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

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.

A website is primarily for readable content. This is content but a site that is a single flash interactive movie is not. The movie itself is content but the web site contains one element and that is all.

That element when read by a blind user or a search engine is a very tiny amount of text. Hardly worth bothering about.

Once you understand this concept the answer to the question "what is a website" becomes much simpler to grasp.

But don't take my word for it.

As we ever seek to make the user expirence the best that it can be for everyone at globallylocal it became obviouse that we might not have all been singing from the same song book.

So we drafted a Hosting and Domain Glossary so that when you encounter words on this site that you might not know the exact meaning of you can look them up.

Feel free to let us know if we have missed anything.

There is no doubt that AJAX is a big deal. You can easily create richer, more interactive Web sites with ASP.NET AJAX when you choose us for your hosting needs.
AJAX-based functionality for your Web sites (with ASP.NET AJAX from Microsoft®), is available FREE to all globallylocal.com hosting customers. Are we good to you or what?

Now your visitors' Web experience can not only be richer and more satisfying but more "web 2.0" too. The built in partial page update feature makes it possible for individual pages to refresh more quickly. ASP.NET AJAX also makes it easy to create the much famed web 2.0 "mash-up" applications, seamlessly merging information from multiple locations into a smooth user friendly site. It works with Visual Studio 2005 freeing you to take your ASP.Net 2.0 sites to "the next level".

As you would expect it is a cross-browser, cross-platform Javascript library that makes the whole thing tick on the front end. It represents a new packaging of many of the technologies you already know and love, such as JavaScript, cascading style sheets (CSS), DHTM, and XMLHttpRequest. As you would expect it supports all modern browsers because all modern browsers support these technologies.

See all our hosting plans

Traffic Facts - your all in one statistical and information control centre.

Once you get beyond two or three domains checking the stats for them all becomes a right pain. We have solved that problem by letting you view all the crucial data in one place. It cuts the time you spend reviewing statistics for multiple Web sites in the most simple and obvious of ways.

By enabling you to access the data for all your sites in one place!

Not every visit to your site results in a positive action or sale. However, that does not mean you cannot profit anyway.

By learning about your visitors, what they liked what they clicked and where they came from you can build a picture of what gets the interest of your visitors and use that knowledge to tweak your site to perfection. This is why globallylocal.com provides Web site statistics absolutely FREE with every single Hosting account - including WebSite Tonight® .

With Traffic Facts' new Multiple Account Management feature, you can review all the vital traffic and visitor information from your different Web sites through a single interface – no more logging in and out of separate accounts to get the data you need.

Try Traffic Facts today and discover a faster, easier, more convenient way to see how your Web sites are performing!

Creating a functional site is not simple but it need not be hard.

Setting up an effective and useful site that not only does something but also sells stuff for you need not cost you half the annual budget. In fact if you follow the Globally Local blog you will know that all you need is a little support, a small amount of "pocket money" (just to buy the inexpensive items you require), and access to a good host.

In this article we explain what you need to get started with a functional web site.

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cultofthe.com is a new website which aims to help you find that perfect domain name.

Rather than simply processing your keyword and applying the most common prefixes and suffixes like "my-", "-live" or "-online" cult of the dot com take a wider approach using a dictionary of over 45,000 English words which can be combined with names and keywords according to three or four sets of possible methods.

The result is that a fresh and inventive list of suggested domain names are generated all with a slight touch of wry humour.