Website owners have woken to find their website displaying a message  “hacked by hacker” or similar; at first it was thought to be the typical your CMS has been hacked isolated case.

As more and more website owners have come forward many from the same web host and same server, this changed the possible attack vector.

This leads security experts to believe its a server wide exploit and isn’t dependent on your individual website security (updated CMS etc).

Website platforms that were hacked in this particular wave included:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Static Websites

The worst is… for the most part this was all avoidable if shared web hosts had taken the proper precautions to disable the exploit-ability of symlinks in a shared hosting environment

There have been a number of solutions around for some time, including APACHE configs, patches and secure Cloudlinux (cagefs).

Its a shame that in todays online environment shared hosts aren’t taking the proper precautions to offer a secure stable hosting environment to their clients.

All it takes is 1 missed setting and a server can be exposed to all the nasties of the internet.

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Optic Empire offer a secure web hosting environment; our servers utilise cloudlinux, equipped cagefs, to ensure website isolation from others on the server.

Our web servers are 100 % immune to this type of attack. If you have been effected by such an incident, contact us to find how we can provide a reliable, secure web hosting solution.

This idea behind personal hosting means that you can choose an domain name that best fits what you are striving to create, whether it is a blog, a photo gallery site, hobbyist page, or for professional purposes. (e.g. bobsblog.com)

Blogging

Personal web hosting creates the perfect platform to be able to express your own thoughts and opinions on a multitude of topics in your own personal blog.

Blogging has greatly grown over the years and now encompasses a multitude of topics; people’s own movie reviews, life experiences, cooking recipes, or even open discussion on topics of the time.

Photo Gallery

If you have photos you would like to share with friends and family or even the whole online community, personal web hosting is a great fit to do this in an easy and personal way.

You can make your pictures easily accessible in a creative way, or have them look more professional by placing them in an online portfolio.

This method is much easier than having to worry about people being connected to the same social networking site as you to try and find your pictures and you have much more control over your data.

Hobbyist

Personal hosting is also a great way to share your favorite hobby with like-minded individuals online.

It not only grants you an easy way to express your passion for the hobby, but expand your knowledge about it with others who can ask you questions or answer and discuss and concerns you may have.

Professional /Resume

Having an online resume is a great way of showcasing yourself in todays “connected” world.

Employers are increasingly looking for standout candidates, a professional website that shows you in the right light could be just what you need to stand out from the crowd.

It also allows you to feed into your professional social networks (linkedin, Google+)

No matter what your interests are personal hosting can help you expand and share your knowledge and expertise with the world. Express yourself, your way.

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Optic Empire offer a range of feature packed, personal web hosting plans

The natural progression is to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server, but that brings a whole new level of complexity.

Ongoing management is now required for:

• The web server / operating system
• Server security (this is a big one)
• Server services (http, SQL etc)

Progressing beyond shared web hosting is significantly more expensive than shared web hosting in terms of disk / bandwidth allocation and ongoing management.

Shared Hosting Limitations

One of the biggest limitations with a typical shared hosting setup is shared resource limitations. In this type of hosting environment websites share physical server resources with other websites on the server.

This often means during peak times or periods of unexpected traffic a shared host can often grind to a halt as one website competes for available server resources. (against other websites hosted on the server)

Not only disk space and bandwidth is shared; but more importantly CPU, RAM and Disk Read/Write access, these dictate how fast and responsive your website is.

Some configurations such as cloudlinux attempt to alleviate this domino effect through tenant isolation.

Introducing Cloudflare CDN

CloudFlare protects and accelerates websites by intelligently routing traffic through a global distribution network. Once configured (and its easy to configure) Cloudflare will automatically optimize the delivery of your web site for the fastest load times and best overall performance. Cloudflare also blocks threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources through an advanced security network.

Cloudflare tout – “on average, you’ll see 65% fewer requests to your servers and save 60% of your bandwidth”

Not only does it reduce bandwidth by globally hosting and distributing  static elements such as images, CSS and JS – It reduces the overall number of requests to your server, this is key for a busy website in a shared hosting environment.

