Three Ways to Safe Guard Your Website
March 19, 2008
After the events of the last few weeks I wanted to put together a list of things that can help you get your business back on track faster when your website goes down, your database crashes or any number of other things that could happen when the “lights go out”.
- Backup your Website and Database on a regular basis – I say this because many people and companies do not backup there website as it changes and goes. Most companies do not remember this and when the stuff hits the fan it is too late because most times your web hosting provider doesn’t backup your website on a regular basis if at all.
- Auto Renew your Domain Name – You don’t want to get caught when your domain name is attached to all that your business is online, all the SEO, the web development, the analytics and everything becomes meaningless because you forgot your domain name was expiring and someone else buys it up.
- Keep notes about everything you’ve done for your online business – Retracing the steps you’ve taken over a year to get your website to where it is can be very tough to say the least. Keep notes of when you’ve made changes and back it up to a disk because you never know when that is going to come in handy and save your butt.
I hope that these tips help you to avert a disaster with your online business and good luck safe guarding your website from the elements.
Luc
How Do SEO, Web Design, Web Development Web Analytics and Web Intelligence work together?
March 18, 2008
You hear a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Web Design, Web Development, Web Analytics and a little bit even about Web Intelligence. But how do they all work together to improve your business?
- Web Property (aka ‘Presence’) Management – Similar to the idea of property management that real estate companies use. This where all things related to your web site, web store, portal and anything “web” begins. Keep in mind this is a simplified article that discusses how all these practices work together
- Web Design and Web Development – These two terms go hand in hand in the world of the web. Web Design is the initial creation of an online presence whereas web development is the ongoing development of that online presence. Before you can have SEO and web analytics to drive web intelligence you must first have a website.
- Search Engine Optimization – After the site is built you usually need search engines to pick it up, index it and rank it and continue to do this. This is also related to search engine marketing (aka SEM)
- Web Analytics – Once you have the site optimized and running you can then start to track your visitors. Many people track visitors simply based on click stream analysis (the process of measuring a site’s worth in clicks) but lately organizations and individuals are moving away from this form of measure because it is not effective in understanding the needs of your customers online and it offers no insight into customer’s activities and behaviours.
- Web “Business” Intelligence – Lastly, Web Intelligence allows you to then make improvements actionable for future business decision making by analysing trends on your web property to improve and drive the success of the online business.
This general overview of how SEO, Web Design, Web Development, Web Analytics and Web Intelligence work together should give you an understanding of where you are at in the development process and what you should think about as you progress and your web presence develops more and more into a long term business system or sales channel for your operations.
Luc
Using Google Webmaster Tools to Submit Your Website to Google
March 12, 2008
If you haven’t had a chance to try out Google’s Webmaster Tool you don’t know what you are missing. This tool allows you to submit your website to Google and get it rechecked as your site changes and grows which means you. So how do you do it on your website? Here is a simple guide to getting setup with Google Webmaster Tools.
- Go to Google Webmaster Tools
- Sign up for an account (If you already have a Google Analytics account just sign in with that username and password)
- You will then be brought to the Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard
- Click to “Add a Website” by entering the full path of your URL (http://www.yourdomain.com)
From there you can verify your website by uploading a Code HTML file that Google will recognize once it crawls your site and you can also point Google to the sitemap on your website too!
Luc
Adding Your Website and Feeds to Yahoo!
March 10, 2008
A while ago I wrote about optimizing your website for Yahoo! As well as Google so I thought I’d put together an introductory run through of what it takes to get your website ready for Yahoo! search engine
- Go to Yahoo’s Submit a Website page (for FREE) and enter your domain name (Note: You may be asked to login to the your Yahoo! Account first)
- Go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer and enter the website you want Yahoo! to index and click the”Add my Site” button
- Click the “Authenticate” button beside the link you just added
- This brings you to a page where you can either upload a Yahoo Authentication Key or add a Meta Tag into your website.
- Once you’ve chosen one of these options you can click “Authenticate” and your website will be indexed by Yahoo! within usually 24 hours
You also have the option to add feeds to your Site Explorer profile in Yahoo! which is very helpful if you have content and a blog that you want to index with Yahoo!
Luc
Domain Names, Cyber Squatters and a Farewell to WebmasterFarms
March 9, 2008
You may have noticed a change lately to webmasterfarms.com… my old site (not by choice I might add) is now PureWebAnalytics.com. Why the change you ask? Well it started yesterday morning when I logged into my hotmail account and saw an email from GoDaddy.com sitting there that says my Domain Name has been cancelled. I emailed GoDaddy.com support and I am still waiting for a reply from them about this issue (more then 24 hours later) about my missing domain name which I have now figured out has been sold off to cyber-squatters to basically create a bidding war on the popularity of WebmasterFarms.com. Man I was pissed off to say the least and I still am very anger about this.
I came to the realization that the domain name is gone so my next thought is “I need a new domain name” and hence you have PureWebAnalytics.com. The core scope of my business is developing web presences around website analysis to build and improve online processes for businesses. WebmasterFarms.com had a pretty sexy sounding name that kind of rolled off the tongue. PureWebAnalytics.com hits the keywords of my business right in the title which is something that WebmasterFarms.com couldn’t do. Looking back on the last few days I realize that this may be a blessing in disguise
Pains in the Ass
- Setting up Google Analytics again – setting up GA takes a little time but the stats are going to change, filters and funnels need to be setup and I am going to have to wait to see the results again… bummer
- SEO efforts gone down the drain – I am not sure to what extent my SEO efforts have been affected because only the primary URL has changed (not the article names I’ve written)
- Restoring my WordPress Database and fixing password and link issues – This is by far the most upsetting part of any problem a company faces with their website. What happened to my data? I was able to backup a copy of my mySQL database using phpMyAdmin but restoring became a huge problem because of the amount of data I had on the database. My phpMyAdmin account was only provisioned to import up to 2.4 MB of database. Not a lot at all given that I have a lot of information available to the public online.
Having a cool new domain name…. Priceless?!!!
Certainly one must watch out for Cyber-Squatters because they are everywhere just waiting to take possession of a perfectly good domain name and sell it back to you at a premium price. Because the focus of WebmasterFarms.com started off in web mastering but has moved into web analytics and web design based on improving past results I find it fitting that I choose to get a new domain name NOT because I want to but because I don’t want to go into a bidding war to get my domain back.
This brings forth a list of things that every website owner or company that runs and maintains a website should do
Always Backup your databases – You don’t want to be starting from scratch should you lose your database. Sometimes and in most cases it is not the responsibility of your hosting company to keep up-to-date backups of your account… check with your web hosting company first.
Always Check “Auto-Review” for your domain name and keep your credit card/billing information up to date
SEO starts with your domain name – if you own a web hosting company then your domain name should probably have “hosting” “host” or “web hosting” in the domain name. If you run a website devoted to your flooring business then “floors”, “flooring”, “floor” or something similar should be including in the business because a good website starts with a well-thought out domain name.
Needless to say this is the reason that i haven’t had any postings recently. I think one of my up coming articles will be “How do i Backup my Website?”
Luc
