Our development work this week has included a lot of server optimisation for an eCommerce website and we dramatically improved response times, lowered overall CPU use and memory use by making changes to the server configuration.

The benefit is a better experience for the Visitors, Customers and Google (page load speed is a factor in Page Rank) and it also enables the server to cope with higher volumes of  visitors without becoming overloaded.

All of the changes were made to the configuration of the server itself, no changes were made to the website to gain these benefits.

Memory

We started by improving memory use, as this was frequently consumed and caused the site to become unresponsive and on rare occasions it become unusable.

The main changes came from changes to the Apache, MySQL and PHP configurations to reduce peak memory use to something the server could cope with.

MySQL

The first thing to do was analyse the MySQL peak use, which is a complex affair but our tools enabled us to quickly discover what the peak memory requirement is and enables us to identify areas we can safely change.

There were multiple changes made to the MySQL configuration that brought the peak memory requirement down from 18Gb to 6Gb, which ensured that MySQL remained in RAM and didn’t get swapped out to disk all of the time and that is very bad.

Apache & PHP

Apache was tweaked to cope with the regular demands by modifying the number of servers it keeps running and the memory they each consume. The changes themselves were small but they are multiplied by the number of servers that are created so the peak memory usage drops significantly.

PHP was quite an easy one to fix, this was a simple case of dropping the memory used per instance and there was one of these per Apache server so even small changes get multiplied to save lots of memory.

CPU Use

Having monitored the server for some time there were peaks in the load that corresponded with some MySQL queries being ran, we investigated further and  identified some particularly slow, and CPU intensive, queries by setting up and monitoring the slow_queries log.

MySQL

The CPU optimisation came by setting up the correct MySQL indexes to match the queries being ran, in a number of cases this dropped queries that were taking above 40s (yes! 40s) down to 0s (instant). There was a single query that was taking anywhere between 85s and 240s to complete that was painful to watch but thankfully this was just from the Admin interface and was ultimately brought down to 0s with correct indexes.

XCache – PHP caching

To simplify things, PHP is a text script that is interpreted every time it is loaded, executed to generate the page and then discarded. This is repeated every time the page is requested and this all takes time.

With this in mind, the way to improve response times is to use a PHP opcode cache, in our instance called XCache. This is an Opcode Cache that stores the interpreted PHP scripts and a way that is very fast to execute and generate pages. This in turn reduces CPU load and also improves page response times as the pages are served much quicker.

We installed, configured and monitor the installation of XCache and at the time of writing the cache is serving over 80% of pages from its cache.

Page Caching – Not sending content

Page Caching is the means that your browser stores files locally and doesn’t download files from the server every time it wants it.

The dilemma is: long expire times mean fewer hits on the site *but* this isn’t great if you’ve got frequent content updates as you want the new content to be sent to the visitor.

The improvement here was to get a correctly configure the expiration times for numerous different file types. E.g., dynamic webpages expire within 1hr, the product images expires after 1yr. Once an item expires, the browser will refetch the original.

Bad Robots – stopping leeches

There are lots of computers out there looking to steal your content, hogging your bandwidth, crawling through your site and generating page requests that don’t bring you any business at all.

There is a ‘nice’ way to request they don’t crawl through your content by using a file called ROBOTS.TXT but it’s not a requirement that servers use it and most malicious ones simply ignore it.

There is a way to block the robots from every connecting with your site that’s quite simple to do and we have configurations that block over 75 known bad computers and prioritise genuine visitors and good search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Summary

Overall, the changes highlighted above along with some other smaller tweaks enabled the server to cope with a higher volume of visitors and also improve the response times for each customer.

These are general principles for well configured servers that can be applied to pretty much any website without the need to change the website itself.

Contact us if you’d like us to improve your visitors experience or maybe you think your existing server just isn’t up to scratch.

• e-commerce websites CPU useage
• memory for ecommerce site
• mysql and php developer doncaster

Original post Optimising an eCommerce Site on Ring Alpha Web Design

Ring Alpha recently undertook the task of setting up and migrating a complete business over to the cloud. The task included migrating all of the User Accounts, Email, Documents, Calendars and Contacts to Google Applications for Business.
If you’re thinking about improving your availability, cost savings and ensuring your documents are backed up and shared then give Ring Alpha a call to see how we can help you migrate

Google Applications represents significant benefits over hosting your own services and here are a few key reasons:

• the cloud
• the cloud images
• google apps cloud

Original post Move your Business to the Cloud on Ring Alpha Web Design

We’re very please to announce the launch of our latest website for Stoke Farm, a Bed and Breakfast nestled in the Peak District National Park.

Our complete online business package includes a full website design, our ‘out of the box’ SEO, availability calendars, photography, specialised booking forms, setting up the associated Google Maps marker, Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters and much more.

