Typing “Link Wheel” as a search query into Google returns 381,000 results. Search in web hosting forums for keywords “Link Wheel” and you’d get lots of varied opinions. So what is a linkwheel and how does it relate to SEO? And is it a whitehat or blackhat SEO tactic? Could it lead to search engine penalties?

White Hat?
To a lot of webmasters and SEO experts, link wheels are a valid SEO stategy (whitehat). Link wheels are essentially a wheel of linked websites (all yours), designed to improve the SERPS (search engine results pages) of your main site. I’ve drawn an example below of a (web host provider) link wheel.

An example of a link wheel

In this example, multiple sites are developed with each linking back (one-way) to the main site, and linking to another related site (within the same niche).

Black Hat?
To take this even further, some SEO experts recommend  using IP addesses from different class C IP allocations for each site. My take on the IP’s? This seems to be a blackhat strategy to avoid Google penalties. Why? Because a lot of link wheels are composed of one-post blogs that offer little or no relevance to a search query. Their intent? To trick Google into seeing multiple links back to their main site. Many say this works, but only until you get caught, and then all that effort goes to waste.

Relevance is the key

 I don’t think I’m all that different from most folks searching for information on the Internet. When I search for colocation, I expect to find sites with great content related to colocation. It’s frustrating to find sites with no real content, or simply links to other websites.  The same applies for Google. They have a ton of advertising dollars at risk, and have developed very sophisticated search algorithms to emphasize and reward relevance.

It’s March 1st – only nineteen days until the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring. And only 30 days away from April Fool’s Day.

What do the following articles have to do with either event?

I’m looking forward to this year’s hoaxes. Do you have anything planned for your own organizations?

What I mean by value add is your company’s unique blend of products and services, and how those are perceived by your prospects and clients.  You may be the absolute best at what you offer, yet aren’t growing as expected. This often happens when you don’t effectively communicate your expertise. 

Communication is Key

Communication is key 

What’s behind your value add? If you don’t spell out everything you do, starting with your estimates and proposals – to invoices, your value add could be overlooked.  What does it take to provide your business solution? Infrastructure, research, surveys, reports, travel time, understanding the competition, proof reading, editing, revisions,  design work, interviews, phone calls, industry schooling and licensing? The list goes on and on, but are these communicated to your prospects and clients? If not, your value add will be negatively impacted.

Expertise is a business value add

Why do I pay my automotive dealer $95+/hour for labor? When I was repairing typesetters, our first hour labor rate was $180.00, and that was 25 years ago. Hair coloring and styling can run $100.00+. And these rates are invoiced and paid routinely because there’s a perception of value associated with each service.  The perception of your value can be elevated via marketing campaigns, blogs, case studies, testimonials and so on.

Web hosting value adds

Among the value adds I envision as important for a web hosting provider, infrastructure, 24×7 support and hands-on expertise rank high. Every provider, it seems, has bronze, silver and gold plans. For providers, if your value add is ecommerce, disaster recovery or managed services, how do you communicate what makes your service unique, and worth the price you advertise? If you offer collocation, how do your plans differ from your competition?  Would two 20AMP circuits per rack be a value add, or simply norm? If you offer business class shared web hosting plans, would that be a value add? Certainly, value adds are competition driven.  Do your prospects and clients know how you differ from your competition?  Telling them, or not, will impact your business.

None of us works in a vacuum. We all have competitors, some more than others. So what separates your business from your competition? What processes have you implemented to brand your business, get it noticed, become rememberable and drive profits?

Always versus Rarely
Cross industry, there are verticals that ALWAYS do business the same way, and there are those that stand out for RARELY doing business as usual. Now either can be good or bad, but separating yourself from the herd WILL get you noticed. I’ve been fortunate to be with a number of firms that didn’t just have satisfied customers, rather Raving Fans. 

Glass or two faces - how is your business perceived

The perception of your industry
Have you ever just sat down and jotted what everyone else in your industry ALWAYS does? And what others RARELY do? What category does your business fall into? For example, let’s take the medical profession. What does your local physician ALWAYS do? I’d say, they ALWAYS take Wednesday’s off (don’t have a clue why!) and they ALWAYS overbook their appointments. On the RARELY side, I’d say they RARELY …. you see where I’m going. Does your hosting provider offer 24 x 7 x 365 livechat and toll free phone support?

Search Queries
When prospects key queries into Google and Bing, they have a preconceived notion of what to expect. With literally millions of results for almost any keyword phrase, studies have shown that you should be in the top 3 results, and at minimum on the first or second page. If you are there now, are the search queries that drove these prospects to your site revelant to the products and services you promote? If they are, how are you any different from the last 5 sites they just visited? Why would they buy from you, if they haven’t purchased from the last site they were on?

Understanding your market and industry
This goes back to the ALWAYS and RARELY. Some prospects want tried and true, while others want cutting edge, or even bleeding edge. Understanding your market and your industry is key. This plays directly to developing an industry niche. And that will be a topic for another day.

