With billions of websites delivering a lot of information these days, SEO becomes a critical and vital process to consider. And as i roam around, there seemed to be a lot of discussion going around with this topic and one of hottest i encountered is about whether or not to play with subdomains or use folders to increase SEO or google pagerank. Just like everyone’s else here wanting their pages to rank at topmost of the search engines, i also am keen to understand the secrets of how these search engines work i.e. how they crawl and rank web pages. For this reason, to accommodate my quest to solely focus in this field i decided to create a subdomain. You would probably ask, why subdomain and not subfolders? I say, Good question. I tell you the reason on my succeeding post  =). Coz i need to hit the gym now! =)

But if you are too curious,  follow me on this link. =)

PhotoCredit: martin.canchola

Taking my journey to study and learn about SEO and optimizing web pages, i decided to join the much talked contest in the SEO World today… it’s none other than The 2nd Busby SEO World Cup Contest which is sponsored by the Busby Web Solutions. Yes, you heard me right. =) You see, I’m not really expecting to win BIG… now that’s B.I.G.  on this challenge anymore knowing i joined just MINUTES or HOURS ago (YES SADLY, VERY LATE INDEED!!!) =C. Moreover, this contest started literally like 4 months ago – on October 1st 2008 to be exact and would soon end in two weeks time at exactly 31st January 2009 (12:00 midday, Perth, WA)…Now how’s that? I know there’s no more time to get things polished but how can you ever pass up this prestigious competition knocking on your door waiting to be unfolded? Time may fall short but hey, it’s everybody’s game, right? LOL, So here i am with an open mind and courageous heart making things happen. For most of you who don’t know, this is actually my first time  and hopefully not the last to join such SEO Competition and still i claim not an expert in this field. Besides am not really after the prize money (Ow’s cm’n, lol, are you kidding?) but honestly my purpose is to hone some of my basic SEO skills and eventually learn from the SEO experts out there through tutorials and some readings about the in and out of Search Engine Optimization. =)

There’s only one purpose for this challenge and that is to rank your website at the top of google searches with the keyphrase to be used: “Busby SEO Test” . Landing your website #1 in google will ultimately make you the SEO Master Title Holder and win the grand prize of a whopping $5000. “Gee, Not Bad!”, i thought, thinking that translates to roughly around P250,000 in my local currency. I know a lot of SEO Webmasters and professional SEO challengers today are already making it into the front pages of the google search engines so i won’t be putting much effort to get this site “in” the competition. All i can do is just lay down the basic foundation of what i know about SEO, learn more on the web optimization process and hopefully do my best to get myself noticed =).  You may or may not agree with me but i feel there’s already some sense of accomplishment and fullfilment once you see your website has gotten to the top 100 SEO searches for making this “Busby SEO Test” keywords. And getting to this far on the game is already an achievement which i firmly believe is more than just the monetary reward at stake.

For those late bloomers out there, lol,  or those who are just having second thoughts about joining to this Prestigious competition, i guess there nothing wrong if you feel the “seo urge” of  joining. All you have to do is sign up for FREE with this link. Bear in mind to always follow all the rules of the game to avoid disqualification and i hope that i am following the rules strictly myself. So what are you waiting for?  JOIN NOW or you miss this once-in-a-life-time opportunity that change your life forever.

I guess am just enlightened and inspired… and I hope you feel the same. =)

Happy Busby SEO Test -ing!

Chofter.com revolutionizes how the existing search engines returned search results by simultaneously searching keywords on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, and Wikipedia. And according to the author’s blog, there’s more to come. It also lets you to scroll the returned pages! This dramatically changes the way we view search results compared to traditional search engines in the net which only returns 10 results per page. It also allows you to search multiple categories spanning from Web, News, Images, Videos, Blogs, Books and a lot more – ALL at the same time. Wow, that’s saving us more than a quarter of our precious time rendering a research or query. Using the search’s portal compact view, each result showcases a title and summary just like a normal search engine would do. Moreso when you use the expanded view, each result displays the title, summary, and links to similar pages, cached versions of the page and for sure there would be even more updates in the future releases. Although not as aesthetically appealing (for me) as i personally compare it with the rest of the top search engines around, for a beginner, i think this is worth a second look. The initial release of this version was pretty slow for IE users but the author already rectified this issue and now it’s a breeze that i am able to search keywords much faster (am using IE, by the way).

Now, get yourself a break. Try it out for yourself-and I hope you discover it as an alternative site for searching. =)

… And to the author, keep up the good work. I hope to learn DOJO Toolkit too =)

During the course of my research, i found this cool site which is administered by google as part of their FREE services. Google WebMaster Central allows a website owner to improve his/her websites’ standing by analyzing the site’s internal structure. The coolest functions you can get from Google’s are in terms of statistics, diagnostics and management of how Google’s index your website, that includes Sitemap submission and reporting. Try it for yourself. But you need to have an account in Google to utilize this feature. So if you don’t have one yet, try to register…. besides it’s free.