Part of our work is always to work with the site owner to decide on the best keyword for their business, one that is relevant and achievable. In this case we chose 2 – Peak District Bed and Breakfast and Peak District Holidays.

We visited the business many times during the development of the website to take photos, discuss design & content and finally to go through the complete design and make sure everyone was happy. This personal approach goes a long way and it makes the whole web design process smoother for both us us.

It’s safe to say that the new website owners are impressed with our service and have engaged Ring Alpha to work on their other business websites as well as recommending us to other local businesses.

Contact us to get your Bed & Breakfast, Self-Catering accommodation, Hotel, Holiday Home or any form of holiday venue have a great presence on the web and bring in more customers.

• tripadvisor stoke farm holidays
• intitle:holidays powered by phpbb
• new website launched

Original post New Website launched: Stoke Farm, Peak District Holidays on Ring Alpha Web Design

Live Customer Support and Realtime Information about your website visitors is absolutely critical to improving your business online.

UPDATE: Our clients with a small number of visitors are using this tool to chat to all of their customers while they’re in a buying mood.

Understand who’s on your site, make your customers love you, and earn more money.

• Want to know who’s on your website RIGHT NOW?
• Want to catch your customers before they abandon their basket?

Chat to your customers live while they’re on your website and help them find what they’re looking for with a great online support tool like Olark.

Integration is easy

We recently integrated this into our own website and were so impressed with the results that we began to encourage our existing clients to take this up.

We simply added the code snippet to our webpage and then connected it to our desktop client – Pidgin for Windows or Adium for Mac.

Once installed, your website visitors appear as chat clients right inside your desktop chat client along with basic information about that particular user.

On the website, they see that you’re ‘live’ and they can choose to chat with you if they need help and you can also choose to start chatting to them.

IMMEDIATE benefits

Since installing it, we’ve been able to catch multiple customers before they walked away and we’ve genuinely got business we wouldn’t have had, all because of the live customer support that Olark offers.

Our major eCommerce client installed it too and quickly caught orders and helped their customers while they were still shopping, those customers would have walked away without live customer support. Live Customer Chat paid for itself very quickly.

Olark is our recommended choice of real-time customer chat because it can be extended to capture more business information you can use to really drill down into those opportunities that may go away without live customer support.

So far, we’ve enhanced this with:

• known user names – find out who’s registered and who hasn’t
• current basket value – focus on the customers who have a large amount of value in their basket
• page priority - catch users who are on your Contact or Checkout pages

Comprehensive Features

The realtime chat and customer support software is great whether you’re on your own or if you have a team of support people.

The software also generates lots of useful information about your online chats and visitors, as well as pushing more data out to Google Analytics so you can really drill down into the detail.

Want Real-Time Chat on your website?

We can help you setup your website and desktop client to enable you to catch real-time visitors on your website and improve your chance of converting those visitors into customers. Contact us to find out how
I can honestly say that we are genuinely impressed with Olark Live Customer Support and so our customers, especially as it brought them real orders within hours of being installed.

• add live chat
• online chat service business
• on website support chat to client

Original post Live Customer Support, chat and monitoring of your website visitors on Ring Alpha Web Design

Getting your business on Google Maps (aka Google Places, Google Local Business) is critical for every business as search results now prioritise and display local results over regular non-map based searches, if your business isn’t on the map then you’re missing out on a significant amount of potential customers.

UPDATE: We are now offering a service to get your business on Google Maps for only £50.

Thankfully, getting on the map is  a simple thing to do, it involves creating your own Google Places account and then submitting various business details such as address, contact details, categories, images, reviews and more to Google for consideration. Getting noticed is a little harder.

The tough part is getting your business noticed on Google Maps, as there are more and more businesses claiming their place and competing for attention. There are various components that need to be done right or it’s just a waste of time.
A well constructed place marker can generate genuine customers for your business and is absolutely vital in todays crowded market place. There are some proven tricks to use to jump up the listings above your competitors if you know how to play the game – these include getting your categories right, using key phrases in your copy, getting important related links into your listing and a few other secrets we know.

Getting noticed on Google Maps

We have experience of getting businesses onto Google Maps and getting them noticed, generating real value to your bottom-line and bringing you more customers and ultimately orders. We have multiple businesses now appearing in the coveted top 8 map slots, bypassing their competitors in regular search results.

Contact Us to see how we can help you get your business on Google Maps with a well built Place marker for only £50..

Related Links

• Google Places
• Our Google Maps listing service for only £50.

• google my place for business
• how to get my business on google maps
• my business on google maps

Original post Get my business on Google Maps on Ring Alpha Web Design

Managing an effective Pay Per Click advertising campaign on Google Adwords takes experience and skill to do right as there are many factors that come into play in order to really maximise your budget and effectiveness.

At the time of writing every new Adwords account gets a £30 voucher to use within 15 days of the account opening so it’s worth grabbing that free cash and using it will.

