In the last post we discussed the new changes in Google’s algorithm to favor older, faster sites. But what does that mean for you?  Well, as is always the case with Google’s changes, there are many ways you can optimize your site to take advantage of the new rules.

In addition to older, faster favoritism, Google is now a faster spider. GoogleBot is more robust, and can spider more information more quickly. This means, of course, that new content is more important than ever before. It also means newer products will likely appear in searches before older ones. This can present some problems but, overall, just remember: New=indexed.

Over the past few days, I have been researching what site changes need to be implemented to get TurnKey Internet to the top. I have learned that there are several changes that can improve rank under the new algorithm, though not all of them are easy or without some technical trickiness.  While reading over these suggestions, remember, the goal here is to maximize speed and take advantage of faster indexing. Of course, you also want to continue to add new content, but you already know that.

Make the most of Google Caffeine

1) Minimize CSS and Javascripts

This is pretty obvious but, by reducing file size, you can significantly increase your site speed.

2) Avoid Duplicate URLs

If you’re pulling the same content, there is no need to be duplicating the same URL. Each time the browser loads that content, it slows download speed.

3) Intelligently Paralyze Resource URLs

Use separate host names for all of your files—for example, CSS.yourdomain.com or images.yourdomain.com. By doing this you allow your browser to make simultaneous connections, increasing site download speed. But watch out for your javascript files. These need to be in the same location as your index file because many browsers won’t start rendering until the javascripts have executed.

4) Enable Compression

Enable mod_gzip or mod_decompress to, once again, speed up your site download.

5) Enable Caching

Make sure you have enabled caching and “last modified” tags to reflect updates. Make them available to search engines with HTTP headers.

6) Use a CDN for Graphic Intensive Sites

Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host large images and other files. This will cache these files geographically. What you spend on CDN (which shouldn’t be much) should pay for itself with increased business from improved page rank.

While PageRank remains shrouded in mystery, each new update reveals new information we can all use to optimize our content. Remember, like with all legitimate hard work, improving rank takes time. But if you make these improvements now, you will be ahead of the curve and, with a little luck and some elbow grease, you can rise to the top of search results.

To your success!

As the latest round of Google’s algorithm changes take the Internet by storm, SEO marketers around the world are wondering what effect these changes will have on search results. Google’s primary metric, PageRank, named after its inventor, Larry Page, is extremely complex. The Wikipedia entry for PageRank demonstrates the lengths to which many great minds have gone to try and reverse-engineer the algorithm to figure it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank.  But, each new algorithm tweak Google reveals new hints about how it all works.

The latest update is called Caffeine and includes several new layers of complexity for the algorithm. It is rumored that caffeine will be taking into account website age and loading time. This will benefit those sites that are more established and faster, and will hurt newer and slower sites. Evidently, Google aims to reinforce good quality, reliable content, optimized for speed and built over time. This is consistent with Google’s mission of improving the overall search experience.

According to Wikipedia and Mashable, there are two key changes to consider:

1) Caffeine includes a massive speed increase. Search results will now be returned twice as fast as before.

2) Search results will be “blended,” including information culled from a wide variety of sources—press releases, images, video, news—along with traditional results.

While, as a marketer Google’s constant changes might drive me crazy, as a searcher, I appreciate the egalitarian nature of much of what they do. If marketers had the inside scoop, there would, undoubtedly, be millions of dollars invested by those who could afford it to manipulate search results to their own ends. This would be great for those businesses but, in the long run, it would ruin the user experience. When I run a search, I’m not looking for results paid for by wealthy companies, I’m looking results that best match my search terms. As our collective information bank, our massive online reference library, Google has a responsibility to the information above all else. As much as the business people among us might wish for it, as soon as money starts getting in the way of our free access to information, we no longer live in a free society.

After running my own online business for a few years, I started working as TurnKey’s Marketing Director last summer. My background is in online marketing and content production, so I felt reasonably knowledgeable coming in on my first day. Ha! As it turns out, knowing something about social networks, SEO and writing copy doesn’t really help one understand the ins and outs of the web hosting business. Weird, I know. Point is: I had a ton to learn. Luckily for me, I had Mr. Dave Klotz, our systems engineer and all around hilarity machine. Dave really made the transition easy on me. He’s a super smart one with some hardcore patience and a real ability to explain things in understandable ways—not a trait common to most systems engineers, or so I’ve heard.

Anyhow, it occurred to me that you guys might like to get to know Dave a little better too. So here you have it, the first in a new series I like to call, “TurnKey Staff Interviews.” Enjoy!

What first attracted you to the hosting business?
I like the Internet, it’s a fun place. To be able to be a part of the IT industry is great too. I feel as a web host we are at the vanguard of seeing emerging technologies on the Internet. When I am able to help a customer and see their business take off, I can’t help but be excited for them and feel like I somehow was able to bring them closer to their goal.

How did you find TurnKey?
Craigslist, the place from which all blessings flow (besides TurnKey, of course).

