Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Google Analytics is a great program that can do a lot more than most people realize. Here are a few features that you may not know about:

* Capture internal search stats. This is a newer feature of Google Analytics and a very nice one. Not only can you see what a visitor put into your internal search box, but what page they were on when they made the search and what page they chose in the search results. Any internal search will work as long as it passes the search variable through the URL. Here’s a short video interview with Google’s Brett Crosby on some of those features.

* Filter out domains. Let’s say your Google Analytics code somehow got on another site and your stats were getting tainted with irrelevant data. No problem. You can create a filter to not count anyone from specific domains you add in. Oddly enough, you can also filter out your own domain so your stats flat line. Not a good idea to do that though.

* Track document downloads or specific links. Adding a small piece of JavaScript to any link will tell Google to track when someone clicks on that link. This works for PDFs, Word documents, email address’ and external links. It also works if you want to see which two links on the same page are generating more clicks. Even though they go to the same URL, you can tag one link as ‘link one’ and the other as ‘link two’ and Google will track the clicks separately for you. Bonus Tip: If you have a Wordpress blog, you can instantly tag all links across your blog with the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin.

* Export to Excel. For any newbies, this is a time saving feature. Just about any report can have the data exported to a CSV file which Excel can open. You can now stop copying and pasting most data out of Google Analytics and into Excel and save yourself some time.

* Filter yourself out. This feature is a must do for any company. Find your static IP address and then set up a filter so Google knows not to include traffic from your company network. This ensures that your stats are not inflated due to employee’s surfing habits. This also is something you should consider for any partner companies. If you have a web development, or SEO company who is constantly checking out the site, filter them out too.

You can create an HTML mouseover text description, similar to an image alt tag or pop up text description, that will be viewed when your mouse is placed over the text link. Place “title=”your text description”" within your HTML link code.

<A HREF=”http://www.blog.tryangled.com/” TITLE=”Web Designing Company”>Your Text</A>

Choosing the right hosting company is a must in achieving top search engine rankings for several reasons. First, you want to choose a reputable company that has 99.7% uptime or better so that when the search engine spiders and robots make it to your website, your website will be up and operating. If you hosting company tends to have a considerable amount of downtime, then these spiders and robots may just visit your website when it is down and not come back to it for weeks or months.

This is a huge price to pay for being cheap! In this case, being cheap will cost you more money. It is better to choose a hosting company will give you, say 100mb of disc space for your site (most websites come nowhere near to this size and if they do, they are either a major mega website or they have not been optimized for size or speed properly) and the most bandwidth you can get - 30 or 40 gigs, for instance.

If you go with a cheaper hosting site you may get only 10mb of disc space for your site and 1gig bandwidth. The problem with this scenario is that if you go over the disc space or bandwidth limitations, your hosting company will most likely charge you lots more dough. Sometimes a cheaper hosting company will shut your site down if immediate payment is not made. Once again the search engine spider or robot may just pass your by. So it is better to buy more than you need and not have to worry about limitations.

It is also generally a better idea to purchase your domain name at a different place than you have host your website. Some web hosts will do both, but the problem is if you wish to change hosts some website hosts will charge you a hefty transfer fee for you domain name and may take more time than desirable for the transfer. Having your domain name hosted separately gives you more flexibility.

Free hosts can cost you when it comes to search engine rankings. If you have a company like geocities host your website, most likely your website is called www.geocities.com/yoursite.html or some variation. This is not optimal for two reasons. First, if you exceed your bandwidth for the month, this host will shut down your website and put a fancy little splash screen in place of your website stating you have exceeded your bandwidth.

So, if you website is popular, which most likely is your goal, you will spend more time with your website down to customers and search engine spiders and robots. Second, search engine spiders and robots generally give more weight to your homepage than to your subordinate pages. In this case, your homepage is actually geocities.com and your main page is a subordinate page to this homepage. Most search engines will give your subordinate homepage less weight than someone else’s homepage at yoursite.com.

If you have gone through the trouble of building a web site and hosting it with a reliable company you obviously want your website to be available 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Downtime can result in lost sales and customer frustration.

Unfortunately, there are many technical problems beyond your control that can cause your web site to go down or become sluggish. Server hardware and software can fail and your host may schedule downtime for maintenance chores. Speedy recognition of failures is the best defence to getting things back on track, so many companies offer website monitoring services that automatically alert you if your site goes down.

There are hundreds of companies that provide monitoring services. Some are free while others charge anywhere from $5 to $60 per month. The paid services usually offer more features and allow you to use the same service with several different web sites. Web monitoring is not done continuously – time intervals range from every 3 minutes to every hour. The paid services usually offer the most comprehensive monitoring.