Before you go ahead, setting up a single campaign, with 1 advert pointing at your homepage driven by lots of keywords is a sure-fire way to wasting your advertising budget but with a little effort you can make it work for you.

It’s important to understand how your advert will be chosen to be displayed based on the adverts content, the bid (usually automatically set) and the page on your website that the advert points to, all of these components need to work together for the best effect.

Adwords Quality

A core concept is a number between 1-10 that you will see displayed as keyword ‘quality’ within your campaign, the higher the number is the better the ‘quality’ of your advert is. The actual mechanics of how this is calculated is a closely guarded secret by Google but it’s definitely based on the relationship between the keyword, the advert copy and the content of the web page your linking to.

Here are some examples to try and give you some ideas.

Good – quality is likely to be 8

• keyword: ‘ecommerce website’
• advert: ‘Get great ecommerce websites that deliver more customers’
• link to page: http://yourwebsite.com/ecommerce-website (note the keywords are in the linked address)
• page content: a page on your website focusing on the keywords ‘ecommerce website’
  • page title: Amazing eCommerce websites
  • page description: Amazing ecommerce websites for businesses of all sizes.
  • page keywords: ecommerce website, website ecommerce, ecommerce website

Bad – quality is likely to be 1

• keyword: ‘ecommerce website’
• advert: ‘All jobs taken, no job too small. Call us now’.
• link to page: http://www.yourwebsite.com
• page content: the home page that contains lots of images and contact details without the key phrase ‘ecommerce website’

The previous 2 examples of pay-per-click adverts clearly show the difference between an effective collection of components and ones that don’t work together at all.

Now, here’s how advert quality plays how in the advertising campaign.

You can essentially think of ‘Quality’ as a percentage of how efficient your pay-per-click bid is for any particular keyword, lets look at an example. To make this a little simpler we’ll imagine fixed bid of £1 for the adverts above and the formula.

Bid Value = Quality x Your Bid

In these examples, Ad A is generating £0.80 of bid value compared to Ad B generating £0.10 of bid value for every £1 allocated. If these 2 webpages were competing for the same keywords then Ad A is very likely to be seen in prime locations where Ad B is never going to be seen because £0.10 simply isn’t enough to out bid their advertising competitors to be seen for those keywords.

Sadly, it’s all too common to see businesses spending money on online advertising without realising how ineffective their pay-per-click adverts are and those businesses are wasting money on bad internet marketing and this isn’t something you can afford to do.

Putting together an effective Google Adwords campaign

Adwords advert quality is a critical component of an effective Google Adwords PPC online advertising campaign but it must work in concert with the page your visitors will land on, aka: landing page. If you’re looking to start an Adwords pay-per-click campaign or maximise your internet marketing budget then you need to get a few things right if you’re to make best use of your budget.

• Create landing pages for your campaigns on your website
• Choose relevant keywords
• Write advert copy that matches your keywords and landing page
• Check your keyword quality to make sure not wasting cash
• Split your campaign up into multiple keyword:ad:landing page segments
• Avoid negative keywords that don’t bring you visitors such as ‘jobs’, ‘career’
• Target specific ad placements such as competitors, forums, special groups, to focus on your audience. NOTE: this is about where your ad is place rather than what keywords you use

You can take this further by adding in some data capturing through Analytics

• Optimise your landing pages to convert your visitors into customers
• Automatically track conversions and adjust your campaign to be increasingly efficient

These are some of the elements we carefully setup and manage for any campaigns we undertake along with a number of other techniques only available to our clients.

Effective Adwords Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Generating highly visible effect pay-per-click advertising campaigns shouldn’t cost the earth and you careful management can really make a difference to get your campaign noticed in the right places and bring potential customers to your online business.

Our pay-per-click campaigns are well-managed, efficient and make best use of your  budget. Can you afford to waste your precious internet marketing budget? Contact Us to find out how we can help you.

• difference between google ad campeign and advert
• advert improve
• roger godfrey management consulting

Original post Improve Google Adwords advertising campaigns on Ring Alpha Web Design

We have a great deal of experience in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for eCommerce websites to improve the position of both your online store and the items you sell.

We have some secret ways of doing this for your eCommerce website but we can share our most common tactics that are specific to eCommerce to genuinely improve your orders.

1. Navigation around the eCommerce website must be easy for both Google and your customers. There are specific tasks that need to be done to ensure that you make the most of website layout to ensure your items rank highly. e.g., the URLs of the products themselves, how the categories interlink, location of your checkout.
2. You must avoid duplicate content by ensuring that your products are unique, even if the same product exists in multiple product categories, that can be achieved with some clever use of meta tags.
3. The website needs to respond quickly to keep your Page speed very quick. This is especially tricky in category listings that show lots of products, but we have tricks and tactics that can reduce your load times massively through on site and on server fixes.
4. Product Reviews are big news for Google and other engines but they must be able to find the reviews and make sense of them in order to display them against your listings in search results by using hReview microformats.
5. Get your products out of your online store and into global eCommerce website places like Google Shopping, Facebook, eBay and Amazon to reach massive audiences. We have experience in adapting existing stores to make this happen and our new online stores come with these features built in.

