Testimonial from BeautyBible.com

“We have used Redspan Services for the past five years and always had an excellent and prompt service. Ben is a joy to deal with and very good about the fact he’s dealing with two non-technological whizzes who need everything explained in words of one syllable… All in all, excellent.”

~ Josephine Fairley Sams, BeautyBible.com

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Search Engine Optimisation, Generating Website Traffic, Internet Marketing Strategies & Ideas

How to draw visitors to your website, how to generate traffic and how to optimise your website for search engines.

More website traffic is what everybody who owns a website wants, but with every increasing amounts of websites to choose from it has become necessary for webmasters and site owners to fine tune their sites and provide some reason why visitors and potential customers should visit their site rather than the rival and competing sites.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become an industry in itself with plenty of companies, small and large, offering to change and tweak your website in order to make it easier for search engines to analyse it, to increase its page ranking, and draw more visitors to it. Naturally, the fees such companies will charge you will vary from the small to the large too, and there’s no guarantee that the traffic will start flowing nor that it will remain constant even if they succeed in generating some.

So what can the site owner do that is both free of charge (or at least low in cost) and which is proven to improve the chances of generating new traffic, encouraging former site visitors to return, and which will make the site more appealing to search engines? The answer is – plenty. There’s a lot you can do without spending a penny. All it take is time and a little thought.

Here is a list of ideas to get you started. You may find more as you go along and research these techniques. New initiatives emerge all the time so this list is by no means exhaustive, but if you can put half of these things into practice then you will have developed an advantage over many of your competing sites.

1. Add plenty of fresh and original content to your site. Keep adding it on a fairly regular basis.

2. Write articles about things that resonate with the theme of your site and submit these to article directories. Your author bio at the foot of the article should contain a link to your site.

3. Swap links with sites that have something in common with your own. Choose the better quality sites i.e. ones that appeal to you and which you would be glad to associate with.

4. Visit blogs that write about your site’s subjects and leave comments on them. Most comment forms allow you leave a URL so you can add a link to your site there.

5. Register at forums that are in the same vein as your site’s topics and participate in discussions. Add a signature to your profile containing a link to your site. Don’t add too many as this can be considered poor netiquette. A discrete signature containing two or three links at most.

6. Post adverts in classified ads websites like Cragslist, Gumtree, or Vivastreet.

7. Look out for review sites and endorse products. You might be able to add a link to your own site from there.

8. Add a blog to your site and write reviews, tell stories, share ideas, and otherwise ‘talk’ to your audience.

9. Use a domain name that is both easy to remember and that also describes what you’re selling.

10. Add something to your site that is free to download. Use a loss leader to draw traffic.

11. Compile a mailing list by having subscription form clearly visible on your site.

12. Send regular, professionally produced mailshots to your mailing list and measure the results.

13. Learn how to use the mailing list account fully and adjust future mailshots according to the results of those previously sent.

14. Optimise your site’s code. Verify it according to a recognised standard and remove anything superfluous.

15. Familiarise yourself with Google’s Webmaster’s/Site Owner’s Guide and act on its recommendations.

16. Join Facebook and make use of the free to use Facebook pages, and/or create a Facebook group and use that to market your site.

17. Join other social and business networking sites and use them i.e. create and expand your network.

18. Use good old fashioned business cards, leaflets and posters on notice boards to advertise your site and its services or products.

19. Advertise your site on promotional merchandise like car stickers, mugs, key rings, pens, and calendars.

20. Start an affiliate program and keep in constant contact with your affiliates.

21. Get someone to proof read your site. Make sure the content is correctly spelt and punctuated and that it is grammatically correct.

22. Submit your site to search engines and web directories. Make sure it’s added to the correct ones and not worthless sites or those which are in the wrong niche.

23. Configure a ‘tell a friend’ link in your site. Make it easy for visitors to tell others about your site.

24. Configure a signature in every email account you use. Make it discrete but interesting.

25. If you’ve added a blog to your site or you have one that refers to your main site then submit the blog to blog catalogues and directories.

26. Write press releases a few times each year and submit them to the free PR directories.

27. If you’re site is a blog or contains a blog, enable RSS feeds so that visitors can keep up to date without returning to the site.

28. If you’re site would suit it, add a forum to your site so that visitors can discuss your products or services. You can also use this list bugs and beta releases, to encourage feedback, and to provide support.

