Customer Excellence Returns to Web Site Hosting! – Marketing
Customer Excellence Returns to Web Site Hosting!
Robin Nobles
For those of you with Web sites, you probably know what a "host" is. Its a company that provides a location, or address, on the Internet where your Web site resides.
In other words, just like a physical business needs an address, so does a Web site. You cant have a Web site and just "stick it up" on the Web. Unless you want to set up your own server, you have to go through a hosting company who gives you that address, including server space and bandwidth, that enables the search engines and visitors to find your site.
Lets look at some common problems we often have with hosting companies:
You can never find an actual person to talk to! They may have a 24-hour customer service line open, but you can never get through to a real person.
Hosting companies often think that the "lowest price" will always get the sale, but they fail to realize that what people really want is excellent customer service, servers that are up almost 100% of the time, and a variety of services that come with the hosting package.
Many hosting companies dont provide any other functionality other than Web site hosting. They dont provide a "control panel" full of goodies such as PGP secure e-mail, shopping carts, log analysis, database creation, etc.
Guess what Technical support people often dont make the best "customer support" people. They may be technical gurus, but their main interest lies in their high tech servers and other functionality, rather than solving the simple problems of their customers.
In other words, weak customer service is a major problem with the majority of hosting companies these days. Solution:
I recently had the pleasure of being introduced to Combustion Hosting Company, and to say I was impressed is a vast understatement.
Here are some things that struck me as unbelievable. When the phone rings, whoever answers the phone is required to stand up to answer it and talk. After all, the sheer act of standing up requires that theyre alert and are listening to your problems and concerns. And, you actually speak to a "real" person!
With Combustion, if you have a problem, they dont just "tell" you how to solve it, they solve it for you! Also, their services certainly arent limited to "hosting." They can set you up with an account to where you can access the Internet through local access numbers no matter where you travel.
Their prices are extremely reasonable -- much better than I had been paying previously. Plus, the "extras" Ive received by going with Combustion are amazing.
But the one thing that makes Combustion shine over most Web hosting companies is their devotion to providing good customer service, and this is an area in which they truly excel.
So, if youre in the market for a new Web site, or if you arent pleased with your current host, consider Combustion Hosting. It will be one of the smartest moves you could ever make for your Web site. http://www.combustionhosting.com/moreinfo
If you want further proof as to the benefits of using Combustion, read: this article.
About The Author
Robin Nobles is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with John Alexander. They teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. She also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and she
How to find good Web Hosting for your site! – Web
How to find good Web Hosting for your site!
Jonathan White
When building your first site the main things that you will probably think about is what types of content you will be adding to your site, how you are going to get visitors to your site and how you are going to generate good revenue from your site.
Well, all of the things mentioned above are crucial things to consider, but then again, what
Search Engine Crawlers and Dynamic Web Pages – Site
Search Engine Crawlers and Dynamic Web Pages
Jerry Yu
There are misunderstandings and confusions in the Search Engine Optimization SEO world in regard to search engines indexing of dynamic web pages.
It has been claimed that search engine spiders dont index/crawl dynamic web pages well. This statement is only half true. The correct statement should be "Search engines dont index/crawl dynamic web pages well if the page URL contains "" without quotes character.". Search engines do index dynamic web pages very well if the page URL contains no "" characters.
URLs that contain "" are called dynamic URLs.
What web pages are dynamic
If you have knowledge about HTML, you know the web pages you create normally have .htm, or .html, file extension. These files are static because the HTML code dont change on the fly when requested and they are not processed by web servers. They can be viewed without using a web server.
A web page is said to be dynamic if it is created by using server-side scripting languages such as php, asp, jsp, perl, cgi and so on. These languages are like normal programming languages such as C++, Java, etc. The major difference is scripting languages cant be compiled beforehand. They can only be processed by web servers on the fly when the page is requested by a visitor. Dynamic pages cant be viewed without a web server.
When a dynamic page is requested, the web server first looks at the pages source code and if any server-side scripting code exist, it will process them and generate static HTML result. When processing of the full page has been completed, web server sends only pure HTML code to the web visitors browser.
Using scripting languages to create web pages gives you the power to do nearly anything you want. If the dynamic page has no "" character in its URL, search engine spiders treat the page the same as a normal HTML static page.
Query string parameters
When "" character is used, the pages full URL changes when values after "" change. The portion after "" is called the pages query string parameters, or simply query parameters. Every time when parameters changes, the resulted page will be different.
A page URL can contain more than one "" character. When this happens, search engine spiders will have difficult time to index the resulted page. If the page has only one "" character, major search engine spiders can crawl that page well. For example, Google can index and store a pages URL as http://www.examplesite.com/product.aspid=12345. But if the same pages URL is
http://www.examplesite.com/product.aspid=12345&category=23&page=3
Most search engines will not be able to index it well even though Googlebot and Yahoo! Slurp may be able to index it.
Note: Googlebot is Googles web-crawling robot. Yahoo! Slurp is Yahoos web-crawling robot. Search engine robots collect documents from the web to build a searchable index.
Yahoo help says
"Yahoo! does index dynamic pages, but for page discovery, our crawler mostly follows static links. We recommend you avoid using dynamically generated links except in directories that are not intended to be crawled/indexed e.g., those should have a /robots.txt exclusion."
Googles Webmaster Guidelines:
"If you decide to use dynamic pages i.e. the URL contains a "" character, be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small."
Lets analyze what Google has stated above.
1. the URL contains a "" character: this means the definition of dynamic pages are those containing "" characters in URL.
2. keep the parameters short: this means the number of characters in each individual parameter should be short. There is no quantitative measurement given by Google but we can check some web forums to see examples. My Search engine friendly article http://www.webactionguide/action-guide/build-site/se-friendly.php referenced black hat seo discussion thread on Cre8ASiteForums. Its URL is http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.phpt=8386
This page was crawled by Google. The length of its query parameter is 4 characters. There are many other examples on the internet that have more characters and were crawled successfully. The maximum number of characters that can be accepted by Google is unknown.
3. keep the number of them small: this means we should keep the number of parameters in each URL as small as possible. The above Cre8ASiteForums example has one parameter.
At least now we can say Googlebot is able to crawl dynamic pages that have one query parameter and the number of characters in the parameter can be 4.
How to get your pages crawled if using query parameters are not avoidable
Query parameters are often used for database calls to retrieve stored information by using primary keys in one or more tables. Database Management System DBMS makes some tedious work easy to manage. When query parameters must be used for your site, consider build a site map page and hard code a pages URL. For example, the previous URL can be hard coded as
http://www.examplesite.com/product12345-23-3.asp
Hand code every dynamic page is time-consuming. If you use Apache web server, there is a Apache mod_rewrite module to help you http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html rewrite the requested URL to one with no "" character embedded on the fly.
Another mod rewrite resource site is www.modrewrite.com.
An interesting article on weberblog.com talked about a practical example of how Google successfully indexed a dynamic page after applying mod_rewrite module. The page originally had 17 characters in the query parameter.
Before rewrite: http://www.weberblog.com/article.phpsroty=20040419170030157
After rewrite: http://www.weberblog.com/article.php/20040419170030157
So, if your site is experiencing the same problem, hurry up and implement mod_rewrite now.
About The Author
Jerry Yu is an experienced internet marketer and web developer. Visit his site http://www.WebActionGuide.com for FREE "how-to" step-by-step action guide, tips, knowledge base articles, and more.