How to Monitor Your Web Hosting Server Performance

Your web hosting server's performance can influence your website performance. For instance, if the server is not online, your website will not be accessible to your site visitors. If you run a business based on your website, an unhappy visitor means an unhappy customer of your business.

In addition, search engines don't like websites on unstable servers too. If your web host server is down, your site cannot be crawled by search engine bots which may result in poor performance of your website in SERP. And your site gets less search engine exposure and your business will lose customers. Also see tips for search engine optimization.

So you should be very careful when choosing web hosting services. Some web hosting companies may promise 100% uptime. But the truth is that this is quite unlikely. Why? Because errors are just a fact of life. When running a web hosting server, errors can arise from human, software or hardware sources. That is why when selecting web hosting services, you should not rely on their promises. To get better results, you need to spend some time and do your own research. You can discuss your needs with experienced people on online tech forums. When reading other people's reviews online, pay more attention to complaints and negative reviews. After some reading and thinking, you can make your own judgment and arrive at your own decision. You need other people's opinions to choose the best web hosting service, but you should balance their opinions with your own judgment.

After setting up your blog or website on a hosting server, you can monitor your website’s response time and your server’s performance. For instance, pingdom.com is one of many companies which provide server monitoring services online. They provide paid services but they also offer a 30 day free trial period. If you need, you can try it to see whether it is useful. Of course, there may other sites providing similar services. Run a quick search online and do a comparison before making your final purchasing decision.

If you think that your server performance is good, you can stick with the current web hosting company. Otherwise, you can transfer your website to other web hosting sites. Remember web server monitoring is essential for building a successful website.

How to Check Multiple Website’s Page Rank at the Same Time |Free Bulk Pagerank Checker Online

Google pagerank is an important factor to estimate a website’s performance in Google search engine. So many people pay a lot of attention to this factor. When you just get to know a website, you don’t know how important the site is. But what you want to do is to check its Google pagerank, particularly when you want to get backlinks from the site. It is easy to check a single website’s pagerank, but it may not be easy to check a long list of websites’. Is there any why to check several websites’ pagerank at the same time? The answer is yes. What you need to do is to find a bulk pagerank check like the one on http://checkbulkpagerank.com/.

How to check bulk pagerank online for free
1. Go to the website http://checkbulkpagerank.com/.
2. Copy and paste your list of links into the box provided.
3. Click on the start button.
4. Wait for a while and let the program does its job. How long it will take to finish your checking depends on how long you list is.
5. After several minutes, you will see the results with the URLs listed on the left side and corresponding Google pagerank listed on the right side. You also get the option to save the report into a CSV file.

This is a quite handy search engine optimization (SEO) tool. If you want to know whether you like this free online bulk pagerank checker, you should give it a try.

Benefits of Having High Quality Content on Your Blog

You may have heard that many blogging experts said: “You need to write killer articles”. You may ask: Why do I need high quality content on my blog? And what are the benefits of having them? Here is my answer.

Benefits of Having High Quality Content on Your Blog:

1. To gain loyal readers. Simply put, your readers will like it. They will spend more time on your blog. They may subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. They may sign up for your opt-in list. They may become a loyal reader of your blog, and return to your blog from time to time to read more posts.

2. To gain social media exposures. If they like your work, they may share it with their friends on social networking site, which may bring in more visitors to your blog. In the meantime, you may get more backlinks to your blog after their promotion. It is a one of link building strategies commonly seen nowadays.

3. To get more organic traffic from search engines. If your readers like your blog, search engines may like your blog as well. Even though we don’t know exactly how search engines’ algorithms work, one thing is for sure that they are designed to serve web surfers better. Your blog readers are also customers of these search engines.

4. To generate more web content. Most people consider articles are web content, but actually audio clips and video clips can also be content for your blog. You can always convert your article into other types of content such as podcasts, video clips, free reports and so on.

5. To build your blog brand. Most importantly, when writing a blog, you are building a brand. The brand is you. The more your readers like your blog post, the more they will like you and trust you. So when you recommend products or services, they will trust your opinion and you will have a higher conversion rate. That is the basis for online affiliate marketing and email marketing.

