Archive for February, 2008:

Back to London

I’ll be visiting London again with my work which means I’ll be from my sites for the next 72 hours almost. Surprisingly no-one has submitted any SEO suggestions for my previous post…come on folks!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

SEO – What do you do?

It is amazing how many different services there are on the web that “Guarantee …” with a “Money Back Refund” etc etc etc. Further to that, the amount of conflicting information is rather bewildering – “Googlebot hates…” or “Googlebot needs”.

Like many things in life, SEO is trial and error. There is no clear system that guarantees you a premium ranking in the SERPs and with so many different things you can do, how would you know what is right and wrong without conducting your own tests?

I managed to rank Kortaz.com #1 – #5 for a number of different keywords. Without sounding arrogant, I think that’s quite an achievement considering “Kortaz” was not even a keyword and the site was not filled with content!

I think the amount of backlinks with the anchor text as the keyword made the site strong and this was the driving force behind its ranking. These links were built up over time with webmasters submitting their own proxy links to be listed on the site.

Aside from backlink building, being popular in Digg and Stumble Upon have their benefits too (I didn’t used them for Kortaz.com but for other sites). As well as bringing in visitors, many webmasters look for content through these sites and this can generate backlinks.

It is quite important to mention on-site SEO too and that generally means ensuring your site is keyword rich with unique content and good anchor texts.

I’d really like to know what you do when it comes to SEO and how you rank well?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Moved to a VPS

Building up a new network is a great feeling, especially when you see a return on your investment. The only difficulty with expanding quickly was that I had to purchase a new $14.95 per month hosting plan for each domain.

This was great because it stopped me making stupid mistakes and creating sites without thinking them through. On the downside it was time consuming and quite costly. Don’t get me wrong, Liquid Web are a fantastic host with great staff (touch wood!) so the $14.95 is well worth it, but if you want to run a network you’d really need to think about something biggar.

After shooting a quick support ticket to a sales advisor, they checked out my sites and advised me on the $60 per month VPS. Whilst I am fully aware you can get hosting for a lot cheaper, after my troubles with Host Nine I don’t think I’ll ever risk quality for price. If you are going to do a job, do it properly.

The staff quickly migrated all my sites over and helped me through the process of domain parking etc so a big thank you to them! I did have to wait about 48 hours before I could update my sites again due to some minor complications with my domains (my fault!).

Now I’ve got everything in one place and making one payment per month which is good. Things are expanding here, so if you haven’t already, subscribe to my RSS feed for the latest news coming soon!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.