The web server (computer) is where your web site’s html files, graphics, etc. reside and is known as the web host. A Web Hosting Service provides Internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web.

Web hosting is typically includes email services, databases such as MySQL and statistics packages that track volume, how visitors arrive and what pages they view. Web servers typically use one of two primary operating systems. Apache (Linux) accounts for approximately 60% of the market and Windows (Microsoft) accounts for about 30%. There are a number of other players that make up the remainder. Apache (Linux) is frequently referred to PHP hosting.

Businesses need assurances of uptime and reliability. These frequently are missing on inexpensive hosting providers. Business web hosting should include regular data backups, 24/7 monitoring, and email filtering for virus and Spam. Other important features are FTP access, multiple power backup systems and multiple Internet feeds are present.

Web hosting companies typically offer other services such as domain names and digital certificates. Some will offer other web services such as web design, content changes and web programming.

At Doug Williams and Associates we offer a full range of business web hosting, design and programming services. We offer PHP database and web application programming. In addition we offer Search Engine Optimization and marketing consulting services so business owners can have a single source for their web marketing and maintenance needs.

Search Engine Optimization deals with both on-page factors and off-page factors. Since on-page factors can be manipulated search engines like Google now place more weight on so called off-page factors. To get the best SEO results, much more time and energy needs to be put toward optimizing these Off Page factors.

Incoming Links: Page Rank is Google’s measure of the number and quality of the incoming links to your website. Google is known to report only a small fraction of the backlinks that they detect. Links from high ranking pages are more important.

Link Text: This is the hyperlinked text that links back to your website. Having key words in the anchor text of incoming links is very important and is on par with optimized body text.

Directory Links: Getting links from Directories such as DMOZ (Open Directory), Yahoo, LookSmart and other directories are helpful.

Other Linking Factors: Getting links too quickly is not good and is viewed as artificial link acquisition. Slow and steady is better. Having older links is more important then newer links. Getting links from “expert” site gives better results. Links from websites that have the same theme or topic are important. Links from image maps or graphics are much less important.

Site Age: Older and long established websites do better. New pages are indexed quickly. New websites go through a penalty phase (Google Sandbox) where it is difficult to get ranked for difficult phrases. The Sandbox penalty can last 18 months for highly competitive phrases.

Domain Name: This includes newer domains are not as important as older domains. Registering domains for 5 years is much more important than 1 year.

Visitor Traffic: Google has patented these and can measure this through Google Tool Bars and Google Analytics. The number of visitors, which pages are visited, how much time is spent on a page and if a page has been bookmarked.

The domain name, how long you have owned it and how long you renew it for will all affect your website rankings. Getting top SEO results is not about doing one thing right, it is about hundreds of factors that search engines like Google take into account.

Keywords: Using keywords in your domain name has consistently been an effective SEO strategy. It is common knowledge that keywords are the foundation that search engine optimization is based on. Using keywords in your URL provides a clue to potential site visitors what your website is about. Search engines will also use this to help determine your sites relevance to a particular search term. The domain name words should be separated with hyphens for maximum effectiveness.

Length of Time: How old your domain name is and how many years you renew your domain name for both affect rankings. Older domains and renewing for 5 or more years are valued more, particularly by Google. Google has an aging filter that discounts new URLs and values older domain names.

Change of Ownership: Selling or transferring a domain and website to a new owner without changing website content or structure does not seem to affect rankings. Changing servers or IP also doesn’t seem to hurt rankings. However, if you move your web site to being hosted by a company that mainly hosts the web sites of spammers, then this can hurt your rankings (bad neighborhood).

If I am a local pizza shop, why do I want a website? I don’t want somebody across the country calling me and asking me to deliver a pizza! As a business consulting and a business web design company, we hear comments like this from small business owners.

Well, the most important reason is that more people use the Internet more often today than use the yellow pages. People search the Internet for what they want. Make it easy for them to learn about you. Newspapers are quickly losing ground to the Internet as the primary source for local shopping information. Times have changes and the Internet is now the most widely used media around. Here are 7 reasons small and local businesses need a website.

1. A website makes your business more credible. In today’s world, all businesses should have a website. Your customers expect it.
2. You can be found in local searches by using the cities that you serve and the service (or product) you provide in the text on your website. It is the text on your website that is important to the search engines.
3. Your customers want to find you, make it easy. Include your address and phone number. Include a map with driving directions so you can be found.
4. Include good descriptions of what you have to offer, If you are a restaurant include a menu. If you have products, include details, advantages and benefits of your products.
5. Include the hours you are open. Someone can be looking over your website at 2AM and wants to know when they can come in. Don’t make them wait, post it on your website.
6. Include a coupon or Internet special that customers can print out from your website. This way you will know when your customers are coming from your website.
7. Include an “About Us” page. People want to know about you, your history and what your philosophies are toward business. Include things such as a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee or we your business is best. This where customers learn about your company.

Internet marketing plans require demographic and statistic data to back them up. So I thought in today’s posting that I would include the latest trends and statistics that I could find about the Internet.

How big is the Internet? Luckily, a company called Netcraft is continually indexing websites on the Internet. As of April 2007, they had indexed 113,658,468 individual websites. This number is up 2.8% in one month (33.8% Annually).

How many people use the Internet? According to Internet World Stats there are 211,108,086 Internet users in the United States which is about 70% of the US population. World wide there are 1.1 billion Internet users or about 17% of the world population. This is based on information updated as of March 10, 2007.

How many searches do American’s make? According to Comscore Americans conducted 7.3 billion searches online in March 2007, up 14 percent versus March 2006. Google Sites captured 48.3 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.2 share points from the previous month. Google Sites led the pack with 3.5 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (798 million), Ask Network (379 million), and Time Warner Network (368 million).