A real world example of Cloudflare in action. (over a 7 day period)

Extend Shared Hosting

The key to extending the lifespan of your shared hosting / server is to reduce the overall requests made to it; this will allow the server to cope with busy times and unexpected traffic spikes.

By implementing Cloudflare or a similar solution you can effectively extend your shared web hosting significantly; save yourself the headache of server administration, fighting spam/attackers and save some serious dollars.

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Optic Empire can help implement a shared hosting / cloudflare solution that will perfectly fit even the busier website.

e.g: Newcastle plumber

Local search results normally are placed highly & include phone, address & map data – which makes it more attractive for users.

Additional information may include:

• Business hours of operation
• Telephone contact information
• Business / places images & video
• Google & 3rd party business reviews
• Business services

There are several steps you can take that will greatly assist in optimising your Google places entry and help further your local SEO campaign.

Description Optimisation

Ensure the description field is being correctly utilised and optimised. You should include a keyword and quality rich business description, be sure to use as much of the available characters as possible.

A “thin” piece of content will do nothing for the optimisation of your Google places page.

• Include the core business services and location in the description.
• Make sure the business description reads well (grammar & spelling)

Category optimisation

You can add additional categories that are used to categorise your business. Using as many as you can will ensure a maximum reach for the Google places entry.

• Include primary keywords as categories

Service area location optimisation

If the business services certain areas or offers delivery to specific locations be sure to optimise the service area section. It will allow for tighter targeting of localised searches.

Photo & video optimisation

Adding photos & videos to Google places entries not only makes it more attractive and can increase user conversion but can also has direct local SEO benefits.

You can upload your images from your computer directly or from other online services.

• Include keywords in image names
• Geo-tag images, to a relevant location
• Add video from YouTube (that is also optimised)

Additional details optimisation

The additional details section offers the perfect opportunity to further keyword optimise your Google places entry.

Include a range of keyword rich information such as services offered, brands stocked and other high traffic terms local searches would use.

Be creative with this area, its one of the most under utilised areas of many Google places entries.

Local Citations

Having a number of 3rd party, authority citations will benefit your optimised entry greatly. This in itself is a standalone task and will help tie everything in your local SEO campaign together.

• Deep Linking, home page linking from authority local directories
• Citations at 3rd party local review websites

Get Optimised

Applying these simple principals can significantly optimise your Google places entry, driving more traffic to your business & website. Capture local customers looking for your product or service.

Google confirmed via an announcement on the Google Webmaster Central blog that it had removed 3 features, citing under-use as the primary reason for removal.

Many users are at a loss and still consider them needed and used tools.

Site Performance Tool

The Google site performance tool provides details and historical information about the performance of your website (in terms of load time).

This Tool played a significant role for many webmasters and SEO agents alike. Especially since Google several years ago confirmed that website load times and latency is one of the signals used in the ranking algorithm.

Luckily we are not left totally out in the cold when it comes to measuring website access time . Users can still utilise the site speed feature in Google Analytics, the PageSpeed tool provided standalone by Google and a range of 3rd party products including the widely used YSlow browser plugin.

One user (MagicYOYO) has voiced a valid concern “I’ll miss a lot(sic) ‘Site performance’. No other tool can show historical data of site’s speed.”

Robots.txt Tool

The webmaster tools robots.txt provided a way for users to generate and test robots.txt files. Robots.txt files are a polite way for webmasters to instruct the Google spiders what is and what is not allowed to be spidered.

Google states “While many websites don’t even need a robots.txt file, if you feel that you do need one, it’s easy to make one yourself in a text editor or use one of the many other tools available on the web for generating robots.txt files.”

From memory it also had a robots.txt testing tool.

Subscriber Stats

Webmaster tools subscriber stats reports the total number of subscribers to a websites RSS feed or Atom Feed. Google has advised that this ongoing functionality is actually also part of Feed burners statistic interface (another of Googles products), so is encouraging users who used that tool to migrate to Feedburner.

That’s it for this  webmaster tools clean up, I’m hoping its made room for some awesome new tools for webmasters!