In short, creating high quality content for your blog has many benefits, especially in the long run.

How to Post to Your Wordpress Blog from an iphone or an ipad

Do you own an iphone or ipad? Do you blog using Wordpress platform? If you do, you may be glad to know that you can manage your Wordpress blog from your iphone or http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifipad. But before enjoying blogging on your iphone or ipad, you need to download and install an application named Wordpress for iOS on your device. This application is available for free downloading from the Apple’s APP store. For your information, iOS is the operating system used on both iphones and ipads.

With the Wordpress for iOS installed, you can blog right from your iphone or ipad. Imagine how convenient it will be if you can post new articles and/or photos to your blog from your iphone. What makes it more impressive is that this application allows you to edit exiting posts as well.

To learn more information about the feature of this application and how to post to your Wordpress blog from an iphone or an ipad, visit the Wordpress for iOS official website at http://ios.wordpress.org/.

Creating Custom Wordpress Themes

One way to personalize your Wordpress blog is to change its theme. There are many ways to get the theme for your blog. First, you can download and install exiting free Wordpress themes. Second, you can spend some money to purchase a premium theme. Last, you can create your own Wordpress themes.

There are many benefits to have your own theme. For instance, you can easily customize it according to your needs by changing PHP, HTML/XHTML and CSS.
If you are interested in creating custom Wordpress themes, you may find the following resources useful.

Wordpress Theme Development

Wordpress Templates

Make your Own WordPress Theme
This tutorial is quite nice, and it includes 7 parts. Even though it is quite basic, I found it useful. The author assumes that you have enough knowledge in HTML, CSS and PHP though.

Anatomy of a Wordpress theme
In the old article, Ryan explained what files are included in the theme and their functions. It is very basic and it is very easy to understand.

Free WordPress Themes

If you host your own WordPress blog and want to personalize its appearance, you may need a WordPress theme. Then you may ask “Where can I download free WordPress Themes?” If this is the question that you ask, you are not alone. Many new bloggers may not have a clue either.
The followings are two websites where you can find tons of free WordPress themes.

One of them is the official theme directory at Wordpress.org, the website where you download the software. Here is the URL: http://wordpress.org/
extend/themes/.

The other is a website called “Best Wordpress Themes” and its link is http://www.bestwpthemes.com/.

On this site, both free and premium (paid) themes are available. All themes are clearly categorized according to their formats and purposes. For example, you can find 1-column, 2-column or 3-column themes. If you want to run an online magazine website, you may want to take a look in the list of best magazine-style themes.

The Free Beginner's Guide of Search Engine Optimization

Nowadays more and more people are getting interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As always, if there is a demand, there is a supplier. To run a quick search on Amazon.com or other online book stores, you will find tons of books cover this topic. Some of them are for beginners, others are for advanced users. Before learning advanced SEO techniques, you must have some basic knowledge first. For example, you have at least to know how major search engines work. I found the basic knowledge is important for better understanding those advanced tips and tricks. If you are interested in this topic, you may want to read the beginner’s guide of search engine optimization offered at seomoz.org. It is a free web-based content. You don’t need to buy anything or register any account to access it. As long as you get an internet access, you can read the guide online. Here is the link to the free guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

It contains 10 Chapters. Each chapter is focusing on one topic.
1. How do search engines work?
2. How do internet users interact with major search engines?
3. Why is search engine marketing important?
4. How to design a search engine friendly website or blog?
5. How to do keyword research?
6. What factors can influence websites’ SERP rankings?
7. How to get links and popularity for your website?
8. What are the search engine tools or services that you can use?
9. Other important aspects of search engine.
10. How to know whether the SEO of your site works?

The information provided in it may not be comprehensive, but it is useful at least for beginners. If you have time, you can read it. It is free any way.

3 Tools to Check Keyword Density and Relevancy

When performing search engine optimization (SEO) for my site, I consider to factors: importance and relevancy.

The followings are 3 online tools for checking keyword density and relevancy, which I just came across. These tools can help you find out how relevant your webpage is to your targeted keywords.

