Thanet Star is a Thanet based blog. It is written by our "Lord Matt" under the more down-to-earth name of Matt B. Thanet is a small corner of Kent which is in the UK which is in the EU (earth).

Our best wishes to Matt with this new venture.

David Caldo who's real name is Dr M G Notley is the author of a novel in the thriller genre. He also runs a web company called Working Internet Solutions but our research team could not find a home page in Google. Additionally as Dr M G Notley he is connected with a project called writerspromte.com.

This is where the rot sets in. Lord Matt, regular writer and Managing Director of Adullam Limited (owners of Globally Local) wrote his exact opinion of David Caldo, the writer's real life persona Dr M G Notley and his methods of SEO. Lord Matt specifically stated that in his opinion this was "dodgy" and the work akin to that of a "cowboy" (rough and of low standards).

So author David Caldo (who is really Dr M G Notley) has started down a path of initiating legal proceedings on what appear to be narrow grounds. The implication is that should he win against Matt UK bloggers will be significantly limited in what they can write about essentially removing the right to be critical of businesses or government. This would be a blow for free speech in the UK and the EU.

For the reason the staff of Globally Local stand fully behind Lord Matt (would we do otherwise?) in his defense of his right to share his opinion. I personally recommend that other UK and EU based bloggers do likewise and that US bloggers duplicate the "objectionable" content to make it harder to suppress. I recommend this because as bloggers ourselves we do not have to stand for rudeness in personal communications.

Readers of the blog, customers and money hungry bloggers of all kinds can now earn extra cash with Affiliate Program. Powered by Share A Sale so you can be sure only of the highest quality and promptest payments. You don't need an existing account as you can create one for free here.

In addition tot he payouts you would expect there are a huge range of performance bonuses. Now when we say huge I do mean huge. Monthly targets and first time targets and they are all available to you. For example when your month commission reaches $100 we will give you another $10 just to say thanks. What is more the first time your monthly commission reaches $95 we will top you up to $100 making that bonus a tasty $15 all for free.

We have added a good collection of banners to get you started and will be adding more as time goes on. You are, of course, free to design your own banners and we might even manage a contest with some big prizes to be won (both cash and products). So, what are you waiting for?

As I have just discovered it is vital that one checks when domains are due to be renewed. Not doing so can result in down time and that is exactly what happened for my site.

Now it is probably an abuse of my position here to use a business site to post the news but I'm doing it anyway. lordmatt.co.uk should be up and running by Monday morning. Thank you for your time.

UPDATE The site is now available again.

You have just spent the last six weeks perfecting your site. You have the perfect set of pages to make that sale or become a famous writer or whatever you plan to do. There is just one problem - no one is looking at it.



This is your site. Okay, so it's not literally your site - it is just a picture but for the sake of argument it is your site. This, however, is your site on the World Wide Web.



Can you find it? It's there somewhere. To make matters worse that is just the other sites on the same subject as yours.

This is the problem that faces every owner of a new website. How can I draw attention to my site and get people to visit it? Until people visit the site they will not know how different it is to other sites.

Most visitors to a site will come from a search engine and in order to get traffic (that is human visitors) from search engines the search engines must return a link to your site as a search result. The higher up the list the engine returns your link the better the chances are that it will be clicked. To get to the top of the listings (or somewhere near) you must show that your site and it's pages are the most relevant pages tor return for searchers.

A search engine will only do well for so long as it is able to return results that are of interest to their users. If Bob Smith types "Hungry House Pub" and gets a page of links to "Harry's Pig and Snout Casino" he will rightly conclude that the search engine he is using is no use. So search engines are very critical of sites and are careful to work out which sites best match the search terms given.

There are a few things you can do to increase the ability of your site to impress search engines. Writing plenty of good quality content and linking your sites pages into a cohesive whole is a very good start. Using nothing but text based links it should be possible to get to every page on your site in a handful of clicks or less. This is where a site map would be of great use.

However to understand fully how to get the search engines to love your site you must understand how a search engine thinks. A search engine is pretty dumb - for example it can not read text in images and in fact can not appreciate arty images at all. When the search engine spiders your site for indexing (that means it looks at your site's pages to see what they are about) it does not run CSS, it ignores tables (on the whole) and it by passes javascript.

A search engine looks at your site's HTML and it starts at the top and ends at the bottom. While it is reading this stripped down version of your site it is looking for text and links. Text is something a search engine understands. For example if the words "search engine" crop up on a regular basis in my text then there is a good chance that my text is about search engines.

However, there is another problem. If two pages both contain text about search engines which text is the more useful? Which one is more likely to be true which is measured by the authority of the page)?

Starting with Google search engines start paying attention to links. Links now count as votes for other pages and a vote from an authoritative page is worth more than a vote from a worthless page. Let's look at that.



Here we have your site again but this time seen within the context of links to and from other pages. This is how the leading search engines think about your site and all the pages within it. The more links and the great the authority of those links that point to your pages the better.

