Fasthosts.co.uk

Fasthosts.co.uk

Brief Introduction
This is yet another leading player in the online services business catering to the home, SME and office segments since the last decade. They have been going from strength to strength introducing innovative web hosting services over the years. They offer both Windows and Linux server facilities based on the type of applications the customers want to run. Both beginners and experienced designers find the packages of Fasthost easy to implement thanks to the better scripting followed by them.

Services offered

a)Web hosting

They offer the entire gamut of services including access to unlimited bandwidth and a new enhanced Site Builder. The set up is quick and the deal is sweetened by the offer of £105 Ad vouchers. Currently they are offering free hosting services for the first three months under the home, developer and business categories.

b)Domain registration

The registration is provided at very reasonable rates along with other advantages such as a personalised email account and website. Instantaneous set up and online controls are other additional features of this service. You can also transfer your domain name free of cost.

c)Email

This service allows you to get regular and uninterrupted access to email using the PC or even from the mobile phone that is compatible. The storage is centralized and all the contacts, emails, numbers and schedules are updated real time so that you have access to the latest information and are in control of the situation. Your data is stored in a state of art data center with total spam and virus protection.

Currently they have slashed their rates by 50% for the mail plus, exchange and business categories
d)Servers

You can manage your server remotely at any time since you will have access to keyboard and the mouse. The Plesk 9 control panel enables you to manage many servers and also configure the server dedicated to you according to your needs. Safe environments can be created immediately using your own LAN if you wish to handle multiple servers. Your information is safely stored at the data center. Unlimited bandwidth is offered through the 100Mbps connectivity line with an uptime guarantee of 99.9%

e)Broadband

Different broadband internet speeds offered without any restriction on its usage for internet telephony, gaming and so on.

f)Reseller services

The unlimited reseller hosting services allow you to start your own web hosting services and you can take advantage of the latest 3 month trial offer.
g)E commerce

Your website is provided security using standard encryption of 128 – bit and there is no need for any manual integration. SSL is also provided free for the Developer and Business categories.

Strengths

* One stop service provider
* Highly respected and trusted by customers
* Excellent customer service back up
* State of art technology used for all their applications and initiatives

What customers have to say?

Customers are gaga over the flexibility of support provided and the ability of this company to respond immediately to changing needs. They feel that the packages are extremely user friendly and those who have moved from other service providers have found the transition smooth and hassle free.

Using your shared web hosting for the first time

Using your shared web hosting for the first time

So, you are the new and proud owner of a shared web hosting account and you wonder where to start from. One good place you can start from is the Getting Started guides your webhosting provider probably offers. However, if you feel that even the thinnest Getting Started guide is too thick for you because you are impatient to start using your shared web hosting account, here is a really brief primer on some of the most important features of a shared web hosting account a beginner should know:

1. Learn the URL of your control panel. One of the things you can’t do without is the URL of your control panel. In some cases it might be the same (or at least similar) to the domain name of the website of your webhosting, but very often (due to security considerations), your shared web hosting package will be hosted on a different server and the URL will be very different. Chances are that you will get the URL (including the port and all other relevant details) in the email you will receive right after you open your account with that particular web host.
2. Learn how to add a domain. Unless you have explicitly chosen a single domain webhosting package, most shared web hosting packages allow to add additional domains to your account. Usually it is done from the control panel (cPanel or something else) and the option is called something like “Add an additional domain”, “Add a new domain”, “Addon domains”, or “Add a subdomain”. Technically speaking, a subdomain is different from a domain but since the domain you will be adding will be treated as a subdomain to your account, don’t get shocked by the terminology.
3. Learn how to configure mail. As with additional domains, unless you have explicitly chosen a web hosting package without any mail features, you will have the chance to use your shared web hosting account to configure a mail server for your domain. Actually, more often than not, you will need to configure the mail accounts, their passwords and quotas. As a user of a shared web hosting package, you will hardly have to configure a mail server, so there is no reason to worry how you will handle this.
4. Learn how to use the file manager. The file manager is a nice feature you should get familiar with. It is true that if you use an FTP client, you will have many of the functionalities a typical file manager offers but since there will be a lot of tasks you will be performing on the files in your shared web hosting account, it makes sense to find the file manager and learn how to use it.
5. Learn how to read statistics. Statistics are vital because they give you information about how your web site is performing. Logs are one source of statistical data. In addition to raw logs (which are hardly the most entertaining type of reading) usually there are also analytical tools, which present the data from the logs in a more readable form.

Almost any shared web hosting provider offers times more features than that. Some of these features (i.e. MySQL databases) are useful but they require more advanced knowledge and you will hardly be able to use them right from the start. Other tools (i.e. Apache handlers, cron jobs, etc.) are also useful but they are too sophisticated for a beginner. Therefore, unless you really need them, you’d better not touch them at all because there is a high risk to make a mess.

Multilingual Online Marketing and SEO

Multilingual Online Marketing & SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses in the 21st century. From PPC and AdWords, to on-page optimisation and link-building, the case for SEO is really quite an easy one: if you rank highly on Google for certain key terms, your business is far more likely to succeed than if you don’t.

This is a given. But with international markets, the waters are even muddier. A whole host of cultural and linguistic intricacies must be considered when setting up a foreign language website and to ignore this, is to embark on a rather counterproductive online marketing campaign. It’s important that you speak to your target audience in a language that they not only understand, but in a natural way that resonates with them. There’s little point in having a professionally designed website, if the content lets it down.