Dave Naylor's Keyword Density Tool at http://tools.davidnaylor.co.uk/keyworddensity/
To use this tool, you have to enter the URL that you want to check and several keywords. You can also try the advanced options to customize your search filter.

SEOmoz's Term Target Tool at http://www.seomoz.org/term-target
Ranks.nl Keyword Density & Prominence Analyzer at http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
When using this analyzer, you enter the URL starting with http:// and you answer the Captcha. You don't need to register to use it.

How to Find Hidden Links on Your Website?

Hidden links can get your website banned by Google, the biggest search engine on the internet. Many people's websites got penalized by Google because of the hidden text or hidden links on their sites. Particularly, if you are using a free theme or plugins, you may have higher risk to suffer from this problem. There are many ways to check links on your site or blog. Here is an easy one: using the Google Cache function.

1. Go to google.com;
2. search for: site:yourwebsite.com;
3. on the result page, click on the "Cached"link right next to your page's url,
4. on the next page, click on the "Text-only version" link found on the top right corner of the page;
5.then you will see what google see on your website.

You can also find hidden links by analyzing all the outbound and internal links on your web sites.

A Free SEO Tool to Check Whether Your Blog Content is Indexable by Search Engine

When you create a blog or website, if you want to get organic search traffic to it, you have to make sure that the content on your site or blog is indexable. The web content that I am talking about here is not only the text content, but also others such as images, audio and video content. Usually search engines can read plain text with no problem. But they can’t read images, audio or video. Content created with Flash or Java can’t be seen by search engines either. So what you need to do is to use “alt tag” or transcript to label these non-indexable content properly and convert them to SEO friendly content.

One free online SEO tool which can help you to find out how search engines see your blog or site is found on http://www.seo-browser.com/. At seo-browser.com, you just need to type in your blog’s URL and run the check, and it will show you what elements on your blog are visible to search engines in the result. If you found some important content on your blog can’t be seen on the result page, you will know these content may have the search engine index problem. Then you have to figure out how to make them more search engine friendly, if you really care about organic traffic to your blog.
Of course, alternately, you can also check the same thing by using Google Cache.

Basic Understanding of Search Engine Optimization

Two words are most important in SEO: relevance and importance. Relevance means that whether the content is what the search engine users are looking for. Importance means that whether the content provides valuable information.

Most important factors influencing search engine ranking results:
Different search engines have different criteria or algorithm. For instance, Yahoo said “Inbound links and content are important.” Bing said”Keywords should be contained in the content and the size of the page should be at right size.” Google said “WebPages should be for users not for me. So give your page a correct title and don’t put too many links on one page.” Of course, these are only some principles and their searching algorithms are always changing, at least from time to time.

How to fully understand how a search engine works? You can ask a search engine engineer who develop it or you can design an experiment to test it and figure it out by yourself. All the trouble shooting strategies are same. Every time you change one factor and then see what is the result. If you get the result you want, obviously the last factor that you have changed is the reason for the problem. So when designing experiment to study search engine, you can build several similar websites and each website has only one factor different from the rest of others. This may sounds easy, but when you really do it, it will have a lot of work involved. But fortunately someone else has already done this type of experiments and what you need to do is just to follow their guidance or observe carefully what they did on their own site.

Then you may ask: how can I who knows the secret of seo? It is easy. Run a simple search with some hot keywords in major search engines and those sites on the 1st page of the search results are your candidates. Do a thorough study on those sites, and you will learn a lot from them.

Where to Find a Free Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Online

I read a new book: search engine optimization (seo) secrets written by Danny Dover. The author claims that this book is not for beginners. He didn’t bother to explain some basic SEO terms in the book, but fortunately he mentioned a website where beginners can learn some basic SEO knowledge. Here is the link to the site:
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo.
On this site, the SEO knowledge is divided into 10 chapters. And they explained what search engine is and how it works. It also gives an introduction on how to do keyword research and where to find seo tools and resources. This website is very suitable for people like me who has no any seo knowledge at all. If you are already a SEO expert, you can pass this site and continue to read Danny Dover’s new book which gives in-depth explanation of search engine optimization. It even shows you how to live as a SEO consultant. It is a very interesting book and I will definitely read it once I finished the beginner’s guide online.