Monitoring works by sending an automatic request to your website and checking the response. These requests are the same as a web browser makes and the response to the request determines whether the site is up or down. Requests are usually sent from several different geographical locations to ensure that the site is available from various parts of the world.

If the response code is OK (200, 301, 302, 401, 403) nothing happens and the monitoring software waits for the next scheduled check. If the response code indicates that the web site is unreachable, there will be a second check a few seconds later from another location. There may be 3 or more of these checks before an alert is issued.

An alert can be sent to one or several email addresses or to a mobile device such as a pager or cell phone. This allows you to get in touch with your hosting company as soon as possible to ensure they are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it. As well as HTTP traffic, some website monitors can also check HTTPS, FTP, SMPT and POP3 so that all the functions of your website are covered.

Besides alerting you to downtime, these services can also provide useful statistics in the form of log files that indicate how often a site goes down. This third-party information can be used to demand better service from your web host or a refund in the case of severe amounts of downtime.

If you find that your site has an unacceptable amount of downtime, you should look for a more reliable hosting company.  The best way to find a good host is to ask for recommendations from other web site owners. If they are happy with their service they will usually be glad to direct more business to their host.

Rather than use the services of a web hosting company to host your web site you could start your own web hosting company. If your business is successful this could provide secondary income and lower the hosting costs for your own site(s).

Basically, there are two ways to start selling web hosting. The first way involves leasing business space, buying equipment, setting up servers, leasing T1 or T3 lines to connect to the Internet, finding clients, and hiring staff to provide 24 hour support. Quite complicated and not recommended for anyone without the technical know-how.

The second way is to become a re-seller for an established host. For a monthly fee you can have an allotment of disk space and bandwidth which can be used to sell to other people. Re-selling is usually anonymous – there is no visible connection to the parent host and you are free to set your own prices and develop your own ‘brand’.

All that is needed to become a re-seller is the ability to pay the monthly fee. All the technical details are handled by the parent company. The re-seller package usually includes everything – even name servers under your own name. All you have to do is to sign up customers and watch the money roll in. Easy – right?

Signing up customers, though, may not be as easy as you imagine. There are literally thousands of hosting companies competing for customers, and making your web hosting business stand out from the crowd is no mean feat. Just think about the process you went through in choosing your own web host. You probably visited several hosting web sites, maybe asked for personal references from your friends or business acquaintances, and then after narrowing down your choices, perhaps did more in-depth research on each of the companies. Or perhaps you just signed up with the first host you saw.

So, in order for your own hosting company to be successful it has to build up a good reputation or be easy to find.  Advertising can make your company more visible, but advertising is expensive – especially in a competitive market like web hosting.

A re-seller account, however, may be ideal for certain situations. If you already have several websites of your own, your monthly costs may be similar to a re-selling account.  For the same amount of money you could switch all your accounts to your own hosting company. Sign up a few friends or associates and you are ahead of the game.

If this sounds attractive, make sure you are going with a reputable hosting company. You will be entirely dependent on them for technical support. This relieves you of many of the headaches of running a hosting company but you are still responsible to your clients if their sites go down.

There are many types of re-seller packages. Some require you to operate under the name of the hosting company while others allow you to set up a shop under your own business name. Pay attention to the billing aspect of the package. Some re-seller accounts have everything you need to get started immediately, while others require you to set up your own billing gateway.

I have had the opportunity to use Cpanel 11 from September, and my ranking of the Linux/Apache hosting control panel is quite high. I had to wait this long on the advice of my server management company, to upgrade to the most stable version of Cpanel 11.

The first and most striking impression is the new looks. The entire user interface of Cpanel has been overhauled and its now much more visually-appealing. The icons that link to the main controls have also been re-arranged into more relevant groups and same goes with a new Notice panel that displays on the top left corner of the Cpanel first screen. The Notice panel displays vital warnings about the hosting account in red, and also carries News from the web host or server administrator.

Some controls hitherto placed a few clicks into the panel have been brought to the homepage making such controls more accessible. Even better, cPanel shortcuts have been introduced. These links can be added to your desktop or your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. They are an easy way to access your cPanel.

What makes the several panels better is that they can actually be moved to suit the preference of the user. All a user has to do is drag-and-drop. The overall theme of Cpanel can be changed as well. Thats not new, but whats new are the several other more visually-appealing themes that have been added.