So how do you feel about the Web master tools cleanup? Let us know below.

Today I’m going to detail several onsite methods that will help you on your way to SEO greatness.

At this stage it would be expected that you to have completed some pretty in depth keyword research; which is the foundation of a successful SEO campaign.

Website Structure Optimisations

If you spend a little time planning the overall structure of your website you can ensure that it is the most search engine friendly structure as possible.  The website structure should make sense logically and to end users.

If your using dynamic technology, use server side tools to ensure search engine friendly URL structures are in place at all times.

e.g. Mod_rewrite to create URLS /widgets/red-widgets/

It’s a good idea to key your desired sitemap / site structure into a spread sheet so you can see a complete and visual overview of the intended structure.

Semantic Coding & Semantic Markup

Ensure the pages are semantically correct, Make use of h1 tags (only use once) to define the purpose of the page, follow this with h2 tags for appropriate second level headings and so forth.

This of it as a page of contents specific to the page you’re viewing.

e.g

Internal Linking Schema

Many people underestimate the power of a well-planned internal linking schema. This comes back to solid planning; essentially selecting the appropriate pages you wish to rank for each keyword and building internal links to that page for the desired keywords.

You need to be consistent with this strategy for it to be very effective. Ensure you additionally utilise the title tag on the internal links

Meta Tags

Optimising Meta tags should be one of the first things completed for any onsite content.

Crafting tags that not only rank well but convert well takes time, patience and plenty of tweaks before going live. It’s a good idea (if possible) to get them into a spread sheet – use your site structure spread sheet. This way you can plan them in bulk and ensure you’re not cross competing on pages / keywords.

Keywords

While they say Google doesn’t use this tag for SERP weighting, many other online properties still use it. It also acts as a great base for your title and description Meta tags. Only aim for 2 – 3 connected keywords per page.

Title

This is a fairly important tag; it should contain your main keywords for that page and look as attractive as possible (not just random keyword stuffing). Keep it under 60 characters

Description

When Google uses the description tag in search results (most of the time) it’s the best opportunity we have to entice the searcher into our website. It should contain the main keywords and a strong call to action. Keep it under 160 characters

A well-crafted description can make all the difference in both ranking and click through rates (ctr).

Execution

The common theme through each of these points is taking your time and planning your onsite SEO strategy before execution. You will save yourself a lot of time in the long run and yield faster results. Always be prepared to make a few tweaks here and there as you execute your strategy

Updates, Social specials and live interactions are just some of the benefits of web 2.0 comms.

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+

And many more to come soon!

Google have advised they are staggering the release of the updates, and expect it to take several days to apply to all Google + profiles and pages.

I’ve seen all of our clients change, although some users have reported no change yet.

An interesting note, there wasn’t really any notice like the recent facebook updates, maybe its just because they don’t expect the Google + user backlash like facebook experienced during the timeline changes.

(PS Still looks like FB clone even more so now)

New Google Plus Pages

Facebook Page Image Dimensions

On with the dimensions.

Google Plus Profile Image: 250 x 250 (px)

There is also now a user choice to keep the existing 5 small square images or the new 1 piece cover image

Google Plus 1 Piece Cover Image: 940 x 180 (px)

Although only 900 of it appears (white page component overlaying the right final 40 PX)

Google Plus Multi Piece Cover Images: 110 x 110 (px)

Note: Take care when selecting the cover photo option to not weight to much content on the right side, as it will be covered by the profile image, and the 40 PX overlap as mentioned above.

There were a range of other features implemented, these include: larger images, easier navigation (left menu) and some hangout related changes.

Here’s a pretty sweet video by Google showcasing the Google plus changes

We’ve put together a quick list of essential things you need to know about SEO before you commit to a campaign.

You dont have to be an expert to benefit you just need to be prepared to do a little ground work to get the best results for your website.

1. There Are No SEO Ranking Guarantees

This is probably one of the most common questions fielded from potential clients. The answer here is simple; there are no ranking guarantees in SEO.

