Webmasters Profit Pak Blog

Changing Web Hosting Providers

If you would like to cut costs (checkout http://www.site-webhosting.com) or are no longer satisfied with their current web host provider maybe it is time to think about changing web host providers. Take time to plan your transfer so that you won't lose any files and data.

Web Hosting Change Checklist:

• Domain name:where is your domain registered? How do you login and change nameservers?
• Your current IP address________ and your new IP address____________
• Your login username and password for old web host__________ and new control panel or shell access via SSH username and password __________________
• Make a list of email addresses including usernames and passwords
• Make a list of databases, usernames and passwords
• make a list of installed software

Checkout your new web host control panel, get familiar with how things work at your new host and to try everything out, including sending test emails and uploading files.

Change Your Domain Record

Login to your domain registrar and change your name servers. This usually occurs within 72 hours, often much sooner. Dome domain registrars can transfer a domain within 2 hours, so check the new IP address often and upload files as soon as possible to avoid website "downtime".

Transferring the Site to the New Web Hosting Provider:

Download files: Open your FTP program and enter the FTP address at your old web host (e.g. ftp.yoursite.com). Once logged onto the server, right click on your main folder (normally public_html or www) and choose download.

Choose a local folder on your own computer to store the files, Click OK, and watch all your files being downloaded onto your computer. You will still have all your files on the server too. Please downloads can take a quite abit of time depending on the number and size of files.

Download databases: Login to your old web hosts Control Panel Go to databases ( usually My SQl), and use either phpmyadmin (usually located towards bottom of page) or a similar program . Choose the databases you want to download and click on "export". You will then come to a screen information about the database. towards the bottom of the page look for; "Normal or None", "GZip", or "Zip". chose one and press download or submit. Save this file to a folder on your computer. Repeat for each databases.

Upload files to the new host:

Using your FTP program connect to your new web host. Right click on the folder (e.g. public_html or www -- or if not present no folder maybe required- ask your web hosting provider if you are unsure) and choose upload. When asked where to upload these files from, choose the folders and files to upload.

Upload databases: login to the control panel at your new web hosting provider, go to Mysql, and use phpmyadmin or a similar program. Choose the insert or upload option and select the location of the database file you downloaded before that is stored on your computer. Click "ok or submit". During the import you will see some database commands, but towards the bottom it will tell you if it failed or was successful. Be patient, don't interrupt this process, wait for the final statement telling you if the import was successful. Repeat this process for all of your Mysql databases.Final Steps

• Set up email address using your new control panel. Use the "help" if needed to learn how to do this at the new web host.
• check that all your software on your new web host site is working properly.
• you might have to change config files if Mysql databases, username or password are different from your old web host. Make sure that all links work.

  Reccomended Web Hosting: http://www.site-webhosting.com . Excellent Customer Service Plans for all size websites $5-$20/month

  Please Email comments to Geraldine Jensen Posted at 5:47 PM
  Edited on: Sunday, March 06, 2005 6:26 PM
  Categories:
  

Choosing Keywords

Choosing Keywords

One of the most difficult parts of setting up a website, and marketing it, concerns determining the best keywords to use. When choosing keywords try to answer these questions. Do the keywords really best describe your site? (relevancy is a must for Google!). Do they tell the story about the products you are selling? Will they target the right customers? If you have a site, which is in a very competitive market you may have to be creative when choosing keywords. For example, Google returns, 594,000,000 possible pages for a search done on the word, software-- Oh My- How would anyone find a site in that crowd!.

Websites most easily found by search engines are niche sites where there are fewer choices. However, it is hard to be niche site when one is selling popular products! Or is it? Try using keywords in your meta tags and on you website which are more exact and create a niche. For example, if you are selling advertising, try California Website Advertising. I found help to expand my keyword list, niche it, at wordtracker.com and goodkeywords.com and by using the Overture and Google Keyword Tools.

Frequency of keyword placement on a website is important. Use a keyword too many times and the search engines will think you are spamming it. If you use a keyword more than 5 times in the keyword meta tags, search engines consider it spam. But, it must appear at least four times on a page to be picked up as an important keyword by the search engines. Placing keywords as the name of a link and as headlines placed between headline codes, H1 and /H1 is important. If this takes up too much space because the font is too large reduce the size inside the H1 and /H1 tags by using font tags.

Mark Horrell's Keyword Density Analyzer very helpful. It will tell you which words, and frequency of each word, that the search engine robots will see when it visits your website. With this information, you are abe to determine it you have optimized you site appropriately. See for more marketing tips.

Help for PPC Keyword Selection

PPC, Pay Per Click advertising is a way to deliver targeted customers to your website. The major PPC's are Google Adwords, Overture, Kannoodle, Findwhat, Mamma .... There are several resources that can help you find good keywords. Wordtracker.com has a trial for finding niche keywords, Goodkeywords.com has software that lets you check Overture for suggestions and create meta tags on the spot. Google Adwords has recently introduced a new keyword finder, you need a Google Adwords account to use this tool. Overture is probably the best known, with a good keyword finding tool and a bid tool to let you know what the current bid is per keyword. To maximize keyword effectiveness you need a great ad that attracts customers. To get help writing ads, I use eZy Ezine Ad Formatter. I would be happy to provide you a copy of it Email me. A good ad consists of three parts: Attention grabbing headline, product description and the benefits. Be sure re to try various resources to develop your keyword list for your webpage meta tags and any PPC service you use.

