Youtube Hosting

Number One on Google within Five Days

Registered the co.uk domain for this case study on the 3rd December, then installed the WordPress Blog into some Weycrest Hosting space. Although WordPress is Google friendly out of the box, we installed some additional “SEO plugins” and added our customised “ping list.”

I made a few blog posts, which were mainly theme related Youtube video’s with some comments, and added an affiliate widget from Amazon. Then I made a blog post from this blog (which is a “nofollow” link by the way).

By 6th December we were number one for our chosen keyphrase (or keywords). Here is the proof (click the image to enlarge):

Number One on Google

Will my blog stay in that position? Its unlikely unless other sites or bloggers link back to it fairly quickly, or we post some new content. Maybe I could add some killer content, book reviews and create some buzz on the social networking sites?

What is this blog adding to the overall visitor experience that couldn’t be obtained, by the visitor going directly to Amazon? I’m expecting the blog to slip to page two over the coming weeks if its not maintained. Google has picked up on the blogs newness, and will later on evaluate its overall “quality” but there is no doubt Google still appears to like WordPress Blogs.

Actually I think I could have got the domain indexed and ranked sooner. My normal approach would have been to bookmark the blog at del.icio.us, then use their RSS feed to automatically update this remote blog. However del.icio.us’s blog posting feature doesn’t appear to have worked. No matter. All I did was write a manual blog post instead. At the time of writing, the blog has just one page indexed and has yet to be deep crawled by Googlebot.

The more experienced “pro – bloggers” will realise, the number of competing websites for this niche is very small , perhaps less than 300 worldwide and less than 4 in the UK. However it shows what is possible, with a new domain, bearing in mind, some people still struggle for months to even get their site indexed by Google, let alone ranked on the first page.

Of course whether there is any traffic for this niche term, sufficient for this blog to pay its registration fee’s and web hosting costs is another matter. Then again part of the fun and expertise required for what is loosely labelled as “domaining” “niche” “seo” and “affiliate marketing” is being able to pick low competition “long tail” niches that have sufficient long term traffic earning revenue.

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be revealing to our Weycrest blog hosting customers, how to configure their blogs for maximum results, and giving our recommendations for best plugins and themes.

Paul Lee

Don’t let your valuable domain names expire

This latest Nominet report makes an interesting read. Apparently he number of cancelled domains names which drop from the register and then get re-registered is falling. However, of all the UK domains that are cancelled, as many as 5% are snapped up within at least 10 seconds of their expiry. The another over 10% are re-registered within a month.

The people picking up these cancelled domains are often known as “dropcatchers.” These are professional domain catchers, that have specialist servers and scripts on fast networks that constantly interogate Nominets database in the hope a getting a valuable domains, that someone has forgotten to renew with a view to either use the domain for Pay Per Click advertising or to sell on at a premoim price. Their is some controversy over drop catching and some debate as to whether its a fair or acceptable business model.

In short you should never let a business name expire and if you are running any kind of ecommerce or site from the domain you are taking a considerable gamble in forgetting to renew it. Only let a domain go if you really dont want it any more. Bear in mind some domains can be like a fine wine and can acquire value the longer they have been registered. The age of the domain plus any residual traffic, may result in it having a value over the cost of renewing it.

Depositit for Backing up your Laptop

Having reviewed a few online storage solutions we find that Depositit was one of the most affordable backup solutions reviewed throughout all storage bands. Many get you signed you with very little capacity and then raise the price very quickly to quite high levels.

Depositit is the one of the most secure online data backup solution available in the world as it backs up your data simultaneously to three separate UK data centres. Also your privacy is assured over the internet due to the 448-bit Blowish encryption used.

From the ten solutions we tested, Depositit offered the fastest upload times for backing up data amongst all the solutions tested. Also the Depositit archiving feature will allow up to 30 back copies of data (30 days worth). This can be revised down to 1 or increased to 1000.

Depositit continue to work towards ISO 17799 security accreditation. and their software can be installed onto PC’s, Laptops and servers – all at no extra cost. Also their is an additional plugin to backup Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003 servers. There is also a version for backing up Linux servers.

With Depositit you can install the software on multiple machines under a single account. This can result in great saving for customers and companies as there are no software licencing fee’s.

In conclusion, Depositit may appear basic compared with some of it’s competitors. But if you are looking for a highly secure, affordable and simple to use data backup solution, that will backup your laptop or PC data on automatic on a daily basis and then allow you to restore in just three clicks you will not go far wrong with this solution.

Click Here to download Depositit

Weycrest Comply with Nominet “Best Practice”

Nominet the UK domain registry responsible for UK domains (co.uk, org.uk, me.uk, ltd.uk etc) have been carrying out a review of members to ensure they are complying with their “best practice” guidelines. As Nominet members and IPS tag holders We were very pleased to receive the following the email:

Hi Paul

Thank you for your email and confirmation.

I can confirm that you are now complying with the Registrar Agreement and
Good Practice Terms.

Your help in this matter is very much appreciated, if I can be of any
further assistance please email me by return or contact me on 01865
332233.

Data Theft is a HUGE Risk!

I was burgled the other week, which was one of the worst experiences (especially with our wonderful police force turning up promptly 7 hours later to check things out!) . A lot of personal stuff was taken including laptops and memory sticks, though importantly all of my critical data was backed up to Depositit.

I’ve spoken to quite a few people over the past week who have explained to me that their Backup Solution is using ‘Memory Sticks’?! I never believed in this method before and totally do not now. We all use them and they are convenient for passing data across but anyone depending on them for their full backup is 100% misguided. The same applies to anyone using an external drive, if I had one it would have been taken along with all the data on it. Most people don’t encrpyt their files either, so the drive would be taken and all info would be easily available – crazy!

There is no substitute for a remote backup solution. I have now personally experienced computer crash, accidental deletion and theft and a flood, each time Depositit has delivered back my information safely and quickly to the replacement machine!