What aspect of your job brings out the best in you?
I think I’m pretty good at figuring out technologies, and how to implement them to increase automation to expedite our ability to deliver a consistent and reliable product, as well as come up with new avenues to expand our current product selection. I think of it as coming up with life hacks for the company.

Do you have any hobbies?
I enjoy taking drives. A good road-trip always clears my thoughts, and if not, then it wasn’t a long enough trip. I also enjoy collecting records, as well as political punditry.

Tell me something interesting about yourself.
I am made mostly of water.

What hardware/software do you use on your home computer?
Windows 7, Ubuntu Desktop, Windows XP, Fedora Core 11 on my 2 PCs. Commodore Basic V2 on a Commodore 64.

Thanks Dave! Stay tuned for more TurnKey Staff Interviews, coming soon.

For many clients just starting out with a website or a new business, a virtual private server is often enough to get off the ground. But, for many there comes a point when the VPS offerings just aren’t enough.

The most obvious sign that it’s time for an upgrade is when your website has started regularly requiring more bandwidth or power than your current plan provides. Sure, this is kind of a no-brainer, but it’s a good idea to upgrade before you start running into trouble. If your site starts topping out the charts, it could temporarily go offline and that’s not good for business. Often we will see clients explode all of a sudden because they ran a special promotion or got some good press, and we will always work with them to make the transition to a dedicated server as seamless as possible. But, if you start seeing things getting busy, you can avoid a stressful situation with a preventative upgrade.

Another time an upgrade is a good idea is when a web application transitions out of beta. While your working the bugs out of your application, a VPS can work fine. With just a few developers and beta testers in the system, a dedicated server would probably be overkill anyway. Once you release your application to the public, however, you’ll want to make sure you plan for the inevitable boom in traffic. Nobody wants their newly released project going down right out of the gate!

Regardless of the content of your website, if you’re worried about stability, dedicated servers are always the safest bet. Below you will find a summary of all the benefits a dedicated server provides (and how TurnKey maximizes those benefits for our customers)…

• Speed and Performance: Server and network response times in a shared hosting environment depend highly on the activity of others with whom you share space and resources. With a dedicated server you have significantly faster response and page load times because all the systems resources (such as CPU, disk, RAM and network bandwidth) are controlled and utilized solely by the applications on your server.
• Reliability: With a dedicated hosting environment, you have unlimited access to the operating system, server resources and software applications. This gives you a reliable way to manage the needs of your web site and database system: it’s all there when you need it. If a neighbor causes a problem by over using resources, it will not impact your web site or your business. All TurnKey Dedicated Servers are bundled with our Managed Services (http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/webhosting/turnkey_managed_services.php) to ensure you have remote off-site backups, 24 x 7 monitoring and security to maintain the highest level of reliability on your server.
• Security: Dedicated servers provide better security than any other form of hosting since you are the only one with the root “administrative” access to your resources (disk, CPU, RAM, etc.) and can configure customized security policies server-wide such as firewall protection, user-level permissions and even restrict the types of applications that run on the server. With other forms of hosting, such as shared hosting, the neighbors you share space with could jeopardize the security of your web and database systems.
• Customization and Flexibility: Dedicated Servers offer unlimited customization and flexibility to meet your hosting application needs. You have access to fine tune and optimize all aspects of the server such as custom versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl/CGI or custom database configurations to suit your application needs, providing substantial performance gains over any other form of hosting. You maintain full root ‘administrator’ access to the server and can install, remove, or modify any applications you wish. Need even more power behind your hosted application – and TurnKey can customize your server with additional RAM, disk and bandwidth to suit your needs or provide you with advanced enterprise level solutions such as clustering, virtualization, load balancing and mirroring of your dedicated server.
• Easy-To-Use-Software: TurnKey Internet provides easy-to-use, pre-installed and pre-configured hosting applications for your web, database and mail system needs. If you know how to use a web browser, you are ready to use a TurnKey Dedicated Server with your choice of Administrative Control Panels. You can even select your choice of Linux or Windows operating systems.
• Multiple Domains: Dedicated servers provide a cost-effective and management-friendly solution to multiple domain hosting. Rather than dealing with the burden of numerous accounts on shared hosting servers, you can host a virtually unlimited number of domains on a single dedicated server. With our server management software, it’s easy to create, manage and delete accounts whenever you want, and all from one interface.
• Worry-Free Operation: TurnKey Internet backs every dedicated server with our Managed Service to ensure you don’t have to worry about your server and can keep your focus on running your business. From offsite backups to London and New York, to managed Firewall and Security monitoring, TurnKey takes care of everything for you.

As you can see, dedicated servers are the best solution for those that are serious about their web site and want the assurance that hardware, software and resources are dedicated exclusively to them. If you are considering hosting numerous domains, a high traffic site, an e-commerce site, reselling hosting to others, have sensitive data contained in your site or simply want more speed, power and control, it’s time to upgrade to a dedicated server. We hope you’ll choose TurnKey!

