I purchased an unlimited hosting account from a new provider (Go Daddy) and so far I like the service. I have moved a couple domains there and plan to move the rest soon. I normally paid about $5-10 per site at other web hosts so I was interested in trying out an unlimited plan. Their tools are pretty decent compared to other providers I have used and I like the automatic installs of products such as WordPress and Joomla from their Hosting Connection site.

This is good news for Rhino Web Services customers as I can host your new web site for FREE! That’s a savings of $60-$120 for the first year for most web sites and no worries about disk space quotas or bandwidth quotas. That’s pretty cool!

There are some restrictions to the free hosting (e.g. a bunch of Go Daddy legal agreements that state that the unlimited space and bandwidth is dependent on it being available) however that should not be a problem for most small business web sites. About the only thing that can’t be hosted is video or audio podcasts. They have special pricing for those kinds of sites due to the heavy bandwidth and storage they use up.

Google has started showing more and more local listings on non-local searches like Pizza or Plumbers. Google using IP lookups to determine where you are and they serve local content up along with web sites. So if you search for Pizza, Google will show a few Internet websites and then place their Google Maps 10 pack of listings.

So if you have a business, whether that is a web based business or a store with a front door you need to be listed in local search engines like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, MSN Live Local. Its not hard to submit your listings and it only takes a few days for each service to list your business.

Update: 4/30 Rhino Web Services listed on:

• Google Maps
• Yahoo Local – still waiting (6/7 still waiting – pretty lame)
• MSN Live Local – MSN letter received 5/15. The instructions were simple to follow and my business is now confirmed, but not yet in.. Update 6/7 – MSN is now Bing Maps and I am in.

I received a question from Carol from Ballantyne Home Staging about how to place ads at the top of Google’s results. Here are some tips for making your AdWords ads on Google stand out.

1. Make sure your advertisement is Relevant to the keywords you are buying. (e.g. if you ad says you are doing home staging but you are buying a keyword like “home sales” you will rank lower as it is less relevant. In some cases Google won’t even let you buy clicks when your ad quality score is too low (e.g. you try to buy ads for X-Men or Pizza)
2. Increasing your Cost Per Click and Daily budget. The more you spend the higher you will rank. That’s kind of an easy one, but luckily you can place high with the first tip so you don’t have to just spend money to be first.
3. Being first is not always best. You might end up getting a lot of clicks from users that are just browsing and don’t have much intent to buy your product or service. Sometimes letting someone else spend a premium to be first is a better strategy.
4. Don’t link to your home page. Unless your home page is a rock solid conversion page then make a special page for your ad. If you are running several ads then make pages that are specific to that ad. Make sure the ad landing page is clear, concise and contains an easy way for your prospective customer to contact you or immediately purchase your product or service.
5. Track your pages. If you don’t have data about your site visitors you are walking around blind. Use Google Analytics.

There are a lot more tips available, but I think those are the most important basic fundamentals to ranking well in AdWords.

While looking around for local news on Charlotte, I found a very cool local news site that shows stories on the map. Here’s a snippet:

This site will also automatically pickup your blog posts from Blogger, WordPress, Type Press and a few more.

http://outside.in/Charlotte_NC

EDIT: OK – 7 hours is a long time for them to pickup my posts and geotag them. This is kind of lame actually. But I will contact them via email before passing summary judgement.

Update: I chatted with Jared from Outside.In and he explained that I had to both add a neighborhood and a place for each story. I noticed that my blog page on their site now found a couple stories but I have yet to see my StoryMap update. Hopefully it will be ready in a few hours. DONE!

I’ve seen a lot of blog posts and news articles lately about the new DiggBar. First, if you are luck (or shall I say talented) enough to get an articles with a lot of Diggs, you will be getting a lot of free traffic. However the new DiggBar seems to be interfering with PageRanks.

Pros: First the new tool bar adds some features. Users can easily Digg, Tweet, Facebook or eMail a news article or post without having to go back to Digg. Assumed result: More Diggs. Second the DiggBar shows how many users have viewed the page. Third, its a short URL service. There’s a lot of short URL services but this one will allow you to also get Diggs (example my short URL is: http://digg.com/u1lie). Which I automatically generated by typing in http://digg.com/www.rhinowebservices.com into my browser address box.

Cons: On downside, DiggBar is framing you in. The DiggBar generates an iFrame that renders your page. Services like Comscore might not give you credit for the page view. Second, while the bar is not that big, Digg could include advertising on the DiggBar. Perhaps cool if you could somehow get a percentage of that revenue, not so great if you can’t. Third, the DiggBar does not appear to do a 301 redirect according to some (3DoggMedia, Search Engine Land, etc.). Which means Digg keeps the SEO credit for your page. However, Digg’s John Quinn says:

We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

John Gruber of the Daring Fireball has written a short PHP script to redirect the Diggbar that generates a message to the Digg user.

As well you can use Framekiller JavaScript like we did years ago when Frames were in fashion. So I guess the DiggBar is a Retro Web 1.0 traffic and unique users grabbing scheme to boost to Digg’s own metrics (and to be fair they claim it is boosting Digg featured sites as well:

The preliminary results have been exciting, and we continue to learn and make real-time updates to the DiggBar. We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors and many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps this past week. Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.

Personally I turned it off, as I didn’t want to use it. I am not sure I would implement a protest counter measure to block the bar from my site though other than just a normal JavaScript framebuster.

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>