Datafeedr Review – Managing affiliate datafeeds

Affiliate marketers know that their commission earnings increase in proportion to the amount of products that they can advertise and promote on their sites. This is common sense you might think and it only works if the product information is both up to date and accurate. Also, the management and administration of the product list on the site increases proportionally so what is needed is a tool that enables the webmaster to manage multiple datafeeds from several networks.

If you have several sites and an increasing number of datafeeds to manage then you need a tool that will save you both time and effort. This is the position I found myself in having spent many hours manually downloading feeds from various affiliate networks and then uploading each one by hand. Even with the use of cron jobs and PHP scripts the process required the creation of of text files which then had to be edited and amended with every change to the merchants within each network.

The solution I’m now using is datafeedr. Datafeedr is a tool that takes all the hard work out downloading datafeeds from various affiliate networks. This tool enables me to update several sites with product information from merchants in each of the networks with which I’m registered.

The process is as follows; I log in to my account in the datafeedr website and this gives me access to the admin area for each of the five sites on which my licence entitles me to use the service. Within this area I create a directory structure for products and then populate this structure with products from all kinds of merchants in all the various networks.

With tens of thousands of products available some kind of filtering is necessary in order to categorise them in manageable numbers. To do this there are tags added by each merchant which can be used to cut down the results and make them more accurate for the designated categories. In this way it’s possible to build an ecommerce online store either on a new site or in an existing blog.

Datafeedr is easy to use and and quick to set up. The responses to support requests are quick, efficient and friendly. If you found this blog post while searching from a datafeedr review then rest assured that it’s worth the very reasonable price for the amount of time its saves you and the flexibility it gives you in managing datafeeds.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and the skill of making changes to your website content and code to suit your chosen market so that your site is given a higher ranking by the world’s internet search engines; ranking in relation to the phrases or keywords that internet users type when when searching for products, services or information.

For example, you have business selling spares for yachts, and presumably you want your site to appear on the first page of results whenever someone types in “yacht spares” in Google (preferably at the top of page one!). SEO is how webmasters tweak the fine detail of your site code and content in order to achieve that result.

If you want to start learning this skill for yourelf you can download a free search engine optimization eBook that explains how to get high search engine rankings.

This FREE eBook covers everything from an introduction to search engine marketing to tips and tricks on how to improve your order page. If you apply all tips and tricks that you learn in this ebook to your website, it is almost guaranteed that you’ll get more visitors and more sales.

You could pay a lot of money for an Internet marketing eBook, or you can benefit from the proven methods that are described in this eBook for free. The free eBook covers all important aspects of search engine optimization on more than 160 easy to read pages. Download your free copy now.

Online Business Promotion

There are a lot of tools available on the internet that promise to promote your business and to bring thousands of visitors to your site. Many fail to live up to the marketing hype and it’s easy to waste your money.

We use just one tool: IBP (iBusiness Promoter). Why? Because it does exactly what it promises to do; it’s kept up to date; the support is excellent; and it’s easy to learn and to use.
It shows you how to get into the top ten search engine rankings by examining your website content and comparing it with that of your competitors, then it shows how different keywords and phrases can work best for your target audience.

Still not convinced? Then download a free trial and see for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

Optimise Your Pay Per Click Campaigns

It can be easy to waste money by paying for advertising that fails to bring visitors to your website. One of the most widely used tools for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is Google Adwords, and properly used it can bring a good return on your investment of both time and money.

Axandra.com’s Successful Advertising with Google AdWords will teach you how to use Google AdWords to its maximum potential and how to get more visitors (and therefore more sales) at less cost.

Successful Advertising with Google AdWords is available for immediate download. You can try it for free for a full thirty days, so you have plenty of time to evaluate it for your business.

Rackspace Hosting & Fanatical Support

Rackspace® is Europe’s fastest growing and most successful hosting company. Since 2001 Rackspace has been hosting and supporting mission critical websites, internet applications, email servers, security and storage services for over 4,000 customers.

Rackspace is totally focused and experienced in managing hosting solutions’ for customers, from simple web servers to complex online applications and email solutions. We help our customers forget about their online infrastructure through providing Fanatical Support® for their hosted applications.

Fanatical Support is their unbeatable level of customer service. Rackspace employees are available 24/7/365 to meet and exceed customer’s expectations. Customers get fast responses to critical issues, unlimited technical phone support, access to our huge online knowledgebase, guaranteed 100% network uptime and many other business-critical support features. It might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. It is what happens when you Experience Fanatical Support from Rackspace.