Writing Tips

 Writing Tips

Do you write content for your website or blog?

It only follows that if prospects (for your products or services) are keying in search queries to find relevant  information on the Internet, that you should be there. I guarantee this – your competition WILL be there.

Writer’s Block

Don’t know what to write about? Select anything you’re passionate about. What do you know about your product or service that could be beneficial to the reader? Very often, if you just start jotting down notes throughout the day, some topic will jump off the paper and hit you square in the middle of your forehead.  The real key here to just do it. There are NO excuses for NOT writing. All of us lead very busy lives, bombarded with demands on our time and energy.

Providing information relevant to the search query is paramount

Business Class Shared Web Hosting Search Query

Keep your paragraphs short 

I realize you’re excited about your stuff, but loooooooooooong paragraphs turn OFF most surfers. Break your content down into specific thoughts or steps, with one paragraph leading or flowing to the next. Try to compile some fashion of chronological order. Hopping around will only confuse the reader and cause them to lose focus.

Touch as many of the five senses as possible

Of the five senses, I mean sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing.  Obliviously, these won’t all apply to each article, but through a combination of graphics, and painting pictures with words, you’ll create mental images that will reinforce your call-to-action.

End with a recommendation

 Recommendations can be tips, cautions or proposed solutions. Prospects are searching the Web to alleviate some pain or issue, grow their company or enhance their lives. Try to stay positive.

To your success

- Steve

Click Fraud

What is click fraud? I just did a quick Bing search for click fraud which returned over 17 million results. It’s actually a cybercrime dating back years that occurs with PPC advertising when a spammer or some program or script imitates a real user clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating an actual charge per click, even though they have no interest in the target of that ad’s link.

Have you ever noticed in your PPC advertising campaigns, the same IP address clicking on your ad, spending one or two seconds on your website and then leaving? And coming back again within seconds? If you’re spending $3.00 per click, that adds up quickly.

Click fraud has been on the rise lately, with third and fourth quarter ’09 seeing huge jumps. This is generally attributed to very sophisticated rings of click fraudsters leveraging bots to automate and coordinate high volume traffic from click fraud rings.

What’s the Motivation?

One motivator is competitor click fraud.  The motivation of the perpetrator here is to simply obtain higher-placed ad positions for lower bid amounts by depleting the advertising budget of their competitors. Other motivators of click fraud include financial gain, revenge and blackmail.

What can you do to detect and prevent click fraud?

This starts with being proactive – measuring your advertising results, analyzing trends in click volumes with or without accompanying increases in your website’s traffic or sales.

There are also anti-fraud softwares to protect your advertising dollars. A quick check on Google for FREE click fraud software returned over 1.3 million results.

Press Release

NPSIS and Hostirian have joined the ranks of members of the hosting community in supporting the relief efforts to assist the people of Haiti. As an industry, providers, vendors and customers are encouraged to visit http://hostingforhaiti.com to make a donation directly to the American Red Cross.

St. Louis, MO (PRWEB) January 25, 2010 — On January 12th, a series of earthquakes measuring 6.5 to 7.3 on the Richter scale devastated Haiti. There is now a critical shortage of essential supplies and support personnel to assist the people of Haiti through this crisis.

Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of the hosting community, hosting providers know that the power they wield as a group is much more than they can wield individually. And so they’ve come together to help assist those affected by this disaster. With the generosity of all their combined customers,they hope to make a difference. And you can too. One dollar helps. One hundred dollars helps one hundred times more.

HostingForHaiti has partnered with the American Red Cross to provide support, which may include mobilizing relief workers, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources for recovery.

Here’s what you can do:

Here’s what NPSIS will do:

For every New NPSIS Order (paid) with the coupon code of Haiti, NPSIS will donate $5.00 via the HostingForHaiti website to further help this relief effort. NPSIS is extending this offer through March 31st, 2010.  

About NPSIS

NPSIS (http://www.npsis.com) “Powered by Hostirian” offers a unique niche of hosting products and services that complement Hostirian’s ‘business class’ shared, dedicated and colocation services, providing real value to business professionals worldwide.

About Hostirian, LLC

Hostirian (http://www.hostirian.com) is a leading Web hosting and colocation provider in the Saint Louis area. By focusing only on Web hosting and colocation, Hostirian is able to provide a level of customer support and consultation that remains unmatched by other providers at a cost substantially less than national Web hosting companies.

Confidence

I’ve always heard that you need to believe in yourself first, if you expect others to believe in you. Scott Ginsberg, aka “The Nametag Guy” said, “When you believe in your value, they believe in your value.” I believe that self-confident people have qualities that everyone admires. When you’re self-confident, you inspire confidence in others, in turn finding success. On the other hand, low self confidence manifests negativity and self destruction.

