We’re changing our current default version of PHP from 4 to 5 from the 6th September. As many of you will know, to use PHP 5 at the moment you need to enable this in a .htaccess file on the server. From the 6th September, we will swap this around so that PHP 5 is the default and PHP 4 may be called via a .htaccess file in the directory you wish to use PHP 4 from.

This is unlikely to affect many people as nearly all scripts written in PHP now operate on PHP 5 (for example all the PHP scripts available in your hosting control panel).

We’re now at a point where having PHP 5 as the default version makes more sense for users; PHP 5 was released in 2004, whilst PHP 4 hasn’t been updated since 2008. If you’re operating legacy software that will not work on PHP 5, please set up a .htaccess file with the following line in it:

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Keyword Optimization

The first step in a search engine optimization campaign is to choose your keywords or keyphrases for each of your web pages. Keywords are the terms that search engine users type in the search box to conduct a query. The right keywords are those that:

1. clearly describe the purpose and content of your site, and,
2. allow your site to show up as close to the first results page as possible.
A good position doesn't depend only on your choice of keywords. It also depends on how well do you position those keywords in your web page, and how many quality external pages link to you. However, choosing the wrong keywords can throw off your entire search engine optimization strategy, so you need to invest a few hours and make sure you do it right.

Let's start with your homepage. Look at it carefully and write down the words and phrases that best define your site. Try to form two or three word phrases, since competition for one-word keyphrases is fierce, and it is virtually impossible to get a top position for them. That is why, from now on, we will talk about keyphrases, not keywords. Once you have developed your list of potential keyphrases you are ready for the next step: to analyze the demand and supply for those keyphrases, and choose the best ones (those with good demand and not enough supply).

We will first check the demand for your selected keyphrases. For this, we will go to Google Awords Search Term Suggestion Tool:

Google Awords

Google Awords is a popular pay-per-click search engine. You will then type each of the keyphrases you selected, and see how many people search for those terms. This tool will show you only those searches conducted in Overture (and only in one month time). However, the relative popularity of each search term will be very similar in other search engines as well. In addition to telling you if your selected keyphrases are popular, this tool will show you other keyphrases that you may not have thought about, which may even be more relevant to your site.
For example, if your first keyphrase was "Italian Restaurant", the Search Term Suggestion Tool will also display other popular search terms, like: "Gourmet Italian Restaurant", "Northern Italian Restaurant", "Italian Restaurant Pizzeria", "Italian Restaurant Miami", etc. You may also try other keyphrases, for example: "Italian Cuisine", and come up with more specific keyphrases, like: "Fine Italian Cuisine", "Italian Cuisine Miami", "Northern Italian Cuisine", "Italian Cuisine Fine Dining", "Gourmet Italian Cuisine", etc.

What you have done is to validate and enlarge your pool of popular, in-demand, potential keyphrases for your web page. The next step is to check the supply, or, in other words, to see how much competition there is for your selected keywords. Naturally, you want to focus on keyphrases where competition is less fierce. For example, choosing "Italian Restaurant" alone will certainly hurt you. There are so many of them that your chances of showing up in an advantageous position within the search results are pretty slim.
Having said that, get your list of keyphrases, go to Google ( http://www.google.com ) and type-in each of them in the search box. Enter your keyphrases within quotation marks (to filter-out less relevant results), and see how many results each individual query produces, making a note of those with a relatively small number of results (less competition). You will stick with the keyphrase that:

1. Best describes the topic and content of your page
2. Is a popular search term according to Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool.
3. Generates a relatively small number of results after performing the Google search.
If "Gourmet Italian Restaurant" is the keyphrase that best meets these three criteria, it will become your primary keyphrase. To get even better results, you can choose a second keyphrase to make your page more relevant to an even more specific niche. For example, if your restaurant is in Miami, you can consider "Miami" a second keyphrase. Once you have chosen the keyphrases for you homepage, do the same for the other pages on your site.

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Selling web hosting is a very lucrative business and the ROI for a successful reseller is an attractive proposition for many entrepreneurs. For only £18.99 a month (with us:)) anyone can resell web hosting packages at prices and specifications of their own choosing. If a reseller creates a package priced at £4.99 per month (which is cheap) they only need 6 customers to break even each month, and then each new customer beyond that becomes a profit.

But this all relies on a reseller being able to attract traffic to convert in to customers, and that is the tricky bit. Search engines are most sites’ primary source of traffic, and one of the most important ranking factors for a high position is the quantity and quality of links pointing to a domain name. If you have aspirations of setting up a dedicated web hosting business your marketing strategy must include search and link building. Here are a few ideas to apply, some are quick wins and others are medium to long term commitments.

Quick wins
CSS gallery submissions
CSS and web design galleries are a great source of traffic and incoming links but there are literally thousands of them to consider. There is a solution with CSS gallery submission services which will do it all for you (for a fee). The three I am aware of that have a good depth and breadth of sites on their list are http://www.thecssgallerylist.com/, http://galleryrush.com/ and http://www.cssgallerysubmission.com/.

Online press release
Announce your launch, promotion or new product through an online press release to raise both awareness and build incoming links from web hosting news resources. Generic PR distributions services such as prweb.com ($200) are picked up by web hosting news publishers and http://www.pressadvance.com/ specialises in distributing web hosting news ($85) and will even write it for you ($135).