By outsourcing your hosting to Rackspace, you get the peace of mind that your hosting environment is being looked after by the experts, whilst alleviating the pressure on your own IT department. We take away those IT hassles, all those day to day IT tasks and projects you really don’t want to focus on. The implementing, updating, troubleshooting, patching, monitoring, administering, backing up and storing, upgrading and every day support – all becomes our responsibility. Couple this with our Fanatical Support and you know that it’ll be taken care of by the experts with a unique passion to get things right for customers.

Once you have Experienced Fanatical Support from Rackspace, you won’t accept anything less!

Reasons to choose Rackspace for the hosting of your mission critical website:

• 100% network uptime guarantee
• 1 hour hardware fix
• 24/7/365 Technical Support
• Fanatical Support® – our no excuses, no exceptions, expert support
• Specialists in hosting solutions meaning we know all there is to know about hosting and quite often spot and correct problems for customers before they know about them
• Great experience in Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux operating systems (Microsoft Hosting partner of the year 2003, 2005 and 2007; and the first Red Hat Premier hosting partner in Europe)

Rackspace Fanatical Support®

Fanatical Support is the Rackspace unique customer service philosophy.

Rackspace is different to many other hosting providers in that we are a service orientated company. It is our goal to be the best service company your business has ever interacted with. Our customer service philosophy, Fanatical Support® has won much industry recognition, the latest of which is being voted the UK’s best service company in the Unisys/Management Today Service Excellence Awards 2005.

The Rackspace core values reflect the importance of customer service in the Rackspace culture:

• Fanatical Support in all we do
• Results first, substance over flash
• Embrace change for excellence
• Passion in our work
• Keep our promises
• Treat Fellow Rackers like friends and family

For customers, Fanatical Support means that Rackspace employees are available 24/7/365 to meet and exceed our customer’s expectations. Every customer gets fast responses to critical issues, unlimited technical phone support, access to our huge online knowledgebase, guaranteed 100% network and infrastructure uptime and many other business-critical support features.

To make this vision a reality, Rackspace concentrates on three key areas to ensure that the Fanatical Support tradition ensures – namely People, Systems and Processes.

Rackspace Fanatical Support Promise

Rackspace goes one step further in guaranteeing to deliver Fanatical Support by cementing it in our contracts according to five key criteria Responsiveness, Ownership, Resourcefulness, Expertise and Transparency. If we do not live up to our customer’s expectations then we will take remedial action to rectify that, and if a customer is still not happy then we’ll even let them leave before their commitment is up, but we’re sure it’ll never come to that.

Service Level Agreement

Zero-Downtime Network™

We guarantee that when not undergoing scheduled maintenance, the network infrastructure will be available 100% of the time in each month.

Network availability means all network infrastructure including routers, switches and cabling is working. The Network infrastructure is defined as the portion of the network extending from the outbound port on your cabinet switch to the outbound port on the border router. Services or software running on your servers are not counted as part of the network.
Downtime begins when an interruption is recorded in our monitoring system or a trouble ticket is opened saying that you can’t transmit and receive data (whichever is earlier). We will open a trouble ticket within 15 minutes for emergency tickets.

In the event that Network infrastructure availability should fall below 100% in a given month due to our fault, and this failure directly and adversely affects your hosted environment, we will refund to you 5% of your monthly recurring charge per half hour of network infrastructure downtime (up to 100% of the monthly recurring charge) for the affected component(s).

Hardware

We guarantee all Hardware components will function properly and will rectify or replace any component with a fault at no cost to you. Hardware is defined as the server chassis, processor(s), memory, storage devices, motherboard, power supplies, and network interface cards. This includes faults in Hardware due to failures in power and HVAC infrastructure including UPS, PDU and cabling. This guarantee does not apply to the time required to rebuild a RAID array, reload the operating system, reload and configure applications, and/or restore from backup (if necessary).

We will begin fault resolution once we identify the problem component. Fault resolution is guaranteed to be complete within one (1) hour of problem identification by us. In the event of a hardware failure which causes an outage in your hosted configuration, failed hardware is guaranteed to be repaired or replaced within one (1) hour of problem identification by us.
In the event that we should fail to replace hardware within one hour of problem identification due to our fault, and such failure directly and adversely affects your hosted configuration, you are entitled to 5% of your monthly recurring charge per hour of additional down time beyond the first one hour after problem identification (up to 100% of your monthly recurring charge) for the affected component(s).

