In these days of Internet-driven business, getting traffic to your website is something that no one can afford to overlook. Moreover, many business sites may be hindered if people try to attract people using “black hat” tools or techniques.

In order to get legitimate traffic to your website, without risking your site’s (and by extension, to your company’s) reputation, you may want to turn to professional traffic-generation sites such as FullTraffic.

FullTraffic is a leading, professional, international company that offers traffic packages for enhancing the reach of your website. Some of the traffic packages offered by this company are Global Traffic Package, Country Targeted Package, Category Targeted Package and Gambling Targeted Package.

Interestingly, the cost of all these packages is really affordable. For instance, their special traffic package costs as little as $399, and you can buy traffic packages of 1,000,000 Global visitors (plus 10% additional visitors) with this package. This is something no webmaster should overlook,

Tags: business sites, global visitors, legitimate traffic, traffic generation, traffic package

It’s the eternal question… What web hosting service should I choose? Clients and friend, both tech-savvy and newbies, have the same questions when they want to start their website and need to buy a hosting account.

If you believe the web hosting companies, they will all say they are the best and that you should definitely buy the account from them. But, as any purchase decision in life, things are not always the way sellers (or telemarketers) try to make you believe.

In cases like that, I always suggest to look webhosting companies on WebHostingChoice.com where they can find the top 10 web hosting companies, right on their homepage. Also, they rank the best hosting companies according to the type of services you need (PHP, ASP, DB support, etc.) so you can find the best match to your needs.

Next time you need a helping hand, there you have a good resource to clear any doubts.

Tags: purchase decision, web hosting companies, web hosting service, webhosting companies

If you own or manage a website, blog or forum you must already know the importance of having a good web hosting service for your site. No one likes a website that goes down every now and then and, on the other hand, website hosting must be cheap and should provide all the essential services to get your site up and running without having the pay a premium price for it.

But there lies the rub…. How can we find a good web hosting service at an affordable price? Well, the answer is simple. Find out what others have found at Web Hosting Geeks, a cool site that provides service analysis, reviews, ratings, awards, and other interesting points about the various services offered by hosting companies around the globe. We can filter the list of hosting services according to our needs (Windows, Linux, with PHP, with Database support, etc.)

For instance, if we choose the best hosting on Windows, we see the monitoring for the recent days of the service uptime for each of the listed service providers so that we can make a decision based on this data (and price against features) I mention service uptime because it is very important as it will determine whether your site will be up or will go down often, leaving your users without service.

This wealth of information is very important to web developers and users alike. And having it for free at Web Hosting Geeks makes it even more valuable

Tags: analysis, Hosting, uptime

In most cases, whenever we start a new web project, whether it’s blogging-related or a demo site, we tend to use free hosting because it ensures that we won’t waste money if the project dies on us or doesn’t work as expected.

However, once the project takes off, and we already know that we want to continue working on it (and perhaps the people who hired us and some external investors show a lot of interest) it’s time to take it to the next level.

And the first step for accomplishing that is to get your own web hosting. Affordable web hosting would be ideal but it has to accommodate all our needs, be stable, etc. because otherwise it would backfire on us and put an end to an otherwise superb project.

ImHosted is a one of such superb web hosting companies, with a reputation of reliability and stellar customer service that precedes it. Just run a Google search about ImHosted and you’ll see what I’m talking about. To put in a few words, it’s web hosting company that offers high quality and excellent reliability hosting solutions to customers all over the world, no matter what projects they intend to run.

One of the greatest benefits of signing up with imhosted.com, is that you are always their number one priority. This is very important, especially when you just started a project and are still learning the inner works of the service and their skilled and highly professional support team is guaranteed to be there for you, no matter the size of your project, your company or where it’s located.

Tags: Customer Service, Google

Posted by Duncan Morris

I’m hoping this post will become the first in a series of posts from me, talking more about SEO from a developer’s perspective. A lot of the posts around tend to be more centered on SEO from a marketing perspective. If you have anything you’d like to see covered, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best.

The work done by developers rarely hits the headlines but can often be the difference between success and failure in an SEO project. The following list may not be groundbreaking but then SEO often isn’t. I think the following all fall under the heading of advanced common sense…

The way developers think makes us a special bunch and can give us an advantage in a number of tasks that a typical SEO will do regularly. Here is my list of things where thinking like a developer gives you an advantage over the more creative types.

1) Realise that you can get a long way with a great site

I think there is a tendency for SEOs to dive in and start trying to gain exposure and links, often overlooking the massive improvements that can be gained from fixing things closer to home. Ensuring the basics are right should be the first step in any SEO project. In so many projects there are fundamental issues with the website that need to be fixed before the site will really reach its potential.

