So you want to achieve a higher rank in search engines?

Below I have written my Top 5 tips in helping you to achieve a higher position within search engine rankings. The best way to start is by choosing one or two keywords that you would like to see your website achieve higher rankings with, e.g. “Web Design” and “Web Design Essex” it’s important that these words are relevant to the content of your site. I’ll be using the terms “Web Design” & “Essex Web Design” as examples in this guide, please substitute them for own chosen keywords when applying these methods.

1. Optimise your Title tags

The <title> tag of your website is the best place to include your chosen keywords. Search engines such as Google will determine a websites relevance based on the words and phrases used within it. It’s important to know that when writing your own <title> tag that you do not repeat your keywords too often, as you could been seen as over-using the term or spamming which may result in your website being penalised. A good rule to go by is to use between 10 – 15 words or 63 characters in your title tag and place the most relevant keywords at the beginning. I’m using the term “Essex Web Design” in the example below to show you that the title starts with the targeted keywords. Naturally repeating your keywords is fine, just be sure not to constantly repeat a phrase; a good example of how to structure your title is below:

<title>Essex Web Design – [company name here] are the top leading Web Design company in Essex </title>

2. Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEFURL)

Search engines will take into account the relevancy of your website to the search term based on the naming of files and folders.

For example:
A website that is un-optimised would have the following structure:

www.[yourwebsite].com/aboutus/index.html

You will see there are no relevant keywords used, so this website is going to have a hard time getting their website to rank higher than a website which is optimised. A good example of how you should name your files and folders to help increase your sites relevancy is:

www.[yourwebsite].com/web-design/essex-web-design.html

3. Regularly updated content

Search engines prefer websites that have relevant and regularly updated content on their pages. You can achieve fresh content yourself easily by either maintaining a blog or by writing small news articles. These don’t have to be hundreds of words, a paragraph would be sufficient, just remember to include relevant keywords and phrases within them.

Note that:
Unique, quality and consistency are the key things to remember when writing content for your website.

4. Relevant Back Links

Having links from other websites to your own will be beneficial to your ranking, especially if the websites are relevant. It’s important to get as many links as you can, what you will find is that if you have something worthwhile to offer, e.g. write interesting content (see tip 3), providing a fantastic service or offering unbeatable value, etc. then people will link to your website naturally over time. It’s worthwhile mentioning that having relevant related keywords in your backlink like “Essex Web Design” will be more beneficial in ranking higher within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) than having a term like “click here”.

5. Heading Tags

Make sure all your headings/titles within your website are encased using h1 tags. Inserting targeted keywords within your heading tags such as h1, h2, h3, etc. will specify what the page is going to be about and make your page more relevant to the subject.

An example would be:
<h1>Essex Web Design Services</h1>
<p>Text about your company here….</p>

Do you use HostPay at all? HostPay is our domain name and web hosting shopping cart that is included with the Reseller Professional package.

I just wanted to remind you that if you do, then there is a separate newsfeed of updates we make to HostPay. You can view the newsfeed by logging into the Reseller Control Centre, clicking HostPay and then scrolling down the page to the newsfeed section.

There have been 4 updates this week including:

 - Renewal Manager
 - Hosting Packages
 - Delete Shopping Baskets
 - Google Acceptance Logo

Over the past few years I’ve always carried a USB drive around with me containing files that I need for home and work, but recently I’ve ditched it for a service that provides 30GB of online storage space for free. Who provides this service? Well, we do actually. It’s called the Heart Drive and if you’ve not used this innovative file storage system then I strongly suggest that you give it a go.

Heart-drive is an online storage service for all of your files.

Your files are stored centrally online so you can access and work with them from any computer or mobile phone. There’s no software to install, all you need is a web browser - one quick login and you are instantly connected to your personal drive.

When you want to listen to your music or watch a movie you can stream them direct from Heart Drive, wherever you are. You can even embed your favourite multimedia in your emails, blog and web pages.

If you’d like to sign up, just pop over to http://drive.heartinternet.co.uk

 We are quite pleased with ourselves today! Computer Shopper, Britain’s biggest technology magazine has awarded us “Best Buy” for our Starter Professional web hosting package.

Here is a short quote on what Computer Shopper had to say:-

“Nottingham-based Heart Internet is the latest project from the team that originally developed WebFusion and 123-Reg. With 2.5GB of storage and a generous 20GB monthly bandwidth limit, the Starter Professional package has impressive specifications, and the email capability stretches to 1,000 1GB POP/IMAP mailboxes, complete with webmail access and spam protection.”