Links do two things for you. First they enable visitors to the other website to find your site and second they count as a vote towards the page they point to meaning that the page is more likely to be found within the first few pages of a search results listing.

But if you look again at the image you will see a "billy no mates" in the bottom right hand corner. With no links coming in and none going out this site is likely to never be considered of any value at all and so, even if it had the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, no one would ever see it.

Also within the diagram are sites shown in dark gray. These are sites that search engines consider to be bad neighbourhoods. From a search engine point of view these are sites that game the system and try to commit fraud to improve their position in search results far beyond the quality they provide. Linking to them can actually hurt your relevancy because you are voting for "bad sites".

It does not take a great genius to see that there is an optimal configuration for a good site whereby the site gets the most traffic as a result. The art of optimising a site has become known as SEO or search engine optimisation. Many people make many claims about it and many of those may use or consider using methods that can hurt your future standing.

I'll end this introduction with some links to further information:

Some SEO Basics and Alexa Rank Mistakes - more detail and more diagrams by Lord Matt, Super Geek (me).
ProBlogger.net - SEO
SEO - Review :: Recover from the sand box again by me
Quality Link Building by Gregg M. Terry
Link popularity, wikipedia.org
the importance of title tags in search engine optimization, ProBlogger.net

As niches go this is a difficult one to make a name in so if this is something you are interested in you need a top notch domain name that has piles of SEO value.  We chose keywords for this lsit that focused on the core issues - money, wealthy, adsense, PPC and riches and come up with something pritty special.  

Once more we have used the fantastic tool that is CultOfThe.com to draw up a list of domain names that would be of interest. Obviousely some suggestions were better than others and quite often the best ones were taken.  This forced us to get even more creative than normal and we looked at words that might not otherwise be used.

As the list of good suggestions grew some off bea names suggested themselves to us and they are here in the mix as well.  The last ten are pure SEO valu whereas the former suggestions have more humanity left.  The kind of domain you choose will mostly be down to the sort of site you want to run.

We have some real treats instore for you here so hold on to your seat and "read more".

» Read More

To really get the most out of you VDL server you are going to want to "get hacker". Download a copy of a program called PuTTY - this is your secure telnet program.

Once you have this baby going fire her up and type in your server's domain name.

You should get a black window that looks much like a DOS window. Do not try to use DOS commands as this is something totally different. It is a shell script driven interface.

Don't worry if you don't understand what that is. It is enough to know that you have left GUI (Graphical User Interface) for CLI (command Line Interface) where you type your commands directly. You should now be connected to the server and talking to it directly.

It will ask for your username so type it in and press return (sometimes called enter).

Now it will ask for your password. You will see nothing appear as you type. Press enter/return when you are done.

All things being equal you should now be logged in as a user and probably with the shell called bash or a near relative. There is a more powerful account called root. Root has authority to do whatever it wants. With out server your root password should, by default, be the same as the one you logged in with. So for goodness sake keep it secret and change it from time to time.

Now if you want to look around type "ls" (no quotes) and you will see a list of files and directories in the working directory (where you are now). To change directory (folder to those too used to windows) type "cd" (no quotes) followed by a space and then a command such as ".." (two dots no quotes) to go up one level ("cd .." remember the space) or the name of a folder ("cd thisfolder").

You can switch directly to your web-space by typing something like "cd /home/USERNAME/".

Now if the server is messing about on you you might want to restart it type: "su -" and (unless you used "su root") type your root password (should be the same one you logged in with) and then type "reboot". You should get a system message saying the server is going down.

This can take a few moments so dive off and grab a fresh coffee. When you get back you can kid yourself that you have made it to some geekish higher level.

There is an error in the documentation for rebooting a Virtual Dedicated Linux server the help text says this:

1. SSH to your server.
2. In the command line, type:
   su-
reboot

This will just get bash to give you a rude message. Instead do this:

1. SSH to your server.
2. In the command line, type:
   su -
reboot

We are currently working to get corrections made.

This short announcment is to let you know that Globally Local will shortly be bringing you a new product that is 100% free. The project is still undergoing some basic testing and refinement but when compleate will have an antivirus scanner for your website.

Why would you want one of those?

If you have used shared hosting for any length of time you will discover that soner or later some evil minded virus pusher manages to find a script on a server that is only 99% secure and breaks in using the exploit to add code to every user on the server. This code is usually to force downloads of viruses. Most of the time the ISP is swift and the nasty little criminal is soon stopped. But in that time did he elave anything onyour space?

The antivirus is the answer to that question. It will be ready soon. Subscribe to our feed to keep pace of the goings on.

Just recently it has been big news that selfproclaimed SEO geek John Chow has vanished from the Google search results. Lord Matt carries the story in full but the short version is that John was trying to manipulate the system and the system did not like it.

While SEO has it's place it is nowhere near as important as content. When you forget this you forget why you are running a site. A site is for people and not for robots.