This SLA does not apply for any month to the extent that service credits arise as a result of your breach of the AUP or if you are in material default of payment.

Client Testimonials

Click here to find out more.

B2B communications specialists, Base One Group uses intensive dedicated hosting to save time and money and concentrate on the award-winning creative business for which they are well known:

"100% network uptime, 1 hour hardware replacement and a passion for hosting that borders on the fanatical. Little wonder that they brand their Support as ‘Fanatical Support®" – Roland Jones, IT Director, VUE

"We chose Rackspace as our hosting partner because of their incredible culture of honesty, quality of service and shear ability to cope with a demanding site like ours…" – Tom Bennett, Head of Marketing, Confused.com

"Out of all the companies that submitted full tenders one clearly shone out above all the others – Rackspace!" – Lieutenant Colonel Frank Tipton, British Army

"Nothing has gone wrong with any of our sites – in fact Rackspace seems able to foresee any issues before they happen and contact us with a solution prior to a problem manifesting itself! The hosting runs like clockwork and having one thing less to worry about is a real benefit for me. I would not hesitate to recommend Rackspace to any company that is looking for very reliable managed hosting with flexible contracts and Fanatical Support®." – Andrew Holmes, Manager E commerce and Customer leads, Renault

Want to join them? Just start a live chat with one of our sales assistants on www.rackspace.co.uk or ring us on 0800 988 0100

Rackspace Awards and Expertise

As the fastest growing hosting specialist in Europe, Rackspace is recognised time and again for excellence in service and innovation. These awards and recognition clearly demonstrate Rackspace’s commitment to going beyond their customers’ expectations when delivering customised hosting solutions.

The Sunday Times Best Small Companies to work for 2007

Rackspace were accredited with 2 stars by the best companies which recognises Rackspace as an outstanding place to work. Rackspace was one among just 106 companies in the UK achieving this accolade.

Microsoft Hosting Service Provider of the Year
Rackspace was named by Microsoft as the winner of the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year in the annual Microsoft Certified Partner Awards 2007 . The Partner of the Year Award in Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions, recognises the top Microsoft partner delivering market-leading, Microsoft-based solutions. Rackspace were also winners of the award in 2005 and 2003.

Red Hat Premier Hosting Partner
As staunch supporters of open source and the open source community, Rackspace has developed a partnership with Red Hat and we’re the first Red Hat Premier Hosting Partner in Europe.

Microsoft Gold Certification
Rackspace received the Microsoft Gold Certification Partner accreditation for its expertise in Microsoft Hosting, making it one of only six Application Infrastructure Providers (AIPs) in the world with this top tier designation.

Why Hosting?

Hosting is the new way of managing your computing needs. It is the alternative to doing it yourself or completely outsourcing, both of which can be expensive options for a company. Hosting is an attractive alternative because it has lower costs and doesn’t involve a high initial capital investment incurred by doing it yourself, whilst also giving greater control and flexibility than completely outsourcing operations.

Alternatives to Managing IT Systems and Computing

Do-it-Yourself:
Do-it-yourself is an approach to managing IT systems where a business retains complete ownership and responsibility for maintenance and support. Companies may choose to house their IT systems in their own facilities or may use a co-location vendor for data centre space and network access.

Outsourcing:
Businesses may also choose to outsource their IT systems and computing operations. Outsourcers typically provide an end-to-end, custom solution for their customers. The outsourcer also assumes responsibility for management of a customer’s IT systems, computing operations, and employees.

Hosting:
Hosting providers offer services to support IT systems and computing ranging from simple to very complex. The equipment required (servers, routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, cabinets, software, wiring, etc.) to deliver their services is typically purchased and managed by the hosting providers. The Hosting provider is set up for and experienced in, the delivery of hosting solutions with expert support staff available to resolve issues as quickly as possible. Customers also benefit from the often large network capabilities of hosting providers, as well as the economies of scale of their infrastructure, with the costs spread across their client base e.g. back up and storage infrastructures, making it a more affordable option.

Rackspace® offers a full suite of hosting services, including dedicated hosting, managed hosting, and email hosting, as well as emerging services such as platform hosting and cloud hosting.

Click through to our hosting section to find out more.