The Starter Professional is a good way of getting your company, club, blog or personal website online. Click here to find out more.

To read the full article on the Computer Shopper website click here.

Have you considered how important email etiquette is in your company? Email is often the first point of contact for a prospective customer and an ongoing communication method for your existing customers. How you deal with emails will say a lot about your company and its values.

6 Quick Tips

 - Start each email by saying “Hello name”, “Hi name” or “Dear Mr Name”.
 - Reply promptly, your customers could go elsewhere if you take too long to reply.
 - DON’T TYPE EVERYTHING IN CAPITALS. Unless you want to shout at your customers?!
 - Proof read your email before sending, check for spelling errors and grammatical problems.
 - Consider who you are sending the email to, do you really need to cc half your company?
 - Remember to finish your email correctly. I would recommend putting your name, phone number and email address as a minimum.

These are just a few tips to get you started, if your company uses email regularly I would recommend you have an email policy so that your organisation has a consistent approach to email.

For more tips have a look at Emailreplies.com or visit the Business Email Etiquette Blog which has some good ideas about how to maximise the use of email in your organisation.

Fancy working for Heart Internet? We have a number of positions open at the moment, all based at our Nottingham offices. For more information please visit http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/jobs.shtml

After reading Jonathan’s blog article about how bandwidth has changed over the last ten years it got me thinking about the hardware we use in web hosting. I’ve just placed an order for additional web servers of the following spec:

Dell 1950

• Two Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X5460, 2X6MB Cache, 3.16GHz,
• 8 GB 667MHZ FBD
• Primary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Secondary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Perc6i SAS RAID Controller
• dual Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC

When we launched WebFusion in 1997 we built our own servers for the first year then started to use equipment from Penguin Computing. We selected Penguin as they were one of the first companies to supply rack mounted servers to the Linux community. They are based in San Francisco and we often had to wait up to four weeks for delivery – having said that they always put toy penguins in the packaging to ease the wait! The spec of the servers in 1998 was:

 
• Two 300 MHz Pentium II w/256K Cache
• 128 MB ECC 100 MHz SDRAM
• Integrated Adaptec 7890 Ultra2 SCSI Controller
• Primary HD: Quantum 9.1 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• Intel 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Adapter

Of course in 1998 we only gave 10MB disk space with each account and bandwidth was limited by the fact that nearly everyone was on dial-up, so these servers coped fine. Today’s websites are much more demanding of servers, so even though the spec is significantly higher, we still only put the same number of accounts on each server as we did ten years ago.

We upgraded our bandwidth today, adding 50 Mb to our current infrastructure, it’s the second time we have upgraded this year. There’s nothing particularly special about this upgrade, except that it got us talking about how much our bandwidth requirements have changed over the last few years.

When we setup WebFusion in 1997 (which we sold some years ago) we started with a 64 KB line, that cost £20,000 per year! We had 600 websites on it before we needed to upgrade and we used it for our office Internet access as well. When we upgraded we went to 128 KB and it was sometime before we hit 1 MB. Back then most hosting companies had a spare room with all their servers in and “air conditioning” was provided by a couple of fans. I remember that the largest hosting company at the time had 2 X 2 MB lines and this seemed quite unbelievable.

Fast forward 11 years and it’s predicted that 2 out of 3 households in the UK will have broadband by the end of the year, so I think we will be adding to our network capacity again fairly soon.

We have updated our Joomla installer to 1.5.1 today. We had been planning on moving to this version in the next few months anyway, but recently some serious security vulnerabilities have been identified in previous versions of Joomla, so we felt we should upgrade our copy now.

To install the new version log-in to your eXtend control panel and go to the CGI/PHP Scripts section.

An overview of Joomla 1.5 is available on the Joomla Website. If you are looking to upgrade your existing Joomla site then there is a helpful article on the Joomla Team Blog on how to do this.
 

If you use your Heart Internet Customer Control Panel or eXtend to access WebMail then you won’t have noticed that we have a new version of WebMail available. The new version is just on http://www.outitgoes.com/ at the moment, but it will be available in the Heart Internet Control Panel and eXtend in the next few weeks.

The new default interface is much more powerful than the previous one, giving you a look and feel that is more like a Windows mail client. WebMail now also supports IMAP accounts as well.

To try out new WebMail now simply log-in at http://www.outitgoes.com/.