The exact factors (signals) that Google use as part of the Algorithm that ranks websites is a protected business secret. Google goes to great lengths to protect this, it is the core of their search business

Combine that with Googles ever evolving algorithm, approx 550 public changes per year! And you can clearly see its not an exact science (which guarantees should be made of).

Google themselves, confirm its not possible and advise users to steer clear of providers offering this guarantee.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a special relationship with Google, or advertise a priority submit to Google.- Google SEO Starter Guide

Don’t fall victim to the agencies that offer a ranking guarantee that simply isn’t possible.

2. It’s Important To Do Preliminary Research

Its pretty easy to do some really basic SEO research. Know what your getting yourself into so your prepared to work with and support your SEO supplier.

Keyword Research: Use tools like the GA keyword tool to get an idea of the search numbers in your area.

Google Search: Search for your main keywords, this will give you your online competitors their numbers.

Once your armed with a little knowledge, you will feel more comfortable approaching an SEO agent.

3. It’s OK to Ask Questions

When your selecting an SEO agent its a good idea to take the opportunity to ask some questions. These will ultimately aid you in the selection process.

Some essential questions to ask include:

1. What SEO / Ranking experience do you have? (examples)
2. Do you adhere to Googles search quality guidelines?
3. Do you guarantee SEO ranks? (run for the hills if they do)
4. What is the expected time-frame for results?
5. Do you have experience in my specific industry?
6. Do you have experience ranking on a Geographic basis (local SEO)?
7. What are some of your standard SEO techniques?
8. What communications channels are open?
9. Are there any minimum commitments?
10. Do you provide regular, detailed reporting?

4. Reporting Is Essential

Ultimately the goal of an SEO campaign is to rank highly; increasing traffic to the website or online asset. To gauge and understand  its overall effectiveness regular reporting is essential.

SEO Reports should reference a benchmark & include information such as:

Rank Data: how rankings for specific keywords are changing over time
Top Keywords: Which keywords are the major traffic drivers
Visitor Statistics: Organic visitor statistics
Traffic Breakdowns: Breakdowns of where traffic is coming from

5. SEO Is An Investment

SEO is a solid investment for any website, a properly executed SEO campaign will provide a significant ROI.

Its important to understand that in the long run there are no shortcuts to the top. If everyone could get top rankings so easily the whole search engine concept would be destroyed. Its in everyone’s interest (especially Google) to enforce strong quality guidelines. So don’t be tempted by unreal offers that are only going to penalise your ranking and online marketing efforts.

Predominately offline businesses can leverage the widespread (almost ingrained) use of search engines. Bridging the gap between online life and offline business – connecting local searchers to local business right when they need it.

A local SEO campaign is perfect for

• Bricks & mortar businesses
• Retail based business outlets
• Local professional / service providers
• Food / dining businesses
• Any business with a local level footprint

What is Local SEO

In its simplest form Local SEO involves targeting search keywords with a geographic influence on them.

Local SEO Example
Localised keyword: “Sydney SEO Agency”
Normal (broad) keyword: “SEO Agency”

Local SEO Advantages

A local SEO campaign boasts a number of advantages over a regular, broader targeted SEO campaign

You Don’t Need A Website

You don’t even need a website to benefit. Typically a campaign is geared towards promoting a Google Places for Business entry. (a business directory entry complete with; phone, map/directions, photos & more).

Local Competition Levels

Because your competing on a tighter geographic and keyword level a local SEO campaign can be significantly less competitive than a general SEO campaign. This also means you can expect quicker results in ranking.

Typical Local SEO Campaign Structure

Although every SEO campaign is different there are fundamental steps to a local SEO campaign.

The fundamentals of  a local SEO include:

• Register, confirm & optimise a Google Places for Business entry
• Register and optimise at authoritative country/locale specific business directories & review websites etc
• Interlink, connect your other properties to your Google Places entry
• Encourage your happy customers to review you online through authorised channel
• Occasional maintenance + site expansion

All in all a local SEO campaign is a cost effective way for business (online and offline) to utilise search engines as a inbound marketing channel, that drives more than just web traffic.