These are just a few of the things we do to make your website rank high on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to get you more customers and more sales.

• e-commerce key basket
• seo tips for ecommerce 2011
• seo tips and tricks 2011 ecommerce

Original post Five eCommerce Website SEO tips you can use on Ring Alpha Web Design

It’s fair to say that we’re experienced experts in ecommerce web development having delivered multiple ecommerce websites of all sizes that serve anywhere from 100 to 90,000 customers per month and have over 1,000 products listed on Google Products.

We offer a number of ‘out of the box’ ecommerce packages that can support your business whatever your scale now and in the future.

All of our ecommerce packages are built on proven, secure, extendible eCommerce web platforms that will scale with your business.

• Small eCommerce websites are built on the popular WordPress platform and can support from 1 to 100 products in multiple categories and come with a rich feature set including secure payments via Paypal or Google Checkout.
• Mid-size eCommerce websites are built on the proven and feature rich Magento eCommerce web platform that is used by hundreds of existing eCommerce stores around the world. Our eCommerce website is capable of handling 1000s of products and 1000s of customers every day.
• We have experience in improving your existing eCommerce website with new features, Google Product listings, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), new payment schemes, Price Comparison integration, new layouts or anything you wish.
• Our custom ecommerce web development projects can bring you a completely bespoke eCommerce store that’s finely tuned to the needs of your business without breaking the bank.

Our eCommerce website hosting is especially chosen to cope with all of the demands of your eCommerce store.

• 1000 products e-commerce site price?
• ecommerce website developer customer post review
• ecommerce website hosting

Original post eCommerce Website Developer on Ring Alpha Web Design

Keeping your website up-to-date is important to ensure you keep high in the search listings or you will be overtaken by those that do. We can help you find and fix any issues that may affect your search results position, it’s never been more important to keep your website up-to-date.

There have been a few recent Google announcements that are likely to affect your site if your website isn’t updated to consider them.

• February 2011 saw Google change their search results formula and 11% of old sites disappeared off the radar, many others are sliding down the ranks.
• March 2011 raised the profile of Page Speed, where faster loading pages appear higher in the Search Engine Results Pages. This website scores 88 out of 100, how does yours compare?
• Jan-April 2011 has seen a major update of  WordPress and numerous security fixes to mitigate hacker attacks
• May-June 2011 will see Google Product Merchants being required to include extra data in their product feeds. Google said “While these attributes will not be required for your data feed to process correctly, they may prevent your items from appearing in Product Search results if not included”

These are just a few of the recent changes in an ever changing web landscape, it’s never been more important to keep your website up-to-date.

Here are some website self-help tips:

Further Spring Cleaning Advice

Broad view of your Online precense

Take a birds eye view of your websites online presence with Open Site Explorer - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/.

Clean website

Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo prefer clean websites with no technical errors. You can check your own website is compliant at these links:

• Markup Validation – http://validator.w3.org/
• CSS Validation – http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Page Speed

We’ve all visited websites that take an age to load and we’ve all clicked away to find a faster website, here are a few ways to check your web page load speed – anything over 2 seconds is considered slow, anything over 5 seconds is very bad:

• Google Page Speed
• Pingdom Page Load tester

What next?

These are just a few of the tools to keep you informed of how your website is performing in todays internet climate, Ring Alpha Web Design is ideally placed to do this work on your behalf and keep your website appearing high in the Search Engine Results Pages.

• spring clean your website
• clean website results
• how to improve website search results

Original post Spring Clean Your Website to improve your Search Results ranking on Ring Alpha Web Design

Our recent SEO work on the eCommerce website for John James Needles has resulted in top of Page #1 ranking on Google search results and Google Shopping results for key phrases “sewing needles” and “embroidery needles“.

Our SEO work includes changes to all of their product written content, layout changes, web design changes and some technical code changes to their existing eCommerce shopping platform.

John James Needles products now appear on Page #1 of a regular Google search and link into comparison shopping results against major online retail stores.

The Page #1 rankings are directly mapped onto an increase in visitor numbers and sales. This is a great result and the position will continue to improve over the coming weeks.

Do you want more visitors and increased revenue? Give us a call.

The numbers on the right are taken from Googles Webmaster tools for John James Needles and show the weekly improvement in position for search terms.

• 1seo reviews
• #1 rank in search results
• improving google shopping results description

Original post Page #1 SEO Success – John James Needles on Ring Alpha Web Design