How to Check My Site's Google Supplemental Index Ratio Online

First, you don't want your site or pages on your site in Google's supplemental index, because once your pages in it, they will not get any good rankings in Google organic search result.

What is the common reasons why my pages are in the supplemental index?
1. Google thinks that the content on your page is not good. For instance, your article is too short.
2. Your content has the duplicate issue. They are similar to other pages on your site or other web-pages on other people's website on the internet.
3. Your content doesn't have any external link.
4. Or other mysterious reasons make Google don't like your content.

How to know how many pages of your site are in the supplemental index?
1. You need to know how many web-pages on your site has been indexed on Google search engine.
Run a search "site:www.yoursite.com" in Google, which will give you the result of the total indexed pages of yoursite.
To see the pages on your site in the main index, search with "site:www.yoursite.com -inallurl:www.yoursite.com". Alternatively，you can search for “site:www.yoursite.com/*”.
Then to get the number of pages in the supplemental index, you simple use the total number minus the number of pages in the main indexed.
To make the whole process easy, you can find some online tool which can help you calculate the supplemental index ratio directly.

There are a lot of sites offering this kind of tools. The one that I come across is http://www.seonlinelab.com/supplemental_index_ratio.php.

It may not be the best one, but it works for me. What you need to do is just to type in the domain name that you want to check and then it will show the result that you want to see. It is easy.

To prevent your pages or site getting into the supplemental index, you have to add content with high quality into your site and/or get high quality links to your site. High quality inbound links are those from sites with high Google page rank and with the “dofollow” tag. Usually new site tends to have more pages in the supplemental index. If that is the case for your site, what you can do just keep building your site and wait patiently. No matter what you do, patience is a virtue.

9 Free Online Keyword Density Checkers

The followings are several top free online keyword density checkers. You can use these tools to check keyword density of your web-page.

Webconfs
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

This keyword density checking tool is very easy to use. You just enter the URL of the web-page that you want to analyze and it can generate a keyword cloud for you. It also reports single word's keyword density. They offer HTML codes so that you can put this tool on your site.

Ranks.NL
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
This is not only a keyword density checker, it can also analyze web-pages backlinks, outboundlinks and google ranks.In the result that it returns, it shows single word, 2 words, 3 words and 4 words phrase keyword density. It also predicts that which words or phrase the page is optimized for. It is quite impressive. I definitely want to go back to check it out.

SeoBook
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
This is a pretty popular online keyword density tool. It has been mentioned in many places. It can also report multiple words containing phrase density.

SEOchat
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
This is another popuplar online keyword density checker. It has the option which allows you to include Meta, Alts and Title into the analysis. Bookmark it and you will need it later.

iWEBtool
http://www.iwebtool.com/keyword_density
This is just a simple online keyword density checker that you can use it for free. It is a very basic one and it only shows the single word density. But it also generates tagcloud for you. If you need to create tags for your content, you may check it out. But for tag generation, I will use http://tagcrowd.com/ instead.

motoricerca
http://tool.motoricerca.info/keyword-density.phtml
This one is simple but looks like powerful. It allows you to filter out the stop word.

gorank
http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php
It is also a simple but good one. But personaly I don't like the result layout.

googleranking
http://www.googlerankings.com/kdindex.php
This one is OK. But it is a little bit stupid. You have to manually remove the "http://" from your webpage's URL.

Submit Express
http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/
This is a META tag analyzer.

How to Change Permalinks in Wordpress

In Wordpress, changing the permalinks structure is very easy. There are several options that you can choose from, such as http://yourdomain/2010/05/30/sample-post/ and http://yourdomain/archives/123. The default one is http://yourdomain/?p=123. If you like, you can use any one of them. But they are not optimized for search engine optimization(SEO) purpose.To get the best SEO permalinks, you have to use the "custome structure" function.

Here is the way to change permalink structure in Wordpress.
1. go to Settings-->Permalinks
2.in the common settings, you can choose from "default", "day and name","month and name","numerica" and "custome structure".For instance, you can set your custome structure as /%postname%/.