So how does a business broaden its online presence in foreign lands? Well, before the SEO process begins, you’ll obviously need to have a foreign language website in the target market.

But before you do this, you must identify which is the best market to target, and this will vary greatly from business to business. You will have to do your research and see where there is a gap for you to exploit. If there are other similar businesses operating already in a specific country, then that’s a good sign as it demonstrates a demand for the product or service. However, be wary of too many companies, as it can be difficult to gain a foothold in an industry that is already saturated.

The next stage is to buy a locally hosted domain name in the target country. It may just be your company name with a local domain extension, for example .es in Spain or .fr in France, or if your company name is a direct reflection of the services you offer (e.g. ‘Web Design Services’), then you would be best translating your company name into the target language and buying that domain name instead. Just as important is your choice of web host as the server they use should be located in the target country – Google considers the IP address of the server in its ranking algorithms.

This lays the foundation for you to translate your website into the desired language. From a content standpoint, you must use a translation company that uses professionally qualified ‘in-country’ translators that translate INTO their native tongue.

Some businesses may be tempted by the many free website translation tools available online – whilst these can be useful if you need to understand the gist of a website in another language, you really don’t want to use such a tool for your own website, as they provide translations that are far from perfect.

It also pays to be wary of the linguistic nuances between dialects. For example, the French spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada are substantially the same, but there are some key differences. There is no room for complacency with your foreign language website, e.g. courriel is ‘email’ in Canadian French but simply ‘email’ in France. And dejeuner is ‘lunch’ in France, but ‘breakfast’ in Belgium and Switzerland.

Localisation and SEO go hand-in-hand. You want professionally written, localised content – this means you musn’t translate your keywords from English. The correct dictionary translation of a keyword or phrase may NOT be what people use to search for the desired product or service locally, they may use colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing. So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.

Once you have your keywords identified for each country, you can then incorporate these into a professionally translated website.

This is just the very basics of launching a foreign language website. The importance of localizing the website for the target market can’t be over-emphasized and there is a myriad of cultural and linguistic complexities that must be addressed in addition to the above – but that would make for an essay in itself!

About the author
Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a global translation services provider that specializes in website localization. With operations across four continents and clients in over sixty countries, Lingo24 are on course for a turnover of £3.7m in 2009.

You can comment on this article at Temi’s blog or you can discuss it at UK Webmaster SEO forum

Bing harnesses the power of Wolfram Alpha to enhance search results

In its continuous strive to become a credible competition to Google, Microsoft search engine Bing has just announced that it is teaming up with respected web tool; Wolfram Alpha to improve results in Bing’s search engine result pages. Wolfram Alpha is different to a conventional search engine because it does not send you to page on the web where you can find the information you are looking for but it actually answers you question, this makes Wolfram Alpha describe itself as a “computational knowledge engine” rather than a search engine.

The partnership between Bing and Wolfram Alpha will first be tested out in US and it will be limited to areas such as nutrition, health and mathematics. Wolfram Alpha differentiates itself from standard search engines by answering questions directly, by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases.

Yes, you can use LinkedIn and other social media for SEO

Using LinkedIn for SEO

You know that owning a website is only half the job done. The website needs to draw a lot of traffic towards it, which is only possible through search engine optimisation. Sites that can be accessed or crawled by the search engines easily and to the maximum are visible to more number of eyeballs and it is therefore in your interest to seek better tips and ways to make the site worthy of attention from the search engines. This will in turn lead to more traffic visiting the website and you can take full advantage of such visibility as you go along.

You may have made use of many of the popular social networking sites to improve the visibility of your website, but may still be unsure about their impact. One site that can be of great use to you is LinkedIn. This site already enjoys great visibility and its ranking on the search engines is quite high. This will ensure that any association with this site would be of great benefit to your website as well. It is the spin off effect that will do the trick.

If you have already established contact and have a running association with this site, then it is time to make substantial improvements on the SEO front and given below are some tips on how to best make use of LinkedIn for this purpose:

a) Take the benefit of anchor text and links

Though this appears simple and easy to do, it is very crucial for increasing the SEO. The anchor text has to be used such that it provides the link from LinkedIn profile to your site and if you can manage to generate such links to many sites, you stand to gain substantially in terms of back links. Anchor text using appropriate key words is the answer towards making your site more SEO friendly.

The reason is also because important search engines like Google does a lot of checking of the anchor text in ranking sites and if you have managed the right key words relevant to your site, the ranking is improved to a great extent and your site will find favor with many search engines. The trick is to be creative about the key words and not fall prey to common names or terms.

b) Pay close attention to the key words

While composing your profile on LinkedIn, you must ensure that you select the most appropriate key words. The making of the profile would mean that you may have to mention about your hobbies, the type of jobs you have done, what you prefer and other salient features of your personality. You need to pepper your profile with the most relevant key words so that they link back to your site effortlessly.

c) Make sure you add connections

This is another area, which greatly influences the SEO of any site. You need to add sufficient number of connections to add visibility to the site and this will automatically improve the ranking of your site among the search engines.
d) Customise and tailor make the URL

Finally, it is important to really customize and tailor make the URL according to what you have on LinkedIn so that even the LinkedIn members are able to make changes to their own URLs and not be forced to make do with the one available on default. You can select a name that is close to you and can even opt for the name of your own website. This will definitely lend better visibility and will result in the SEO getting boosted further.

You can discuss this article and other search engine marketing related issues at UK Webmaster Forum

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