Top 15 Ways to Promote Your Website

1. Get a high Page Rank in Search Engines. It is important to optimize your website for best results:

Title Meta Tags should include your website's top keywords. For example, if you have a Hawaii travel site it should include the keywords: Hawaii travel

Description Meta Tags should also include the same keywords

Keyword Meta Tags should include your keywords in various forms, but not more than 5 times, otherwise; the search engines will penalize you for spam. For example; cheap Hawaii travel, airfare to Hawaii, Hawaii hotels, cheap travel, Hawaii vacations,

Use the Alt tags of images to emphasize your keywords. For example, a picture of palm tree could be alt="Hawaii travel plan"

Submit to search engines monthly, but not more than that, unless you make major changes to content. Be economical, buy and use your own software to submit to search engines. For example, Advanced Site Submitter software submits to the main 66 search engines.

Be sure to include a paragraph about your website which includes your key words towards the top of your website's home ( index page)

2. Join Online Forums

Discuss issues that relate to your website.

Be sure to use a signature that includes your website address and motto

Do not spam forums or they will ban you from participating

3. Buy Traffic. Popunders, Paid to Click, etc. will bring some visitors, but most of all, they help you get a better Page Rank which is in part based on average number of "hits' and visitors to your site. Get 10,000 visitors for $22.75

4. List product for sale on ebay.com, bizrate.com, and amazon. Having links on websites with high page rank increases your page rank.

5. List your website with directories such as DMOZ. Do a search for websites with directories which relate to your website. For example, "travel directories" put it in quotes, and you will get back sites which include those exact words.

6. Advertise in ezines which target your customers

7. Use Pay Per Click Advertising- Google adwords, Overture, Momma, Kanoodle and more.

8. Get listed in Google's Froogle for free

9. Set up link exchanges with websites that target your customers. Try to get websites with a high Page Rank to exchange links with you.

10. Pay for banner or text links ads on pages with high Page Ranking to improve your Page Rank

11. Join a Webring

12.Send Our news Releases once a month

13. Ask website visitors to sign-up for a news letter or special offer emails. Use free gifts as an incentive to get customer to sign- up software downloads make great incentives and bonuses.

14. Nominate your site for awards

15. Do off line promotion, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and newspaper ads to name just few.

Getting a Google Page Rank 3 in Six Months

Getting a Google Page Rank 3 in Six Months

I entered the world of website ownership in July of 2004. I did a Google search for “websites for sale” and found that e-Bay was a big seller. I had learned some web programming as the acting webmaster for a non-profit organization. My training consisted of reading, Learning Web Design: A Beginners Guide to HTML, Graphics and Beyond by Jennifer Neiderst.

Many websites are for sale on e-Bay. After watching the ads for a couple of weeks I decided to buy two sites: a travel site (www.epictravels.com), and a web tools reseller site (www.webmastersprofitpak.net).

 

My choice was based on the domain names, the product being sold, and the sense they were good products to sell. I had read an article that said search engines were more likely to index and rank a website where the product or topic was part of the domain name. My total investment was less than $300. The diet site was a drop-shipping business and required the most time. The travel site was an affiliate so no web programming was needed, only advertising. The web tools site required some web programing. I decided that a few additional web tools to sell would be good, so back to e-Bay I went to purchase more software to sell.

Next came submitting the sites to search engines. I found www.addme.com where you can submit sites for free---this definitely fit my budget. I also hand-submitted the sites to Dmoz, Yahoo (free), AltaVista and any other directories I could find. I found www.directoryarchives.com, a directory of directories and submitted the sites to as many of the directories as possible. I also began to do searches based on the keywords of my websites and did add the url, or submit site, or exchange links to those who offered it. I figured that people searching for my product were likely to find the same sites I found.

Within about 3 months, my sites were listed on Google, Ask Jeeves, Excite and several others when the exact website name was entered--- a big step forward. I still had made only a few sales and noone had found my sites by using the search engines. I decided to focus my attention on only one site, www.webmastersprofitpak.net, because it was the only site that had any sales and the profit margin was highest on that site.

I began to experiment with advertising. I opened Overture, Google Adwords , Mamma, and Kanoodle accounts. I signed up for Adsense. I bought ezine ads, and visitors from Traffic Taxi, did a popunder ad and newsletter ad with bravenet.com. I signed up with companies that pay people to visit your site, I tried an adblast---all with little or no results. I found site-reference.com and bought ads for the software site in the newsletter. Finally, I began to make some sales..

But to stay in business long-term and to reduce advertising costs, I needed to be able to make sales based on search engine results. I bought some site submission software which I now sell and began to submit my sites page by page. I also signed up with Microsoft bcentral.com and began to optimize my website pages.

Now, after six months, one of my sites has a great Google page rank. www.webmastersprofitpak.net ranks 3. Website traffic is about a 2,000 hits/week. I have high hopes for 2005! I have learned a lot in the past six months especially about search engine submission, optimization, directories, and links. See www.webmastersprofitpak..net for Reseller Tips.