Google webmaster tools was first announced in the year of 2005 (summer). Beginning from that date, it has been 6 years now, and maybe millions of web sites has been utilizing this service, and most them has started using it from the very beginning. But why do people care about this? The answer is quite simple, if you want to be indexed in a higher rank in Google, you have to care about what Google thinks about your site. Google webmaster tools is the Google way of telling the site owners about how they are doing. Webmaster tools offers some quite valuable information that no one else can do. Sitemap status, Search queries, Keywords, Internal links, External links,  Crawl errors, HTML suggestions and many more. If you are still not registered your site with Google webmaster tools, now go and do it. The rest of this article will help to readers who has been already using Google webmaster tools (at least for 2 months and more.)

Rather than demonstrating Google webmaster tools in this article, I would tell you how to use it to increase your traffic. I assume you are already familiar with it. First you have to know How successful you are with your objectives? I mean is your site really getting attention with keywords you want it to be? Or Are you successful in your niche? There is a quite simple way of checking this. First create a list of keywords you think your site is successful on them. It shouldn’t have to be a long list, just quickly pick 5-10 keywords or queries. Now, from the left menu click on “Your site on the web” > “Search queries”. Now you should be seeing a long list depending on your content. The most popular keyword is shown in the first row, the less popular ones follows it second, third and goes on. What do you think now? Does the list you have created match the actual list ? If it matches, and your impressions are decent, then you are successful and know what you are doing.

Generally, it is really hard to get ranked higher in some keywords, since there are always lots of competitors with higher page ranks. Google prefers them and lists them in the higher places. Assuming that the list you have created differs the list on the Google and you are getting low impressions on the keywords you are targetting and on the other hand you are getting decent impressions on the unexpected keywords. Now what you are thinking? Although it seems to be a failure, you can use this information to your advantage. This is Google way of saying, “You should be concentrating on these keywords, not these ones!”.

Secondly, under the bold written “Search queries” (in the top of the page), there should be a link “Top pages”. Now click on it. You will see that which pages on your site are most popular and which are less, which are getting more page views and which are getting less. Similar to keywords, you should again use this information to your advantage, you should focus on the content that you are successful at it, like in the real life situations. By this way you will not be wasting your time to create content that you are not successful with. Instead you can set your focus on the content which is probably help you more in your goals. This is not changing your niche, this is tweaking/optimizing it.

Click on the “Links to your site” from the left menu. You should be seeing a list of sites that links to your site. If you don’t see any sites, you should do some link-building, seriously. You might be surprised with this list, this a reflection of your site’s success. If your site is successful, then it is referenced by others. Links by others are valuable, because Google uses them to determine your page rank. If a site with higher page rank than yours links to you, then your page rank will probably increase, as a consequence your site will take higher places in the search results.

Now click on the link “Subscriber stats”. Your feeds may not be indexed by Google, in this case you should submit your feeds as sitemaps. This is very useful, Google indexes your last minute updates by this feed sitemaps. Lastly navigate to “Diagnostics”>”HTML suggestions”. This one is also useful, which gives suggestions about Meta description, Title tags and Non-indexable content. Following the suggestions showed here, helps Google to index your site better and more. These are just valuable information to know.

Remember to check other links like “Lab”, which gives you an idea about your site’s performance (page load times), may be it needs to be optimized, do check it and always check if your sitemaps have errors. The main idea is to focus on the content that you are successful.

I wanted to share my experience about Hosting in this article, which may give you some idea and decide which option is suitable for you. I just tried to keep it clear and simple, but the subject is a big one, so I ended up having the following. I hope it provides you a basic insight. Grab some beverage and go on reading.

If you are a new into the world of Web, you start with a free host which provides limited amount of space and a simple interface to manage your site, and they put ads on your site/blog in return as a cost for this free service. It is a perfect way to discover the world. However, as your site grows bigger and get some attention from people, you start to need a paid hosting, which offers considerable amount of space, no ads, increased service quality such as access speed, server availability and service up-time.

Paid hosting services can be divided into 3 different groups:

• Shared Hosting
• Virtual Private Server
• Dedicated Server

 Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting is the most suitable option for beginners. Why? Because you do not need to consider installing a Web Server, a Database Server and a PHP/ASP extension. You will have a ftp access to server, to upload,delete and modify your web site files, and also you will have a database account associated with this hosting account. There are not very complicated setup procedures to make your site working, all you need to copy your files to your root hosting directory and setup database connections if you are running a website which uses a database (Like WordPress). On the other hand there are some disadvantages with this kind of hosting plan.

