Vidahost

Ok i don’t usually complain publicly about bad experiences with companies but for Just Host this will be a massive exception!

Roll back 12 months, created an account with Just Host to host a number of sites for both myself and clients of my web design business and as of the 9th December 2011 no issues at all.

My domain was up for renewal on the 8th and the auto PayPal subscription didn’t work so i logged into my Just Host account and paid the subscription, site still working fine.

9th December my site goes down, now no problem at first as i understand the domain may have slipped through the renewal net but having received a payment notification email through all good.

NO!

Just Host’s “automatic domain holding page” gets switched on leaving my site down. So i see that they have 24/7 technical support which i raise a ticket to and subsequently call Just Host to raise the problem.

Just Host apparant 24/7 tech support

Now i’m speaking to Just Host on the phone and whilst the technician was polite he then advised i call billing as they will be able to switch off the Just Host holding page affiliate cash generating page at my expense.

I re-dial and Just Host billing is closed, ok support are in the USA so time difference a factor here, i then call back 3 hours later and to my shock and horror, billing are closed on a weekend!

I then speak to support at Just Host and ask what they will do about it and the technical support say they can’t do anything about it until billing open up on Monday!

I then re-raise my Just Host support ticket to make sure they have it in their inbox to action

Now Monday comes, site down for over 72 hours, Google have now removed me from the SERP’s for my brand terms for my site and i receive an email:

Just Host Support email

Just Host apologise and basically they will refund me my hosting costs. Fine, but i now have to backup all the sites on my account and move them to my new preferred host – Vidahost.

I am now going to formally complain at the poor experience with Just Host and the time it has taken for my site to be re-instated and loss of potential bsuiness.

Updates to follow.

Just Host? Just Don’t!

I will provide a quick summary though, the data is still there but Google only offering aggregated data through Webmaster Tools but as mentioned by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, it’s not that accurate. So begs the question is the data now being sent to webmasters useful?

So for more information on this topic here are a few useful posts:

• Google Whores Out Users With False Privacy Claims – Joost de Valk on SEO Book
• SEO Under Attack – The Google Analytics Keyword Data Apocalypse – Alan Bleiweiss on Search Engine Journal
• Google To Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default With SSL Search – Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land

Related articles

• Google Rolls Out Https Search For Logged In Users (ghacks.net)
• Google to Limit Keyword Search Referral Data to Marketers (hubspot.com)

After conducting some research for SEO companies as a project, it seems like there are some dodgy SEO’s out there that claim to be able to “guaranteed page one results in Google”

Absolute bull! If you are approached by such a company/individual then as the title says, run a mile! You may hear things like:

We have a relationship with Google

We can prioritise submission to Google

We can guarantee ANY search term will reach Page 1 of Google

It really boils my blood to hear and even see these statements, i have had the joy of rescuing an SEO campaign from one of the “guaranteed page one” companies.

SEO as a practice is not a set your campaign up and leave it, SEO requires constant work to maintain and grow rankings and for a quality service the likes of the £50 per month scam artists needs to be looked at in great deal before deciding this is right for your business.

Google themselves have their own SEO guidelines that states “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”

I have been working on SEO campaigns for 3 plus years and still gets under my skin seeing these modern day Dick Turpin’s operating.

So in short, don’t trust ANY company or person that offers “guaranteed page one results“!

There are many ways to tackle SEO such as content creation, link building, keyword research and many more.

The danger of doing SEO without any prior knowledge can be detrimental to your website as many tactics that can be used may end up getting your site penalised.

Building Blocks

When beginning any search marketing campaign there are processes to address, firstly keyword research.

Without in depth keyword research a campaign can fall at the first step as identifying the correct keywords/phrases is vital to any success.

Once a defined list has been agreed the next phase is to then look at the website from an on-page and technical perspective.

This can identify any structural issues with the website as well identifying areas to improve.

Content is also a vital part of on page work to undertake, make sure your content is unique, not to keyword heavy, a reasonable amount of keywords to mention is perhaps 1-2 per 200 words, make the content useful for the user as conversion is the main goal for any website.

Patience

Once the website has then been ‘optimised’ for the SERPs (search engine results pages), patience is the next important part of SEO as it’s not a quick fix.

It can take the search engine’s time to re-crawl your updated site so a handy tip is submitting an updated sitemap.xml file to the Google Webmaster Tools console (account setup and verification needed). This can help inform Google of changes and new pages to crawl.

Now a little bit of time has passed and your newly optimise site is appearing for your researched terms in the SERP’s what next?

Links

Link building is an important part of SEO as links to your site count as a ‘vote’ but be careful when trying to attract links to your site as there are key factors involved to ensure a link to your site will be beneficial.

Relevancy is key, if your site is about and a site about laptops links to yours there is no relevancy between the 2 and therefore could be viewed as spamming which if this technique is adopted can lead to poor results.

Quality Over Quantity

Ensuring that the quality of a link is relevant to your site topic can lead to greater results 1 link from a highly related website will have more benefits than having 10′s to hundreds of unrelated links which could lead to a penalty.

End Results

SEO is a steady progression and making the wrong choices on a small budget can cost SME’s a lot more in terms of money if the wring strategy is adopted.

UPDATE

As SEO Account Director at MEC Manchester SEO Operations manager for Latitude Digital Marketing‘s I have seen businesses that use ‘black hat seo’ techniques as well as poorly planned strategies come a cropper compared to a professional and well planned campaign that reaps rewards.

I have been playing around with this new social tool and spotted a couple of observations when a site has been +1′d:

When using the preview option for a +1 site, you get a little snippet from the site, in this example a description and contact details, quite handy if you want to contact a site without trawling through to find the information:

And without being a +1 site:

Ciao for now

Not sure what to make for your tea (dinner if not a mancunian)?

Google Recipe will make your life easier

http://www.google.com/search?q=red+thai+curry&tbs=rcp%3A1

Only on google.com at present, also tells you calories where available.

You want a prawn curry (shrimp if you’re an American) not chicken I hear you ask? Simply select the recipe element you don’t want in your meal.

What does this mean?

Potentially for UK SERPS in the future sites that may be marked as link selling or spam sites may have their external links discounted further and pass no weight.

No indication of the release in UK yet but keep an eye on your site or clients rankings as if the drop a cleanse if backlinks will be required.

Whilst believing that black hat SEO techniques might have some short term positive effect, the long term implications can be disastrous for your website and in turn your business.

Black hat SEO isn’t just about buying paid links as there are various techniques that can give a website a short term boost but as mentioned can have a detrimental effect on your website, such as ranking penalties, Page Rank penalties and being de-indexed altogether.

Let’s take a look at a few methods for both White and Black hat SEO in more detail:

BLACK HAT SEO TECHNIQUES

1. Bulk Link Purchasing/Link Farming

Buying a large volume of links in a short period of time will alert the search engine’s to unnatural linking behaviour and could see penalties imposed.

Known public networks are generally used to place links on a site within the network but generally placed in “bad neighbourhoods” i.e. a link for a keyword relating to a blue widget site being placed on a gambling site with a high page rank.

2. Keyword Stuffing

There are 2 meta tags that are used to inform search engines of content on the page, they are the description and keyword tags.

Meta Description is used to describe the page to a user and is usually a descriptive paragraph of 1-2 sentences.
A common black hat technique is to overload the description and keyword tags with just keywords that are being targeted for rankings.

3. Hidden Content

Hidden content comes in many guises but the basic principle is that content is “stuffed” with keywords within the code of a website site, this content will not be visible to the end user of the site but can still be read by the search engine’s when crawling the site. Examples of this as follows:

1. Comment Tags
2. The use of the tag
3. JavaScript

WHITE HAT SEO TECHNIQUES

1. Keyword Research

Research keywords and key phrases you think people might useful to find your site, multi-word phrases that are much more specific to your product/service and you’ll be targeting end users that are much more likely to want what you are offering.

Use the keywords and key phrases you’ve identified effectively throughout your website. Assign each page 2-3 of the keywords you’ve identified and use the keywords throughout all the important elements of the page. Those are:

• Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Heading Elements
• Text
• Alt Tag
• Links

2. Link Building – Quality vs. Quantity

It is important to look at the ways to link build in a natural way as to not just grow the back link count to help with rankings, A A good approach to link building for campaigns to look at quality, relevant links that will pass benefit to a keyword so rankings may improve for a keyword where just a small number of relevant, on-topic links will impact greater than bulk buying links on un-related websites. The amount of quality inbound links to your site therefore have some relevance on where in the search engine your site is placed.

3. Quality Website Content

There is nothing more valuable than to optimise your site for search engines by offering unique, well written content. A search engines aim is to provide what it believes to be the most appropriate website for any given search term to the end user.

4. Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Providing pages with proper titles and meta data is an essential part of on page optimisation. As discussed in the black hat SEO techniques section the meta description and keywords tags have been so misused in the past that search engines place less importance in using them in the algorithms for search rankings, but it’s still important to ensure that the information given is correct and used in an appropriate way.

5. Semantic HTML Structuring/Internal Linking

Structuring HTML mark in a semantic way helps search engines understand the content of your webpage. Make proper use of heading elements is essential because search engines give more weight to the content within the heading elements.

Using CSS to separate the design elements from the content makes for much leaner code and makes it easier for search engines to find what they’re looking for.

Creating an internal linking structure is essential to help both users and search engines traverse your website.

You can find my blog post on small business seo over at the Latitude blog.

Key points I covered off include:

1 Price
2 Resource
3 Contracts
4 Specialist Teams
5 Accreditations
6 Tools

Hope you fond my info if use.

Ciao for now.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled to see if instant is rolled out on iPhone mobile.

This is available on google.com as my default is .co.uk that’s why not seeing.

Ciao for now!