How many people use broadband? According to ClickZ Network The U.S. maintains the largest total number of broadband subscribers among countries tracked by OECD, with 29 percent of all broadband connections. U.S. broadband subscribers reached 58.1 million in December 2006. Worldwide there are a total of 197 million broadband subscribers worldwide.

Other interesting trends include the average display resolution is now at 1024×768 (54%) and although Internet Explorer is the dominant browser (58.7%), Firefox is continuing to increase market share (31.8%).

These statistics help shape website design and Internet marketing strategies for businesses.

Analyzing your website traffic is a valuable tool for understanding how many visitors your website is receiving and how they are coming to your website. Website statistics packages are part of most business hosting plans. Our hosting plans provide both Webalizer Web Stats and AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics). Here are 5 key areas that website statistics supply insight into your website visitors.

1. Activity: This is the number of visitors that visit each day, week or month. AWStats shows visits and unique visitors for each month. Unique visitors are first time visitors while visits include new and returning visitors. You can see how many pages were viewed and what days of the week and month that visitors came to your website.
2. Location: This is the location your visitors are coming from. This will show the country where your visitor was from.
3. Robots/Spiders: You can see which search engine spiders are indexing your website and how often they are returning.
4. Navigation: You can see how long your visitors are staying once they arrive, which pages they view, entry pages and exit pages.
5. Source: Track which search engines are sending visitors and see which keyword phrases are being used. You can see which websites are referring visitors to you.

The purpose of these statistics is to understand your website and look for problems that you can fix. You may need to adjust your keywords or maybe visitors are leaving as soon as they arrive which means you need to change your home page message or graphics. This is essential information for your Internet marketing campaign.

I think every small business owner that wants to grow their business should be blogging. If on the other hand you can’t commit to regular blog postings then no, you should not have a blog for your business. Blogging takes commitment and the payback can be great!

Blog marketing is a fast growing business marketing strategy that has become a powerful marketing strategy. What should you expect to gain from business blogging?

1. Postings with interesting and timely information will position you as a knowledgeable expert in your market.
2. Readers will develop an interest in you products and services.
3. Regular blogging develops familiarity and trust in what you have to say.
4. Over time this will develop a stream of qualified leads and an increase in sales.

What should small business owners be blogging about? Well, the real answer is just about anything that your customers or prospects would be interested in.

Realtors may want to talk about their local market, trends, days on market, etc. They could write about specific properties to encourage prospective buyer. They could write about the local area for potential relocation clients. The key is to write about subjects of interest for for potential customers.

For property managers, they can talk about the rental market, vacancy rates and amenities that are most sought after. They can publish special deals to promote rentals in the off season… you get the idea.

The key thing to do is to create a blog marketing strategy for your business and then follow through. We offer blog marketing assistance and can help you launch a blog for your small business.

We are an Internet marketing and a  web optimization firm and we know that once you bring visitors to your website, you need to write convincing text to get them to act. A great website is much more than a great business web design, it is attracting, presenting and getting action. You do that through the writing of your website content.

State the benefits: Benefits are what sell. This includes Features (what products do), Advantages (what features do), Motives (importance of features to buyer) and Benefits (what features mean).

Anticipate Questions: Focus on the benefits and answer your visitor’s question “So, what’s in it for me?” Other questions that need answering include: “What am I doing here,” “How do I do it,” and “Where can I go next?”

The Five Great Motivators: Psychologists have identified five “Great” motivators, and virtually all good web copy creates sales by catering to one of these forces. These include fear, exclusivity, guilt, greed, and the need for approval. When our custom copywriters tap into these basic motivators, you will see your sales increase dramatically!

The Soft Motivators: In addition to these five great motivators, the consumer is also motivated by what is referred to as “soft” motivators. The soft motivators are convenience and pleasure. These are utilized best when combined with one or more of the five great motivators.

You should storyboard out the sales process and then write the text to give the results you are after. Writing is much more than just working in the correct keyword phrases, it is both a science and an art form.

Search engine optimization is still very misunderstood by many business owners who want more traffic to their website. They have heard that META Tags are extremely important and they are reluctant to use much text because they like a very graphical look. To get SEO results today we have to look at both on page and off page factors.

It used to be that the META Tags were very important, but today the META Tags have very little importance. META Tags are Information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine spiders.

Search engines will rank a website based on two major factors. These are on-page and off-page factors. On page factors include those things that exist within the website. This includes keywords, website structure, website content, navigation, etc. Off page factors include those things that exist outside of the website itself. Off page factors include links from other websites, age of a website, how many years a domain name is renewed for, etc.

Visible text is the actual content or body text used within a web page and is how search engines index and classify sites to relevant search results. Remember that no matter how search engine rules change, the one thing that will never change is that content is the king and is the web’s reason for being. Search engines do not search based on images or graphics, only on text used in the website.

As a web optimization company we regularly analyze keyword phrases to find out the best keyword phrases. We use Wordtracker as our research tool because it not only gives us the number of predicted searches per day, but also the number of competing pages shown by Google for that phrase. Here are the top 15 real estate related search phrases by geographic area. The phrases are actual search phrases that are being used. The data is based on the last 60 days.

So which phrases are best?

Well if I were a Realtor in Tampa, FL, I would quickly choose “tampa real estate” over “florida homes for sale” for two reasons. First, with the high number of competing pages, it will take longer to get good rankings for “florida homes for sale” and second, I would be much more able to convert a visitor who searched for “tampa real estate” because 100% of my visitors are interested in what I offer.

Realtors in Parry Sound, Ontario, Canada have the best ratio between searches and competing web pages. They would have the fastest response for SEO results. You can also see that Florida has the greatest activity which should equal the greatest area of Real estate demand.