Building an Effective Website – Pt.3

• Jul. 14, 2005

In the previous 2 articles, I touched on what you should do if you wanted to set up a new website.

 

In the first article, we were introduced to a fictional company – Ekko Heating and Air Conditioning, which has a new product which it wants to promote on a new website.  The business owner knows what he wants, and made some notes.

 

In Part 2, we went into more detail on the site, including picking a domain name.

 

This week, we look at what is required to in finding a hosting company and setting up the domain.

 

There are many considerations which must be made when picking a hosting company.  While price is important, it will not be the only determining factor.  The services the host offers will be of supreme importance.

 

For example, is the server Windows based, or Linux/Apache?  Will it support dynamic pages, or only static, and if they do support dynamic will they support both PHP as well as ASP? Or do they stick to one flavor of dynamic.

 

How much space will you get for your price? And are they flexible enough to allow you to upgrade easily?  How much bandwidth are you allowed?  Is this upgradeable for a reasonable price as well?

 

Do they offer support?  If so, what kind (i.e. 24 hour support by phone, or email only support)?

 

Do they support having domain email addresses?  If so how many?  Can you have a database attached to the site (for the aforementioned dynamic site) if so, what kind is it (i.e, MySQL, Windows SQL, Access).

 

Even though this site is going to be static for now, we need to know these things for the future.  For example, if the site owner wants to be able to offer some kind of e-commerce capabilities in the future, he will need to have a host which supports a database and dynamic language of some kind.

 

Will the host allow for sub-domains?  If so how many?  How many other sites are hosted on the server with yours? How many will share your IP?

 

All these questions will need answers as they could all affect your search engine rankings in some form.  For example, if your host doesn’t allow for dynamic sites, and you need one down the road, then moving a site can cause issues.

 

Also, servers and IPs with multiple sites can also adversely affect your rankings – especially if one of the sites is considered a spam site, or it gets so much traffic that it slows your site load time down.

 

In general, most hosting companies are very flexible.  They will support both Microsoft based ASP sites, as well as open source/linux PHP based sites.  They also usually allow for multiple @domain.com email addresses, and generally provide sufficient space to host a medium sized site, even at their lowest package.

 

It would be best to find a hosting company that offers quick turn around on support – that way if your site goes down at any time there will be someone there to look after you and help you get the site back up ASAP.

 

You also want to be sure they don’t block access from search engine crawlers.  While this may seem like a natural thing, we have come across hosting companies which have blocked search crawlers because they generated too much traffic, according to the host.

 

If possible, you should see if you could request your own IP address.  It should only cost an extra few dollars per month, but can save you many headaches.

 

This is because you don’t know for sure what other sites on a shared IP are doing, and if they are being penalized because of it.  While the search engines won’t say for sure one way or the other, there is mounting evidence that they will penalize or even ban a whole IP address because of the actions of one or a few sites on it.

 

If you can get your own IP, ask the host if it’s been used before for hosting and if so try and get an idea of the sites that were on it.  It’s possible that the IP has been blacklisted in the past, so you want to be sure it’s still considered safe by the search engines.

 

Also, do consider the price.  If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.  Many hosting companies offer bare-bones hosting for a few dollars per month, so be sure to read the fine print and see what they do offer for that price.  It may be worth it to upgrade to a mid-level hosting package to ensure you receive everything you need now and in the future.

 

If you are going to be creating a dynamic site, using a database and some language like PHP or ASP, be sure that your host has a URL rewriter implemented and that you can readily access it.  This is because a static site will almost always perform better in a search engine because the crawlers can more easily find the content.  They tend to shy away from dynamic sites.

 

If they don’t have a rewriter readily accessible, see if they would be willing to implement one on your behalf on the server.

 

If you have registered multiple domains, ensure that they can put 301 redirects on them to point to the main domain.  For example, if the main domain in the fictional company is ekkoair.com but many of the other domains are registered, they must be properly configured to use 301 redirects to point to the ekkoair.com domain.  This is because we want to ensure that the search engines only index 1 domain, thereby eliminating any duplicate content penalties.

 

Essentially, you want to ensure your hosting company is as flexible as it can be, for as little cost as possible, but also provides the ability to add or otherwise modify the services available to you easily and with little hassle.

 

Once you have found the host, you can get the domain(s) moved from where they are parked to the new host.  Once you’ve done this it’s probably best to test them out.  Within a day or two you should be able to go to the URL in your web browser and see a placeholder page.

 

Next, you want to test the redirects on any other domains.  There are online tools available to do this, or you can find and download free software called IDServe which will return what are called server headers.  These are the server responses to the page requested.

 

All you are looking for is the server response that looks similar to:

 

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

 

This tells anyone visiting the site to go to the other domain listed (this can be found further down in the output, beside “Location”).

 

Once you are satisfied that all the hosting is properly configured, and all your domains are set up to redirect properly, it’s time to choose a designer.  Next week we will discuss some things to look for when picking a good web designer.

 

Rob Sullivan

Head Organic Search Strategist

Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition

Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing