What Blog Hosting You Have Chosen

It’s so often that people ask me question about what’s the best blog hosting. I used to host my blog in HostMonster, which works pretty well. Since I hosted more than 10 web sites there, as my traffic grows, I purchase iPower as a backup, and host this blog with it. And I am quite satifisied with it right now.

But today, I’m interested to hear who you use and recommend to host your blog? And what are the cons. and pros. of them?

2008 Open Source CMS Award Launched

Today, I visited Drupal official site, and found a post that “2008 Open Source CMS Award Launched”, and Drupal encourage all their fans to vote for them.

And I saw the same kinds of post can be found in Joomla.

This Open Source CMS Award is sponsored by packtpub.com, and has been ran for many years. In last year, Drupal wins the Overall Winner award, and Joomla is the Best PHP award. The result looks interesting since Drupal and Joomla are both build on php, how can Drupal is the best of all, but not the best in php? Looks like to me it’s the result of balanced.

But any way, this is a big event for all those contributing a lot to open source world, especially in Content Management area. The winner will deserve those awards.

Which is your preferred CMS, Drupal, Joomla or WordPress? Don’t forget to vote for it now.

Internet Marketing 101 - Effective Key Word Strategy

SEO game is fun and excited, during which you can see a page goes from nothing to something in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). People tend to spend a lot of time to manually build the links and optimize the pages for optimal search engine placement, and overall it’s paid off in a big way.

It isn’t really all that hard to obtain a higher ranking in SERPs if you follow some good SEO practice, but maintaining that position is a whole different story.

If you have started promoting your web site and track your positions in SERPs. You will find that your pages can stay quite stable in some key words once you get there, but for another group of key words, they will be rolled out further and further till disappeared in the result.

So, what makes them so different?

Usually, the key words are categorized as Long-Tail key words and Competitive key words. Competitive key words are the popular key words which will bring you a lot of traffic if a page can list high against them. It’s competitive since a lot of web site optimize their page and try to get a better position. For those Long-Tail key words, they are related to the competitive key words, but much fewer page talking about them or no too many webmaster would like to optimize their page for them. An example here is that “web hosting” is a competitive key word, but “family web hosting” is much less competitive.  

If your page ranks high in the SERPs against a competitive key words, it will drop down quickly if we don’t continuously promote your site with that key word. But for the long-tail key words, once you get to the top page, it would be hard to be second since there are less competitors.

A lot of successful stories have told us that obtaining front page rankings for several long-tail keywords can actually drive more traffic and be more profitable in the long run than ranking for a competitive phrase and not having the patience to keep it up there!

Strategy for Competitive Key Words

“Natural link” is the best way to win a better position against the key words. When another site owner links to your site/pages simply because they are a good resource, then you’ve just received a natural link. When you manually build the backlinks and no one else is linking to you then you are manually ranking your own site and if the keyword(s) you are targeting is very competitive, you simply will not hold that ranking for long, unless you constantly build those links and never stop!

Strategy for Long-Tail Key Words

Obtaining front page rankings for several long-tail keywords can actually drive more traffic and be more profitable in the long run than ranking for a competitive phrase and not having the patience to keep it up there!

The reason for this is because your competition, in most cases, for a long-tail keyword will be far less competitive, meaning it will retain top 10 rankings for far longer without constantly having to build links!

Summary

Use article marketing, link exchanges and other link building and SEO strategies to obtain top 10 rankings for long-tail, niche phrases, but don’t spend your time manually ranking a site or page for a competitive niche, it just doesn’t pay off in the long run! If the content isn’t compelling enough to rise on it’s own, it’s not worth your time to manually push it to the top.

There is nothing wrong with using articles etc. to get a site off the ground that is targeting a competitive phrase, but it should be the user’s interest in the content that brings it to the top, not the Webmasters will to be on top!

If you want to achieve top 10 rankings for a competitive phrase, write good content that invites natural links. It’s far less stressful and you’re much more likely to hold that ranking for an extended amount of time!

BrowseRank vs PageRank

Recently, some Microsoft researchers in partnership with some Asian academic fellows published out a research report BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, in which they come out an idea to ”Let Web Users Vote for Page Importance”.

This new ranking method is called as “BrowseRank”, which is designed against PageRank from Google.

In the report, they talk about some problem of PageRank, one example is that people can game on PageRank through link farms.

And the core of BrowseRank is that “The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance.”, which will avoid the issue PageRank is facing right now

This sounds very reasonable, and the research is still on a continuing process and the researchers hope to further elaborate on the BrowseRank method of measuring the importance of website.

Although, pensonally, I would to see BrowseRank can be a competitor to PageRank (I like to challenage Giant), below are just some recommendations from me to BrowseRank research team:

• PageRank is important, but it has become less and less important in Google’s algorithm to determine a page’s ranking in the search result against a given key word (SERP).
• The ways Google used to determine the PageRank is changing, which means Google is continuously improving its algorithm to generate the more reasonable PageRank. I believe they will take above issues into consideration sooner or later
• PageRank has been used for so long and it’s also quite successful right now. BrowseRank hasn’t leverage any advantage of this method and come out a total new one. It comes back to my old saying that “You fix 10% issues, but you might introduce 20% more in at the same time”. How BrowseRank avoid this happen.
• Last and the important one is that PageRank is running now, and BrowseRank is still something in the air. Who and when are going to promote it - will this be Microsoft?

But no matter what, glad to see this new concept show up.

Google PageRank Update Coming

Yesterday, Matt Cutts from Google announced on this blog that a New Toolbar PageRanks coming, and in this updating, Google will be expiring some older penalties on the website.

This is a good news for those who have been punished by Google last year for this or that kind of reason. But Google hasn’t revealed why they did this.

You can see the change of PageRank today actually, one of my site has increased from PR3 to PR4. And Centeurlife just get a PR2, this is not a good data, but considering I just launched my blog 1 month ago, this is still reasonable.

What’s yours …

What You Should Avoid in Drupal Hosting

Drupal is an opensource Content Management platform. Created in 2001, Drupal has become the most powerful CMS system currently. And it’s mostly used for creation and management of diversity content such as community web portals, FAQs, and knowledge bases, etc.

Owning a Drupal web site is not hard, you can purchase a web host, download their latest scrips, and get is setup. But as my many years working experience to support the Drupal webmasters, I think below are the top 3 mistakes they have made.

1) Drupal Hosting is Very Special

This is probably the most common thing we can feel from Drupal webmasters, especially for those beginners. The fact is that every hosting which can support php and MySQL, and grant you with the write permission to the root directory, then you will be all set. The only thing you need to care about is the connection speed between web server and MySQL database server. Some web hosting companies havn’t optimized the connection between those two and cause some performance issues for Drupal. But this issue doesn’t exist for the most of the current leading shared web hosting service providers.

2) Web Hosting Companies with “Drupal” included in their Name are Drupal-Specialized Host

It’s fun that there are many companies who declare they are dedicated to the web hosting for Drupal, and place “drupal” into their companies’ name, such as drupalhosting, drupalvaluehosting, etc. This is really strange if you have read the first mistake I list in above. If a company can provide good solution for Drupal, it definitely can provide the same level support to other open source application like WordPress, Joomla. So why he wants to place it in his company name, and keep the other webmasters out of door. This is not good for the growth of their business. A company even doesn’t know how to take care their business, how can they protect your business.

This type of company is usually very small, they actually cannot provide with you reliable support. There is no surprised to me when I see many complaints of them in Drupal forum.

3) The Experience Shared in Durpal.Org forum is Trusted

Hosting threads created in Drupal.org forum are probably the most scammed forum I have seen in all those very reputed web sites. It’s allowed you to simply paste an advertisement to there. Currently drupal.org is considering to close their hosting section. I think this is a good decision.

So, for a Drupal webmaster, in order to get a good hosting solution, what you really need to do is to find a reliable Linux web hosting service provider. That’s all.

Althought, Drupal.org provides with a list of recommened Drupal hosting companies, but as said by them, those are the sponsors only, it’s not necessary to provide a good service and be listed. But in webhostingclue.com, you can find the true best Drupal hosting which have been carefully filtered. If you want to setup a Drupal site, that is the place you can get help from for a host.

ElephantDrive Review - an Affordable & Security Online Storage

What’s ElephantDrive

ElephantDrive is a online storage service provider, founded in mid-2005 by a group of veteran technology and internet entrepreneurs to meet the increasing demand for cheap, reliable, and secure online storage and backup.

ElephantDrive provides simple, secure, and automated online storage services to individuals and small businesses. The company’s software has been recognized in the industry for its game-changing approach to storage management.

What Make it Different

As there are so many online storage service providers, what make ElephantDrive differnt compared with its competitors? I believe below are something need to be noted.

• By combining the power of grid computing infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services’ S3 with proprietary storage optimization technology, ElephantDrive’s service allows users to enjoy the same levels of availability and performance as large corporate enterprises, at a fraction of the cost.
• Provides effective and continuous data protection tools for online backup and PC synchronization, it is the first of a suite of online data management services that will combine to push core computing utility into the cloud, where any web enabled device can store, retrieve, manage, and share any digital asset, from anywhere, at anytime
• A client side software which make it very convenient for you to interact with your online documents

Check it Out 

Need a online storage service, and share your file as you want, check out the service from ElephantDrive, it’s cheap, security, and convenient.

iPower Discount - Free Web Hosting for 6 Months

I just finish my iPower Review, and find iPower is in a new promotion today, which is only 5 days left. In this promotion, you will get free web hosting for 6 months, which lead to only $3.98/month, and what’s more, you can choose to pay month by month at a price at $6.95, this is totally new payment terms from them. And you still get free setup even you pay with monthly terms.

Need a reliable web hosting for your blog or small business, check them out now:

iPower Review - Budget Web Hosting Solution

This blog is hosted in iPower. Since many people ask me to recommend some reliable hostings for their Blog, I would like to share my experience with iPower and explain why it’s a good choice for Blog or Small Business site.

It’s Affordable

This blog use the iPower Pro Plan solution, the regular price for this one is at $7.95/month. This is an average price for a shared small business web hosting solution in the industry. This price is affordable, and it’s less than the cost of a lunch for most of the people. And what’s lucky is that I purchased the service when they were promoting their products, so that I only spent $4.95/month to get it actually. 

By signing up with them, I have received around $80 free marketing credit for Google Adword and Yahoo Search Marketing, which is more than my spending on their service.

It’s Powerful

In its Pro plan, you will be provided with 1500GB disk space, 15000GB monthly transfer. You can host unlimited domains (blog) in it if you want. And your site will be powered with tools like MySQL, php, Perl, Agora Shopping  Cart, and SiteBuilder, etc. You also can get many other web site promotion tools from them, such as Google WebMaster tools, which has been integrated into their control Panel recently.

What’s the beautiful thing of iPower is that their teams are continuously thinking about how to give their customer better service to keep the business relationship. I see many enhancements from them since I used their service. 

It’s Reliable

I haven’t seen any down time for my sites (one blog, and one web site about affiliate network) so far. Looks like their solution is pretty stable. I only have encountered one issue when trying to create a Joomla site, I override the .htaccess file, and cause some priviledge issues, but they help me re-instate my environment and then there is no problem any more. 

Great Customer Support

I am pretty satisfied with their service so far. What iPower attracting me most is their Live Chat support, which allows me to ”chat” with them easily via instant messager and show them the problem I met. Live Chat support is a much have feature for me to sign up a service with a web hosting vendor. Otherwise, you will have to send out an email and sit there waiting for the reply. This doesn’t feel good, as least for me.

Cons of iPower

I have purchased the service from many web hosting companies to try their service so that I know what I should recommend to my customers. And compared with some other hosting companies, there are still some space iPower can improve:

• More free open source scripts.
  Currently, most of web hosting companies will provide their customers with a lot of free open source scripts so that you can get them installed with some simple clicks. But iPower only includes some basic scripts such as WordPress, phpBB, etc. And for the scripts like Joomla, Drupal, you need to pay for the installation if you want them to do it for you. Even the charge is limited, this defintely not the necessary cost for the web site owners. The good thing is that setting up an Drupal or Joomla sites is pretty easy even you do it by yourselves.
• Web Statistics Tool
  iPower does provide a very good web site statitics tool AWStats as free. But there is one issue in iPower AWStats configuration that all the traffic data from different domain are mixed together, if you have more than 1 domain hosted with them, it would be hard for you find out the web statistics for each domain.  
• Non working time support
  iPower live chat support is only available in their working time. For non working time, you have to use the email support system. This is somehow slow, but considering everyone want a work life balanced, this sounds acceptable for me. And this isssu should be able to be resolved by outsourcing this support service to China or India.

Summary

As a responsible company, iPower has served for more than 700, 000 customers so far. It’s experience and technology will guarantee you a reliable environment for your web site. You can visitor iPower to get to know about this company.

Google Knol is Open Now - What Should You Do

A few months ago, Google announced the testing of their new product Knol. And today, they final open this new product to evreyone.

“Everyone knows something”, Knol is a place for people to share their knowledge. Unlike some other articles writting web site, Google Knol will encourage the people to collaborate on the topic, and author has the right to approve the modification.

Knol will be a big competitor to Wikipedia  or Blogger, Google Knol - a Wikipedia Killer or a Blog Killer, I think what described in that blog is correct, Google Knol is invading into the Content management area, which should is the business of the other web site, not Google.

But if you are an Internet Marketing expert, what you are thinking now? Yes, you should start publishing your articles to Google Knol. Google Knol is defintely a perfect place to promote your web site or product.

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