For instance, introductory shared hosting plans support only single domain, which means that you can’t host multiple sites under single hosting plan, this is a huge disadvantage. Many people don’t bind to single site, they have several maybe many. But if you are willing to pay more for shared hosting like twice the price, they let you to host multiple web sites. But again this will cause you a lot of headaches. Why? I have started with shared hosting to blogging, as I started to have some traffic, I started to get warning mails from the hosting company, nagging about my sites use extra resources, so the overall quality of the other sites on the server are decreasing. Even they closed my account for this reason. So I recommend you to stay away from such shared hosting plans, unless you are a beginner with a single site, and minimal traffic.

So here are a list of advantages/disadvantages. Recently I was using MediaTemple, Grid service (which is a shared hosting plan), and I was paying $20 for this service, what is worst is that you have a so called GPU limit (1000 GPUs per month), which is amount of processing time allocated to you per month, if you overuse/excess this amount you are charged for extra bucks, most of the time I was paying extra $15-20 for the excessive usage. I was paying a total of $30-40 for a shared hosting and I told myself, this is B.S, I had to move on a VPS or something… Before than that I was using GoDaddy’s shared hosting plan, which was even worst, because they suspended my hosting account several times for overuse (they don’t allow even the smallest spikes in the traffic, this means to bye bye to digg or other social media, that can drive instant traffic to your site), meaning that all my sites were down for days, so this caused me hundreds of dollars, hundreds of visitors, and loss of prestige. Currently I am using Netdirekt’s VPS service. Paying 25 €uros, I’ll tell you later that this price is really optimal, if you compare performance, quality, limits and availability.

Advantages

• Easy to manage
• Considerably cheaper than VPS or Dedicated (starting from $3 per month)
• Ready for deployment (Generally no initial setup)
• Ready-to-use control panels (Varies among the hosting companies)
• Built-in statistics tracking

Disdvantages

• Limited amount of resource allocated to you. (small amount of drive space, max num of 20-25 databases and other such limits)
• Extra charges applied or Account is suspended  for over use of resources.
• No customization on the server, you have to stick what is installed.
• Can’t handle traffic spikes, (Even if they say it can, it CAN’T, they will be charging you with extra cash, this is not handling)
• Risk of losing your visitors as well as your prestige. (When your account is suspended, it may take days to fix the so called “problem”, so think about it, your sites will show, forbidden, 404 and etc.. for days)

Virtual Private Server

Don’t let the word “Virtual” bring you down, focus on the part “Private Server”, yes there is a sharing principle in this but you can’t pass the borders. What if you overuse, or overload it? Simply, you just affect your own availability, meaning that, all your websites hosted on this VPS will have a decreased service quality, you can only damage yourself.! Not the others… So think about a real hardware that is divided in to 4 VPS, and resources are allocated that no one can use others. This is not much different than dedicated server in the user perspective, not in the underlying hardware. Because in dedicated server, you are the only user of that hardware, and likely to have more processing power/capability.

Virtual Private Servers are offered in a broad range of choices. Only variance is in the prices, higher price is for to offer a ready system (everything is pre-installed) out of the box. Apache, PHP, MySQL are already installed, typically such system is called “LAMP”. Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP the fantastic four. So if don’t want to struggle anything, and you want everything to be ready, this may be the option. But if you ask me, If you don’t want to struggle anything, then why do you want to have a VPS? You may still go on using shared hosting by paying extra cash for extra resources. In my opinion,  just go for a from-scratch option, so by this way you may spend some money on extra hardware, such as instead of having 1GB RAM, you may have 2GB RAM. You just make an initial amount of effort for installing and setting up everything to have a running system. After all, you will be paying a lot less for every month than out-of-the-box system. Also you will be learning Linux, isn’t it awesome ?

Let’s compare VPS with a shared hosting account. In VPS, the most important thing is that you are the administrator (root) of the whole system. You have a shell access to do everything. You can install anything you want, you are the responsible for choosing the software. This may be an advantage if you are an experienced user.  You decide on everything. You can use all the available limit of the system. Probably you will not be facing with risk of suspended account or paying extra money. (If you want to earn some cash, so why the heck you will pay extra for a limited service.). Briefly you own that machine, do what you want with it. But as in always, power comes with responsibilities, don’t forget to schedule some auto-backup mechanism, because the company will not be offering any backups (unless you request so and pay more), you are responsible for any data loss, they are only responsible for hardware failures. Also another subject is Security. You are also responsible to secure whole system, and being aware of what’s going on. Besides these disadvantages, there is another advantage, generally the bandwidth limits are much more that shared ones, also the bandwidth is a lot bigger than the shared ones. Companies allows you to install different kinds of Linux distros, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Slackware and etc.. So you can choose your own flavor.