Free resources
People love free things and a lot of companies have used this to create link bait by giving things away with no catches. Areas to look at as a web host to attract relevant incoming links are free icon sets, a WordPress theme, CSS template etc. If you do go down the free web template path add your URL in to the footer as well.

Get involved with the forums
Research the relevant web hosting and domain name forums that do not add “nofollow” to links or signatures and get involved in discussions. In no way are we recommending creating spammy posts, in fact they will backfire on you from a branding perspective. Become a genuine part of the conversation but use your domain name in your signature.

Write an article for a high PR site
There are more web design blogs that anyone man could count, many of them with a high PageRank and quite a few open to contributors writing for them as long as it is original and useful content. As part of the deal the author will often get a small biog and a link back to their site.

Directory submission
As with anything when it comes to SEO, directory relevance is key here. Generic directories that will take anyone for a fee will pass next to no link juice but niche/ industry specific directories who care about creating a genuine resource are definitely worth submitting to.

Long term link building
Write a blog
Blogs with useful and insightful articles are a fantastic source of building links, blogs with dry content, nothing new to say or full of press releases are a waste of time. If you have the time and the drive to commit to writing regular content, go for it, if you don’t, stay clear.

“Hosted by…” buttons
If you provide a great service some customers will be happy to associate themselves with you and carry a “hosted by…” button or link to you in their footer. Not all customers will go for this, but if you don’t make it available then none definitely will.

Being known as an expert and/ or leader
You would be amazed how many sites will link to a service recommending them or using them in a “top x” list having never used them themselves. The old saying “success breeds success” is true for link building. If you become well known enough within your niche people will link to you because you are perceived to be a market leader.

In this article I will point out a new way of marketing your business website by using a blog. Why should you care about blogging, that’s just something web designers or egotistical teenagers do to look cool in class. If Microsoft believes that business blogging is important then who are we to ignore it?.

Non Compete culture

Companies worldwide, and from my own personal experience especially in the UK, are very scared of giving away the smallest hint of what they actually do for their clients. Their perspective is often that any information they make available could be valuable to their competitors; they could get an edge over them if they knew their prices.
The Less Customers Know, The More We Can Charge

UK companies have a tendency to hide their prices and instead give an awkward quotation form for their services, even though they may supply competitive prices and a reliable service. If you picked up the phone they can probably give you a quote straight away.

Be Personable

There is an attitude that the less the client knows the more we can charge and to a great extent this is true. But these companies are missing a new wave of marketing, one that is transforming companies images and actually making business approachable and personal, even Microsoft, the brand tarnished with the evil corporation badge for so many years, has seen the error of its ways and is using blogging to become more personable.

Blog Marketing Gains Trust

The blog marketing scheme works by creating something that is mostly lost on online trading; trust. That website could be run by anyone with a few services to throw your way, you cannot actually judge what the company staff are actually like and there’s no way you can truly estimate the level of integrity the company has and how specialized they actually are.

These are all trust issues affecting paying customers choices every time they look at your website.

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If you keep up to date with the goings on in the SEO world you will have read about Google’s recent announcement regarding their inclusion of page load times in to their search ranking factors.  With a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon to use this to sell their services I wanted to address what this means to your website and what you can do to make improvements.

The full announcement from Google can be found here is well worth a read http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html. In summary the key points to take home are:

• Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests
• While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page
• Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point

To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools.  As you can see one of my own websites is incredibly slow (thanks to multiple JS and CSS files plus a few resource heavy WordPress plug-ins) and needs dome serious attention!

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You can now control your web hosting, domain names from your IPhone.

Available for both the iPhone and all Android powered phones, I.T Studio Hosting is proud to announce the launch of our Customer Control Panel and Hosting Control Panel for the iPhone and Android phone.

To access the new control panel from your phone, simply login as normal via our website and the new mobile control panel will automatically be displayed.

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What is the World Wide Web?

    * The Web is a network of computers all over the world.
    * All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other.
    * All the computers use a communication protocol called HTTP.

How does the  WWW work?

    * Web information is stored in documents called web pages.     * Web pages are files stored on computers called web servers.
    * Computers reading the web pages are called web clients.
    * Web clients view the pages with a program called a web browser.
    * Popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Firefox.

How does a Browser Fetch a Web Page?

    * A browser fetches a page from a web server by a request.
    * A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page address.
    * An address may look like this: http://www.example.com/default.htm.

How does a Browser Display a Web Page?

    * All web pages contain instructions for display.
    * The browser displays the page by reading these instructions.
    * The most common display instructions are called HTML tags.
    * HTML tags look like this <p>This is a paragraph.</p>.


What is a Web Server?

    * The collection of all your web pages is called your web site.
    * To let others view your web pages, you must publish your web site.
    * To publish your work, you must copy your site to a web server.
    * Your own PC can act as a web server if it is connected to a network.
    * Most common is to use an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

What is an Internet Service Provider?

    * ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.
    * An ISP provides Internet Services.
    * A common Internet service is web hosting.
    * Web hosting means storing your web site on a public server.
    * Web hosting normally includes email services.
    * Web hosting often includes domain name registration.