As a girl working in the technology industry, I’ve got a lot of tech-obsessed buddies on my list this year. So, I’ve been paying pretty close attention to what’s new and exciting in the bright and shiny electronics world. At this point, I’m panicking. December is rolling on under me like a breakneck speedster and, well, I am completely overwhelmed by the stunning volume and variety of new tech gadgets: Nanos and Kindles and Androids in The Cloud or something? Not only don’t I know what my friends want, I don’t have time to figure out what everything even is! If you’re feelin’ me right now, then stay tuned, because I have the solutions to all of your tech gift-giving problems:

1) Web Hosting
2) Domain Names

In today’s world, many of us spend more time interacting in cyberspace than we do in originalspace. It’s where we socialize, do business and stay informed. As more and more people all over the world gain reliable, regular access to this global marketplace, online real estate will only become more and more vital and necessary in our everyday lives. What better gift at the holidays than a juicy plot of land in our global village? No matter what gadgets your friends have, they can always use online real estate.

Once you’ve got the house, you need an address. Giving the gift of a domain name, with web hosting or on its own, is a great inexpensive way to help your friends expand their online empires. Tell them to think of picking their domain like naming a band. That always helps me.

Whether your friends are techtastic like mine, or have always wanted a website but haven’t gotten around to setting one up, web hosting and domain names make excellent gifts. And, if you’re really ambitious, install WordPress and build a blog to get them started! Think of it as the ultimate holiday card.

Anneke Rudegeair
Marketing Director

It’s a curious thing about people but, despite tough times, when it comes to gift giving we always feel generous. In hardcore, ramped-up holiday America, that makes us delicious morsels for anyone who is selling something. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the Marketing Director for a web hosting and web conferencing company: I’m selling something too. So, maybe don’t trust anything I say. But right now I’m putting on my hypocritical hat to balk at the maelstrom of advertisers all around me. I’m in an advertising soup. These noodles want my money! And, strangely enough, while one part of me is bothered by the assault, another part of me actually does want to buy stuff.

So, the question is: What advertising actually works? What cuts through the creamy broth? Where’s the beef? (And by that I mean sales.)

Personally, I appreciate an up-front, old-fashioned discount. What can I say? I enjoy a sale. But I don’t just want to feel like I’m getting something for less than I should be. As a consumer, I actually want it to be true. Needless to say, at the same time that I want an honest-to-goodness bargain, all those business-ladies out there still have to make a buck. So, you might ask, “Where, Anneke, do the twain meet?” Well, reader, I might answer: in the lovingly-crafted compromise.

Before you call me a Socialist (and I wouldn’t be mad if you did) remember: in tough economic times more than any other, it’s the returning customers that sustain your business. Loyalty leads to word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth leads to more customers (which leads to more word-of mouth, which leads to more customers… see where I’m going with this?) With big corporations leaning heavily on the tax-payer, honest, sustainable businesses have become an invaluable commodity in America. And in an age of social networks, reputation is more important and spreads faster than ever.

The focus-on-the-customer idea isn’t new. But the give-the-customer-a-real-discount-such-that-you-don’t-make-a-big-profit idea, is. I contend that the potential value of that customer’s positive experience outweighs your immediate monetary profit. Obviously you can’t run your business that way all year round or you’d never make a dime, but at the holidays in a tough economy, when customers are inundated with options and strapped for cash, your deep discounts will really matter. Allowing a customer to be able to afford your product or service at the holidays can make it possible for that customer to give a meaningful gift to a loved one. If that doesn’t engender loyalty, I don’t know what will. This is an honest, legitimate, practically and emotionally significant way to build your business.

In summary: providing unprecedented discounts can really set retailers apart in the mad scramble this season, and can set them up for unprecedented success in the new year.

Anneke Rudegeair
Marketing Director

This is a question we often get from new clients. Every time I hear the question, I think, “if you don’t know the difference, you probably want a managed server.” Of course, this isn’t a very helpful thing to say to someone who is curious about what is actually going on behind the scenes. Here brief overview of the differences…

We have many clients with years of experience working with servers, and these are typically the clients who opt for the unmanaged option. With an unmanaged server, we set up the hardware, install the operating system, install the control panel if one is ordered, and maintain the network and hardware. Beyond that, most everything is controlled by the client: troubleshooting, configuring firewalls, installing software, etc. While we are happy to provide unmanaged servers to those clients who request it, we feel so strongly that managed servers are the way to go for most clients that we offer it free with our dedicated and virtual private servers. Over the years, we have found that this is the most effective and efficient plan for keeping our clients up and running. 

A managed server is dedicated server or virtual private server backed with extra technical support services such as round the clock monitoring, off-site backups, security and firewall management, software updates, and software technical support beyond just rebooting the server if you have a problem. Many companies out there today abuse the term Managed, when in reality they only provide minimal support via email only, and offer to reboot or reformat your server in response to any problems you may have. TurnKey Internet was founded on managed services and we take it very seriously – when we say our servers are fully managed we mean it, and put it in writing.

Whether a client is an expert or a novice, having a platform that works without a fuss is usually pretty appealing. Why do all the extra work if you don’t have to?

Click here to learn more about TurnKey’s managed services.

Or follow these links to learn more about our different managed plan options:
Silver, Gold, Platinum, and  Titanium.