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The Web has expanded immensely – so much that advertisers clash with each other in getting good advertising spaces on high traffic websites to promote and gain exposure of their products and services.

Basically advertising involves costs as it does on television, radio and newspapers. Online advertising however, offers various ways to promote your products and services for free. Social media channels and online communities offer such opportunities in getting your products known beyond geographical borders.

Like other media channels, paid online advertising on high-traffic websites usually is a cost-efficient and timely marketing move. However, there are situations when such activities backfire especially when the advertisements are placed on irrelevant sites or placed in wrong advertising space.

This blog post sparks a series of discussions about online business promotion. Of course, this is aimed to help you bait real customers in the World Wide Web and making more money from them.

To have a head start, we will discuss the first and significant online business promotion channel: search engines. Continue Reading »

If you are an online entrepreneur running your own blog or your own e-commerce site over a shared hosting plan, then trust me: your site needs a dedicated IP address. Although your sites will run fine on a shared IP address, you would prefer having a dedicated IP for your online business.

Shared or Dedicated IP Addresses – Say What?

Most shared hosting plans from hosting companies by default offer shared IP addresses to run their customers’ domains.

To be clear, first let us determine the difference between a shared hosting plan and a shared IP address since these are two different things. A shared hosting plan is a hosting account that runs on a single, physical server shared by other users having similar hosting accounts – thus the word “shared.” A shared IP address, on the other hand, is a real address of a website or server. Instead of real IP addresses, a domain name is used for convenience to represent a website. Since a single server can handle multiple domains running on it, these domains could represent one shared IP address. By default, the domains of other users on same shared server are pointing to a common, shared IP address.

Domains hosted on a shared hosting account, however, are not restricted to use only a shared IP address. They can be as well configured individually to be assigned a static, dedicated IP address that is utilized only by a one domain.

For shared hosting plans, a dedicated IP address is usually a premium upgrade to most hosting companies which costs around $2.50 per month. Certain hosting companies like IXWebHosting and Top Hosting Center (to name a few), include dedicated IP addresses to their shared hosting packages which is excellent.

The Impacts Of Having A Dedicated IP Address

Acquiring a dedicated IP address for your domain brings the following benefits:

Scam and Spam Blacklist Protection - In a shared hosting environment, if someone you share with a common IP gets trouble for spamming or scamming, the shared IP address could get blacklisted or banned by Internet Service Providers (ISP) and it would affect all domains using the said shared IP address. When your shared IP address is banned or blacklisted on some ISPs, your website will not be accessible to some areas in the world and your emails get blocked. It would directly affect your online business operations, search engine ranking and reputation. Getting a dedicated IP address resolves this. A dedicated IP isolates your domain and protects it from being affected from the consequences of abuses done by other shared users.

Business Identity Support – With a dedicated IP address, online businesses can have the confidence of better identity. Customers feel unsafe doing monetary transactions on sites that use a shared IP address because of reliability and security issues. A truth about this is that security certificates like private SSL requires a website to run over a dedicated IP address before it can accept credit cards online. Although you can still run an e-commerce site using a shared IP address, through a shared SSL certificate, having your own dedicated IP will make things easier and convince your customers to avail products or services, and close deals.

Enhanced Search Engine Optimization – Search engines track websites through their addresses (domain name and IPs). It has been found that most search engines favor websites running over dedicated IP address. Sites with a dedicated IP addresses do better in ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). For online businesses, this concern is very important.

Extended Hosting Functionality – Certain functions on a shared hosting plan cannot be enabled if you are using a shared IP address. For instance, Anonymous FTP can only be enabled with a dedicated IP address. Anonymous FTP lets anyone using FTP client software to access the files in a special directory of your site. Also, having a dedicated IP allows access to your website by FTP even if your domain name is still inaccessible due to propagation.

Knowing the benefits of having a dedicated IP address, I strongly encourage you to have it especially when you are running business-related sites and even blog like this. John Raul dot Com just shifted from shared IP to dedicated IP with the coming of THC’s Speedy hosting plan – and it is great.

Well basically that’s the usual million dollar question of novice web entrepreneurs when they want to move their sites to a new host. The risks of losing good Page Ranks (PR) and Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) position, are typically the things they carefully consider before initiating the transfer. So, does moving to a different host affect your site’s search engine optimization?

Theoretically the answer is “no.” Moving from one host to another does not affect SEO. However, if you are not careful enough and you fail to follow instructions your sites could face risks of defeating your SEO. The impact largely depends on the actual transition process from your old host to a new one but utmost it depends on you.

Downtime is commonly the major issue you may face when you change to a new web host.

Downtimes, for sure, are not healthy for your search engine-optimized websites, especially when it is prolonged. During downtimes, search engine spiders fail to crawl your site’s web pages and thus affect your pages’ SERP ranking when the search engine begins to re-index all downloaded pages by spiders to provide fast searches. Downtime is commonly the major issue you may face when you change your host. The good thing is that the chance of experiencing a downtime can be prevented. A good host would always suggest the following steps to provide your sites a smooth and transparent transition from your old to new host:

1. If you are moving a domain name to your new host as well, unlock your domain name from your old host/ registrar and provide your new host the EPP/authorization code. This will let them initiate domain name transfer request to your old host/registrar. If you are only moving a site or sites between hosts and does not involve domain name registrars, proceed to Step 2.
2. Set up your website on your new web host. Begin by adding your domain name in your new host’s control panel. Copy all your files to appropriate domain folder and copy necessary databases from your old host to your new host to “mirror” your existing website. You can test/view the files you upload to your new host by typing into your browser your domain name alias. If you don’t know about this, ask your new host’s live chat support.
3. Change your domain’s name server configuration (DNS) and point it to your new web host. After completing this step, your site should still be accessible online and still running from your old web host while the new DNS settings are propagating on the Internet.

The common pitfall in the process is when you take down the site on the old web host while the DNS is still propagating – definitely it would cause downtime for your site. It’s when the SEO risks come in. To prevent that to happen, keep your website files on your old web host for one week. This ample time lets the DNS propagation to complete which can be identified by monitoring where your website files are pointing to. If your domain is finally pointing to the files on your new web host, then the site transfer is done and complete. You can now take down the site from your old web host and enjoy the services of your new web host preserving your site’s PR rank and SERP position.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of my favorite buzzwords in the Web 2.0 era. It refers to the process of improving the volume of visitors, the quality of traffic from search engines, and higher ranking of a website in search engine results page (SERP).

SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.

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