For a new Cpanel user, there are free Video Tutorials that would guide them through all the basics of using Cpanel 11. Similar videos have been made available before now by other companies, for a fee. Not to forget the “Getting Started Wizard”, a 7-page basic guide that takes new Cpanel users through the rudiments of setting-up their new hosting account.

The Cpanel interface loads faster as well. In some cases, processes are carried-out using AJAX thus the entire page needs not be re-loaded, to complete a process. Some back-end processes now run faster as well. Example? SpamAssasin. It now requires less server resources.

These are a few amongst the several CPanel improvements that make an upgrade a must. What has been your experience with using Cpanel 11? Share your thoughts here and now.

In order for web site optimization to succeed and succeed well there needs to be extensive keyword research and analysis. Generally your not going to find too many, if any one word keywords to use on a new site that are highly competitive. So it’s instrumental that researching the competition and analyzing the industry for the best keywords and keyphrases be done. To be done correctly time must to spent on this analysis.

Not doing the proper keyword research is the biggest mistake that any SEO company can make. It is what will make the web site optimization a success or a failure. With all of the off-page and on-page work that needs to be done for good optimization to occur, not having the right keywords will make the whole process a waste of time and energy. So to have a successful SEO campaign insure that time is taken to find the right keywords and phrases for your web site.

Based on the latest patent filing from Google the answer to this question is yes. Google states that how a site is hosted and the length of time that a domain name has been paid for does help in how a web site ranks. Google considers a domain name that has been paid for, for more than one year a more credible domain since throwaway domains are rarely used for more than one year. Google looks at the following information:

* how long has the domain name been paid for in years
* how long has the hosting company been around
* how many web pages the web site has (one page is not good)
* who the owner, admin and contact names are in the registrars records

Google keeps track of bad name servers and can tell whether or not a spammer is running a domain.

Following the steps above could make your rankings improve!

A German Company Sistrix recently analyzed roughly 10,000 web sites to see if there were any common elements to reaching the top of the SERPS in Google. Here are some of the results that they found in their research:

They found keywords in bolded type, h2 to h6 tags (not so much in h1 tags), title tags along with these words in the body text were important. Image names and domain names with keywords helped also. Keywords in file paths or the parameters in a dynamic web site url didn’t seem to have a positive effect. Having inbound links seemed to have on of the biggest impacts in Google’s SERPS, for example a SERPS at number 11 in Google had about 4 times less the inbound links as did the number 1 spot.

Once again it seems sticking to the basic rules of SEO over time will garnish favorable rewards! Happy SEO-ing!

Up until about 2-3 months ago I was only aware of two real Google penalties. The outright ban, where a site will be completely removed from the Google index and the minus 40-60 penalty.

About 2-3 months ago I started talking to a local company about helping them with their SEO. It looked like they wanted to do something and they were just thinking things over. Next the guy called me up and said that all of his Google rankings had disappeared and that the only thing his site was coming up for was the name. The site came up no.1 for his two word company name and no.1 for the domain. However all of the other positions the site had with the homepage, albeit not good ones had disappeared. Even when I tried searching for some unique text off the homepage in quotes it did not come up. So I asked the guy a couple of questions, you know - have you made any changes recently that could have caused this to happen? etc. The guy said that the only thing he could think of was that he had placed a load of area names on the bottom of the homepage in tiny text so that no body could see. I said “bingo, that is why the site is penalised, you put hidden text on”.
This was totally my fault and looking back it was really bad and stupid.

This is the only time I have ever got a client penalised by any search engine. The site had about 130 categories and I placed an SEO friendly drop down menu on the homepage and the rest of the pages to the 130 categories. I saw some progress with the rankings initially, but around a week later the site got hit with the exact same penalty, this time it was not just the homepage that got hit, it was all of the pages where I had placed the drop down menu. It was ranking for the company name with and without Ltd, the domain and that was it. I was scared as hell, I had to tell this guy that I had got his site penalised. I spoke to the owner about it and he was so cool you have no idea, it is a good job I choose my clients carefully. Now technically I had done nothing wrong, but it looked seriously spammy - I showed it to a friend and he said “no wonder you got penalised, you’ve got hidden text, hidden links and keyword stuffing” (not technically right, but that is what it looked like). I am still waiting for the developers to finish the new site on this one.

Weather this is a new penalty or not I do not know. It is different to the minus penalty because when pages are hit they do not show up anywhere, no matter what. It is different to the outright ban because effected sites stay in the index and rank for their own names. Have any of you ever seen a penalty like this? It can definitely be applied for hidden text, it could possibly be applied for hidden links or keyword stuffing.