I had this site (techronnati.com) registered on Google’s WebMaster Central. After configuring some settings on the service, i waited for a day or two for google to crawl on my site’s content. The result? I’ll tell you next time. It’s a long story =)

• PHP mail() function and Sendmail
• Curl, GD2 library, ImageMagick, Zend
• fopen() and PHP sockets
• safe_mode is OFF, file uploads ON
• Zend Optimizer support, Ioncube loader.. and much more features are enabled

Sometimes, there is a bargain when you choose a free web hosting provider over a paid hosting provider. I decided to make a shift towards paid hosting because of some limitations i get with free hosting. Some of the known disadvantages of free webhosting are as follows:

Little/No Support
Free hosts generally offer no customer support to their free customers and if they do it is low priority. While many free users are new to web hosting, neglectful support can ruin the hosting experience. As compared with 000webhost, i think they have leveraged this criteria and give out the best support to their free service. The good thing about their support is that they roam around some forums to answer questions about their free web hosting issues which is justifiable and i think by doing that they are being transparent.
Overcrowded Servers
Normally free hosts are not known for their reliability and uptime. Often the servers web hosts put free users on may be overcrowded and slow or even frequently down. Since it is relatively simple to get a free web host company started many free hosts are fly-by-night operations and care little for the long term well being of users files. But with 000webhost, though there were occasional down times, based from my experience i think it’s bearable and understandable. The initial down time i’ve experienced with them happened just once for 15-20 minutes. Not bad for a free hosting right?

Less Features
Well, free web hosting plans usually don’t include advanced features, software, and email services that paid ones do. (ex. PHP, MySQL, FTP accounts, and POP email). But with 000webhost, they have limited number of free FTP accounts, POP email accounts and disk storage. One of the main reasons why i switch over to paid hosting is the disk storage. I am concerned about the growing bandwidth and storage with my website hence i made the transition to Hostgator. 000webhost probably can’t handle my long term requirements but bearing that in mind, somehow i want to be justful…atleast I have considered what this free hosting has provided me and was happy to have their services.

Ad Banners
To fund the free hosts, web hosts add an advertisement in the form of a text link, banner or pop-up to free users web sites. Many users find these ads take away from the design of their site, or are a nuisance to their visitors. But with 000webhost, they don’t display much of ad banners. According to their site forum, they have primary 4 funding sources: (1) they have paid hosting company, (2) they have strong financial ground; (3) they run their business through the support and donations and finally, (4) they earn by offering paid upgrades for those who need more disk space and more services. Not bad for a free webhosting right?

Trivia about 000webhost:

000webhost is providing Linux web hosting services, has been founded in 2006 and now it’s two years in business.

000webhost.com average uptime is 99.932% (rank #2118 on directory) with total 6996 successful and 4 failed checks, monitored since 2007-08-03. Similar companies with 99.932% uptime are nomonthlyfees.com and websitesource.com.

Search for “000webhost.com” on 3 biggest search engines returns average of 8266 results so company name popularity rank is #364.

There have been 1711 positive votes for 000webhost and 223 negative. And overall company rank on our directory is #12 (similar companies are invisionpower.com and hostdepartment.com)

» Free Web Hosting
Disk Space	250 MB
Bandwidth	100,000 MB = 100 GB!
Domains Allowed	Unlimited
Control Panel	cPanel, view demo
Ads on your pages?	No Ads or Banners!
Your own ads allowed?	Yes
» Package Details
Website Builder
PHP Scripts Autoinstaller
Unrestricted PHP Support
MySQL Databases
Instant Backups
FTP Support
Web File Manager
99.9% Uptime
Instant Activation
» Supported Features
PHP and MySQL	Details
Cron Jobs
Curl
GD
Image Magick
Streaming Video
PHP Pear Modules
» E-mail Features
POP3 Accounts
Web Mail
Auto Responders
Spam Protection
Mail Forwarding
IMAP Support
Modify MX Entry
» Control Panel Features
Latest cPanel	View Demo
Website Builder	Details
Fantastico Autoinstaller	Details
Getting Started Wizard
Video Tutorials
Multi Language Support
Hotlink Protection
IP Deny Manager
Redirect URL
Password Protected Directories
Web Based File Manager
phpMyAdmin

Try it for yourself. So if you are transistioning into self web hosting, this is a good start. If you plan to roll out some design changes and template changes you can also subscribe to their service so as not to harm and mess up with your production template. You can sign up by clicking ->here

Update:   For more discussions about this topic. pls see this discussion board :

http://www.techronnati.com/forum/domain-names/