Currently I am paying 25 €uros per month for a VPS from Netdirekt.de with the following properties:

CPU: 2.000 MHz
Ram: 2048 MB
HDD: 250 GB
Traffic: 5000 GB
OS: Debian Lenny

When you compare it with a shared hosting like MediaTemple ’s Grid Service which costs $20-40 per month to me. There is no logical reason stay with such service, so I have moved VPS. Now, I freely playing with it, adding new websites easily and without fear of overuse of resources. So following list will present you a big picture about VPS.

 Advantages

• Freedom (You are free to change everything, you are the administrator)
• Customized configuration and softwares (You decide what to install)
• No risk of suspended account
• No limits, you may wish to use all available limit
• Increased speed, quality and availability than shared hosting
• Higher efficiency (Cost/Performance proportion is higher than shared hosting)

Disdvantages

• Initial effort to make whole system running (If you prefer a scratch one, not a ready system out of the box)
• Hard to manage for inexperienced users (but you’ll get used to it, you’ll gain experience time after time, remember “Rome was not built in one day”)
• You are responsible for backup & maintenance.
• You are responsible for your system security. (Be careful! This is a tough task)

Dedicated Server

Dedicated Server is similar with VPS in usage, you have Linux system with shell access, so you have the same degree of freedom. But Dedicated Server differs in hardware aspect. Because you are the only owner of the underlying hardware, so you may modify the hardware configuration as well as software. So in future, you may consider expansion, adding memory, disk space and etc… But this all means extra cost but if you are running a big business (large scale), this option is more suitable for you, since you have possibility to modify the actual hardware, according to your needs.

The biggest disadvantage is the cost. There are broad range of choices, but even a slower Dedicated Server will cost too much money. If you are serious about your business and gaining a lot much (4x-5x times) than the amount you are paying, then it’s worth paying for Dedicated Server, else VPS is surely enough. All the advantages and disadvantages of VPS applies to Dedicated Server and plus the following ones.

Additional Advantages over VPS

• You may alter the hardware configuration (Future upgrades)
• You are the only owner of the hardware
• Proportionally higher performance, speed and bandwidth

Additional Disadvantages over VPS

• Since, you are the only owner, your responsibility increases, so you need to spend more time on periodic maintenance & backups.
• Increased cost.

Before ending this post, I want to clarify that I didn’t mean say one is better than the other, in some cases one is preferable among others. Briefly, If you are beginner, go with a shared hosting, but if you feel that you are growing and earning some money that can afford VPS, don’t wait for the hosting company to push you to pay more for resources, or suspend your account, just switch to a VPS, and introduce yourself some degree of freedom. If you have started to gain some serious amount of money, then you can call it as a business, so go for a Dedicated Server.

Have Fun!

1 )Earn money from best earning niches. (MoneyComes First)

or

2) Write about something that you know about. (Real blogging)

As you can realize, I don’t aim at earning, I write about things that I enjoy. But you may want to target at earnings.
Read the rest of this entry »

List:

• Carry your laptop/hand-held with you
• Collect ideas
• Write down the ideas you collected
• Organize them
• Drink something, complete the story

Technorati Tags: Vacation, Blogging, Holiday, Boost

Many bloggers are hopeless, they just work hard and run their blogs for months, but they still don’t get any valuable amount of visitors. This is just because something is wrong with your content. Maybe the most anticipated subject by bloggers.Catching a good content and idea must not be so easy, because among those millions of bloggers only some of them earn much.Problogger,John Chow,etc..

So have you ever think that what if you spend your time on your content rather than your design? Probably you will start to get some loyal readers, and your feed chicklet will show a number greater than 10. If you still lack of ideas what may your content be, you have to ask for yourself, you know the things that you are better on.

Searching other sites, browsing many blogs in your niche can be very helpful, to do so, get a feedreader, add your favorite blog feeds and it will be much more easier to follow many blogs.This week Problogger touched an interesting point Go Shopping and Improve Your Blog , this was really an interesting experiment for me. He asked for his readers go shopping, observe the people and note their ideas about what is going on around. Problogger himself did the same thing, he went the nearest shopping center and catched some ideas. The most important point is that he related the ideas with blogging.

An example is :

3. Lines and Waiting in Queues Kill Customer Loyalty

(He related this with slow load times of sites.)