Competence

Without an underlying competence, I don’t believe you can really achieve true self confidence. Rather, you lean to a sort of shallow overconfidence. Competency needs to be tied closely to reality. The reality is that you can’t be everything to everybody, and you can’t be an expert without logging appreciable hours learning your industry, and specifically your job, in achievable steps.

Perception

Confidence is a perceived value. How do your clients and prospects perceive you or your company’s products, services, ability to deliver, customer support and so on, as a solution that will ease their pain, or help their bottom line? Your confidence inspires the confidence of your clients and prospects, either positively or negatively.

Visualization

When I attended Victory 2000, one of the things I took away from Tony Robbins presentation was how dynamic “visualization” can be as a weapon in your arsenal to achieving success. Visualizing yourself as self confident will do wonders for your career. Think positive. Think – I can do it.

My Recommendation

To become truly self confident in a way that leads to ongoing success, first set some achievable goals – small battles that you can win, then build on those. Then celebrate your victories. Hold your head high and answer questions with assurance, and those you can’t answer, admit straight up that you can’t, but promise to get them an answer (and then do it).

To your success

- Steve

Featuring Fantastico De Luxe

Fantastico De Luxe is an autoinstaller for cPanel servers, automating and simplifying the process of installing lots of great scripts like WordPress and phpBB (see extended list below). The installation procedures take seconds and can be performed by novices without the need for setting up MySQL databases, importing structure, chmoding files and without the need of other tasks usually associated with installations. Fantastico De Luxe is accessed via the cPanel control panel and requires one MySQL database per installation.

The following scripts can be autoinstalled using Fantastico De Luxe

Blogs:

b2evolution (3.3.1-stable) (website)
Nucleus (3.50) (website)
WordPress (2.8.6) (website)

Portals/CMS:

Drupal (6.14) (website)
Geeklog (1.5.1) (website)
Joomla 1.5 (1.5.15) (website)
Joomla (1.0.15) (website)
Mambo Open Source (4.6.5) (website)
phpWCMS (1.4.2 r345) (website)
phpWebSite (1.6.3) (website)
Siteframe (3.2.3) (website)
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware (3.3) (website)
Typo3 (4.2.10) (website)
Xoops (2.3.3b) (website)
Zikula (1.1.1) (visit site)

Customer Support:

Crafty Syntax Live Help (2.16.3) (website)
Help Center Live (2.1.7) (website)
osTicket (1.6 RC5) (website)
PerlDesk (4.012.2) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
Support Logic Helpdesk (1.2) (website)

Discussion Boards:

phpBB (3.0.5) (website)
SMF (1.1.10) (website)

**E-Commerce:

(These scripts only available with NPSIS Ecommerce Packages)

CubeCart (3.0.17) (website)
OS Commerce (2.2 Release Candidate 2a + buySAFE) (website)
Zen Cart (1.3.8a [Patched]) (website)

FAQ:

FAQMasterFlex (1.51) (website)

Hosting Billing:

AccountLab Plus (2.8 r14) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
phpCOIN (1.6.4) (website)

Image Galleries:

Mailing List:

PHPlist (2.10.10) (website)

Polls and Surveys:

Advanced Poll (2.03) (website)
LimeSurvey (1.85+) (website)
phpESP (2.1.1) (website)

Project Management:

PHProjekt (5.2.2) (website)
dotProject (2.1.2) (website)

Wiki:

PhpWiki (1.2.11) (website) 

Fantastico De Luxe

Other Scripts:

Dew-NewPHPLinks (2.0.1.0b SEF w/Thumbshots) (website)
Moodle (1.9.6) (website)
Open-Realty (2.5.8) (website)
OpenX (2.8.1) (website)
PHPauction (3.2) (website)
phpFormGenerator (2.09c) (website)
WebCalendar (1.2.0) (website)

For more information, please visit http://www.npsis.com.
**NOTE: NPSIS does not provide any support for these applications. You must use the included website links and the vendor support forums. NPS is not associated with these vendors and cannot provide application support. The fantastico scripts only provide auto-installation of these applications.

Language Translation

One of the great divides across cultures has always been the language barrier. Not only do I not know how to speak, read or write other languages, often I cannot tell what the language is just by looking at it – for example, Korean, Chinese or Japanese. I received an email in Chinese? today and went to my normal online translator to see what it said, but Chinese to English wasn’t one of their options.

Auto Detection

I’m thinking, what if this isn’t Chinese? Do I try multiple translators until one works, or is there a translator out there that simplifies this whole messy process? To my amazement, I found Bing Translator which has an auto detect option. Wow! I plugged in my email message and was able to instantly read Chinese spam in English. LOL.

Online Translators

Google’s language tools currently offers the following interface languages:

Yahoo also has it’s own language translator named Babel Fish, allowing you to translate a block of text up to 150 words.

Of course, there are variations of translators, like The Dialectizer. The Dialector can translate web pages and text into Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker. I just tried Redneck on our site and it’s hilarious.