Even if you aren’t going to be making these changes, as a developer identifying the issues and suggesting alternatives is slap bang in the middle of your skill set. I hate to let the secret slip, but getting these things right is not rocket science, and often boils down to plain old common sense. A great start would be to read the illustrated guide to building a search-friendly website.

2) Develop stuff!

It turns out if you are good at building widgets you can cause quite a stir. Widgets, quizzes and online tools, sounds like something a developer would knock up (read carefully craft).

I’m sure that if you sat down for an hour you could think of something that would make the life of people in your industry better. Maybe you can make them more efficient, or just make life a little more enjoyable for them. Providing tools to other people in your industry is a fantastic way of helping to build inbound links. The inbound links to the seo tools and the IP Location Lookup tool in particular is no coincidence.

3) Test, tweak, rinse, repeat.

I don’t imagine I’m the only developer that spends my life testing things. Rarely does a program work first time. It turns out these skills aren’t as common as you’d think. I always tell the story of when I was in my final year of a computer science course and earnt some pocket money by being a lab demonstrator. Every week, without fail someone would ask me to help them fix a compile error along the lines of. “Missing ; on line 152″. Every week I replied with “Can you look at line 152, do you see anything missing?”.

Anyway, me reminiscing isn’t helping you become a great SEO. However understanding how to test stuff does. Rather than relying on hearsay, gossip and forums that are out of date, why not setup some tests. Does a h1 tag actually help? Don’t take my word for it, set up two websites that are all but identical. Make up a random keyphrase, put it in a h1 on one site, and in a p tag on the other and see what happens. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should ignore what is being said, and re-invent the wheel, but there are a massive number of things that would benefit from a test. Ok, you want an example, I’d like to know what works better for geo-locating a website – microformats vs address?

4) Reverse engineer other sites

I’ve just talked about testing and how these skills are not as common as you’d think. Another area where these skills are immensely valuable is when you are reverse engineering another site. An inquisitive mind and a few good tools will get you a long way.

For those of you not used to this sort of detective work, i’d recommend starting off by installing the user agent switcher, upgrading the user agents list and set your browser to identify as Googlebot. Now simply sit back and get on with your job. Within hours I guarantee you’ll see something weird happening. Now simply work out what is happening. Once you know what is happening, all you have to do is think about what the website is trying to accomplish. I promise you, no-one codes cloaking based on user agent by accident.

Other things to try, include disabling javascript and blocking all cookies. Try this on all your clients, if things go a bit funky, then you can jump in and save the day.

Finally for the real geeks among you, try browsing with lynx. A site that works well with lynx, both technically and in terms of the users is likely to work fairly well for the search engines. Quite often a site will ‘work’ but will be so badly architected that it may as well be in flash. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a well architected site is worth its weight in gold, both to the search engines and to the users of the site.

5) Become a blackhat!

If all else fails turn blackhat. Most of the blackhats I’ve met are developers at heart. Blackhat is all about doing something dodgy (by which I mean against google’s t&cs) once, then working out how to get a computer to do it whilst you sleep. Link farms, comment spam, write once, computer repeats for you. No content to write, no networking to do, hang-on, why am I still whitehat?

Apart from the “doing something dodgy” part, that last paragraph can also be applied to whitehat. By automating tasks you do on a regular basis, you can end up doing more work with less effort.

6) Don’t be afraid to learn

As a developer I feel like I never stop learning. There is always another api to get your head round. When presented with often badly written documentation, most people run a mile. A developer on the other hand jumps in, tries stuff and eventually hacks something together (the fact that this needs to be deleted and re-written, but never is, is neither here nor there). The difference between a developer and a ‘normal’ person is that a developer presses buttons to see what happens. A ‘normal’ person is scared to press a button in case they break something.

So go ahead, and learn something new. Why not get your head around some stats. Perhaps you could ‘knock up a online regression tool‘ while you’re at it.

The last point is the one area where a developer (in general) pretty much sucks. Networking, speaking to people, putting yourself out there. I know it’s hard but having a trusted network is a massive shortcut to being a truly great SEO.

7) Break the stereotype

One of things I’m least good at is networking, online. I have a twitter account but I don’t say much. I’m self-concious about what I say, so I often write replies, re-write them then delete them. However if you really want to become a great SEO building up a network is a fantastic way of opening doors and getting your name out there. Luckily I can just piggy back on the networking that Will and Tom do.

I think it is worth saying that the way to become great at anything is to play to your strengths. I long ago realised that I am far better placed, sat in my corner coding stuff than trying to be overly creative.

So, lets get some debate going. What else do developers do better than everyone else?

Tags: Computer, Google, headlines, Marketing, Network, Networking, Search Engines, Spam, tools