Web Hosting and Domain Name Articles

How to move a website from one server to another
For some reason, you aren’t happy anymore with your current Web hosting provider. Possible reasons might be there’s too much downtime, their servers are overloaded and too slow, or maybe you found a better deal with even more features elsewhere. Whatever the reasons, moving your site from one server to another could be a very simple and easy process, provided you keep a few important considerations in mind. The number one concern is always search engines. If you are like most businesses that own a website, you certainly don’t want the little search robots coming to your site when it happens to be down. One way of preventing that is there should not even be any downtime, provided you do everything right. When transferring from one hosting provider to another, prevention should be your most important concern.

The five steps to successfully building a good e-commerce website
In carefully planning and building any e-commerce or e-business website, begin by registering a .com, .net, .org or a .ca domain name (.ca are reserved for Canadian companies only). Whether you're looking to reserve domain names for use now or at a later date, you should seriously consider doing it now, while some still might be available, although the best choices in the .com range have most certainly been taken by now. From time to time we hear about domain names, mistakenly or otherwise, not registered in the name of their rightful owners. Even if it’s just an oversight, rectifying this situation can become time consuming and costly. Before finalizing your domain name order, make sure it will be registered in your name and the administration, technical and billing contacts will be determined by you only at the time you are registering your new domain name (s).

Effective domain name selection and your rankings
If you think the selection process and the name you have chosen for that shiny new domain name won’t make any difference in the search rankings of your new or existing website, think again. Today more than ever, all search engines do carry a lot of weight to the keywords or key phrases that are present in your domain name. Ask any SEO professional firm that has been in this business for at least three or four years and they will tell you that the careful research and the final selection of the domain name you will use can have a tremendous positive impact in the search results pages from Google, AltaVista, Fast-all-the-Web, Yahoo, MSN, Inktomi, DMOZ and just any other search engine in existence today. When you need to register a new domain name for an existing site or a new site under construction, the first thing you need to do is decide if it will be a .com, a .net or a .ca domain name, or any other variations, as there are many. Whether you're looking to reserve a domain name for use now or at a later date, you should seriously consider doing it now, while a good selection might still be available, although I think the best choices in the .com range have already been taken by now.

Are dashy domain names better as far as SEM is concerned?
Dashed domain names offer a big target for proponents of a purer web marketing. They float there broadside in the SERPs, overshadowing the sleeker domains, just begging for a pot shot. You'll find eager takers on any major SE forum or blog. Disclosure: yes, I am responsible for some dash-intensive domains. Opinion: why would a serious search marketer not experiment with a potentially fruitful technique? But beyond any real or perceived benefits, dashed domains are worth pondering for what they can reveal about marketing via search. Yahoo actually created this monster, if a monster it is. Blame them for a search algorithm based solely on the content of the search listing and not on the web site in question. Further blame them for leaving only one element of those listings in the direct, unalterable control of the webmaster or marketer: the domain name. Yahoo's editors could edit all the flowery marketing copy out of your description, but they couldn't touch your "buy-flowers-here.com" domain without defeating the purpose of a directory. You can also blame them for their word-matching algorithm. It seems to only recognize words embedded in domains as separate words when the words are delimited somehow. A dash, an underline, a dot. "Buyflowershere.com" didn't match a search for "buy flowers"; "buy-flowers-here.com" did. So what was a web marketeer to do, especially when Yahoo was the Google of its day?

Search engine optimization myth: Multiple domain names are better
If there is one area on the Internet that is often overly abused, this is it. There are several factors that make this a dangerous strategy. Let's start by outlining the tremendous amount of work that would be necessary to build, host, maintain and achieve a high ranking for, let's say fifteen websites rather than one only. On top of all that, let's not forget the cost of the domain names themselves wich some, in certain cases, can be expensive to begin with. In this hypothetical case, you would have to pay to register and host at least fifteen new Web domain names. Since many Internet search engines and directories actually penalize mirror sites, you would have to spend time building fifteen different web sites. Additionally, you would have to pay to host those fifteen Web sites. You would also have to invest a lot of time, actually many weeks just to optimize the same fifteen web sites. You would then have to make even more efforts submitting fifteen independent web sites (very time consuming).