way to measure if they work for you. There are many variables you may not have privilege to in a reference such as their personal relationship or if they were a part of a team that was successful but they contributed little.

Remember, SEO is important to your business growth and time is money one way or another. Do the math and ask yourself what makes sense for you.

Jeff Beale is a marketing specialist that has worked with planning and implementing marketing strategies for several businesses ranging from independently owner organizations to government and corporate entities. He is known for saving thousands in marketing budgets and increasing growth with the utilization of a diverse online marketing strategy. Jazar Dezign jefferybeale@jazardezign.com http://www.jazardezign.com

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