To catch some ideas, the only thing is to look around something, go away from your computer.Think about your content, how to improve it, or maybe you have to change your niche.You have to know your professions and skills, and choose your niche accordingly.People who are successful are the people who aware of their environment, having a good reasoning, and relating every experience with their jobs by catching common points.
Sitting and waiting will not inspire you, do different things and read a lot.

Tags: Content

Tags: Restore, Rollback, Tip, WordPress

Here are the advantages:

• No slow downs caused by browser
• You do not need to open your control panel
• Easy to use, so you don’t waste your time.
• Comfort of sending posts from your desktop

Search for “BlogDesk”, the best offline software.

Tags: BlogDesk , Offline , Editor , WordPress

1. Google Webmaster Tools : Learn your pagerank distribution, get an idea of query keywords, know your incoming and outgoing links, manage your sitemap. Sitemaps are very useful and helps Google to index it.
2. Google Analytics : You should definitely get an account for this service, not any other free services offering such a service with quality and useful details. You will be aware of your visitors that where are they coming , what are they looking for.
3. iWebTool : Get your site’s rankings and you can make a future PR prediction. This service does not require any registration, tens of tools.
4. Google Adsense : Even the creatures out of this galaxy is aware of what Google Adsense is. Get an account to make money from you site. I will not explain this service, there are dozens of sites, forums for this, just google it.
5. Social Bookmarking : This is service is provided by many popular communities like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. An awesome way to publicize your content and make people aware of your existence. Start with Digg.com and you will explore others.
6. Technorati : Blogger community, people search about anything in blogs. Get a Technorati account and use technorati tags to get your blog indexed with Technorati.
7. FeedBurner : Help your readers to get news from your site with their favorite feed reader.
8. Extreme Tracking : Get realtime statistics about your site, really useful. You will get a detailed knowledge about your referers.
9. MyBlogLog : Community of Bloggers, you can discover who visits your sites.
10. Digital Point Forums : To get an answer to any question, discover new ways to promote your site, #1 forum of digital world.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Tips, Services, Content, Traffic, Optimize

Becoming a webmaster is a tough job and it does not mean that you sit and design something then you publish it. No, absolutely not, you have to use forums, web directories, make link-exchanges; simply you have to get your web site promoted. But do not forget that original content is always much easier to promote. Once you have really nice services, people will quickly be aware of you web site and will use your services. So firstly build your own original content then start promoting you website on different places. Firstly begin with registering yourself on the webmaster forums, and then take advices from experienced users of forum, then you may make link exchange with other people in the forum. But do not forget that high PR (page rank) the more quality links you can get. High PR is another problem for beginners. Most web site owners suffer from low PR. If you want high PR, then you must buy some links from higher PR web sites. Then only you can make quality link exchanges. These are the first steps to get your site known. Besides link exchange, you should submit your web address to many web directories; they are quite helpful in the beginning. Also do not forget to submit your website to search engines and before submitting you should make SEO analysis on your site, you may search what is SEO? And how to make a SEO analysis, then you reveal the points and then you can optimize your site for search engines. Another good way of promoting your web site is get you site reviewed on related sites or blogs. Again you have to pay a bit for this. But believe me you will get much more than your money when you started to get some traffic. You may use AdSense and other advertisements to get money from your website, and in my opinion AdSense is the best. I know many people make thousands of dollars per month. The key point is good content. Once you created your own original content and you have to update your web site frequently to keep visitors coming and visiting. Updating a website is a crucial point on getting loyal visitors. One of the most important point is that do not ever pay for traffic to your site. Most of them are fake traffic or robots, you can not make money and also they are prohibited by many advertisement systems such as AdSense. Also do not pay for useless softwares that promise thousands of visitors starting from tomorrow. They are all fake softwares! Do not believe them; do not waste your money. Such softwares are mostly URL submitters. They just submit your web site to worthless web directories and to search engines. This means nothing; there is no way that you can get thousands of people just submitting your site into web directories and to search engines. If it was real, why would they try to sell you that product, they will probably building hundreds of websites everyday and billions of visitors to those sites. No way! The only thing to get many visitors is having an original and useful content. When you have the nice content then you promote your site. You have to wait at least 6 months to get a high traffic; if still you are not able to get remarkable traffic then you have done something wrong. Even you have a very original content; people may not be interested in. So having a original content plus meaningful and relevant content is the golden rule. Then you just promote your web site and wait people to come. Do not forget that you have to pay a bit while promoting, and if you use an advertisement system, later you may earn what you spent. The only way to earn from a web site is selling products, offering services or advertisement systems.

Technorati Tags: Tips, Traffic, Blogging