Having shared hosting is all well and good but if you want real control you need a dedicated server. The advantages of a dedicated server are:

• Customise it how you like - you can choose any operating system and control panel
• No sharing with everybody else - so there’s no chance of your site getting bogged down if somebody else is eating up all the CPU resources, or potential security risks from somebody else’s insecure scripts
• Administer it yourself - if you wish, you can administer the server yourself via SSH as you will have root access
• Built in redundancy - if you have a sudden surge of visitors to your site the extra resources are there to handle it without any drop in performance
• Host as many sites as you want - many control panels (cPanel included) do not have a limit on the amount of accounts which can be hosted

 The only downside to a dedicated server is the cost as this is likely to be over £100 per month for a good server from a reputable provider, however if your website is your main source of income it may well be worth that.

You may have a domain name already registered which you want to transfer over to 600host.net.

In order to do this you need to first find out the nameserver for your server. You can do this by either checking the welcome e-mail you received on signup or by contacting our support department.

Your nameservers will look something like:

ns1.600host.co.uk
ns2.600host.co.uk

You will then need to change the nameservers in your domain name control panel to these nameservers - as control panels vary from registrar to registrar we can’t publish them all here but it’s pretty self-explanatory.

If comparing PPC and SEO I would say that the main difference between the two is that SEO is relatively cheap but takes a long time to produce results, whereas PPC is relatively expensive but produces results almost immediately.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the principle of paying for every click from a website (in this case we’ll use Google’s Adwords program as an example) to your website.

In the case of Google Adwords, all PPC advertised sites appear at the right hand side of the search page under the ‘Sponsored Links’ header.

Sounds simple but there is a little bit more to it than that. Clicks are paid for on a bidding basis - the person/company prepared to offer the most per click gets the top spot and therefore the most traffic. This has resulted in charges of up to £10 per click for the top spot for certain keywords.

Generally speaking, PPC advertising should not be the entire basis of your online advertising program, instead only part of it.

Search Engine Optimisation/Optimization (depends where you’re from - from now on we’ll just call it SEO!) is the basic idea of optimising a site to make it more attractive to search engines

80% of websites are found through the search engines, and the principle search engine is Google. It therefore follows that if you want your site to be found it has to be listed with Google.

Google uses an algorithm which basically ranks site on quality and how relevent the site is to the user’s search term and the most relevent and highest quality sites come highest on Google for that particular search term.

SEO is an art for competitive keywords however there are a few basic steps.

The first thing to do would be to download the Google Toolbar. On the Google Toolbar is a little green icon which shows you the Pagerank on the page you’re currently visiting. The higher the better.

Secondly, identify your keyword. Using a tool such as Overture Keyword Analyzer (www.overture.com) will help as it will give you some idea as to search volumes for a particular keyword. Make a list of 10-20 keywords which fit your site best. It’s now time to formulate your SEO plan!

SEO takes about 6-9 months to complete, this is solely due to the fact that the process has to look to the search engine like it is occuring naturally. Also, search engines do take time to update their records. You should plan your work evenly over a 6-9 month period and spend around 2 hours per day on it.

Once you’ve analysed your keywords it’s time to make your plan. To help you in this you can purchase software such as Axandra’s IBP (www.axandra.com) but if you’re on a tight budget this is not necessary as at the time of writing this software costs well over £400.

The first major part of your SEO plan will be the on-page optimization. Search engines will rank higher sites which have a larger amount of relevent content - ie. a lot of pages which contain relevent keywords.

Factors for your on-page optimization are:

1. Title tags - include keywords in your title tags, keep to a reasonable length - not too long but not too short either

2. Meta tags - be sure to include description, content and keyword tags

3. Headers - use the header tags and be sure to include keywords in headers

4. ‘ALT’ tags for images

5. Body text - make sure a suitable density of keywords is included in your body text - do not have a list of keywords at the bottom of your page in the same colour text as the background or simply a list of keywords because Google will know! - you can’t con Google!

Generally, use CSS and keep coding clean as this makes it easier for the search engine robots to spider it.

Also, uploading a Google sitemap may help - make the most of Google’s analytical tools

You can get an idea of what the search engine is looking for as regards on-page optimization by analysing around 5 competitor web pages. In Internet Explorer, visit your competitor’s page, right click and click ‘View Source’.

Once you’ve completed your on-page optimization it’s time to think about your off-page optimization. Over your 6-9 month period you need to plan the following:

1. Link building: it’s better to use one-way links rather than two or 3 way links. In general, a smaller number of links from sites with high Pageranks is better than a lot of links from trashy sites with low Pageranks. If you use two-way links and have links back to a large link page on your site, the search engine will know and this may harm your ranking.

2. Ezine articles: make sure you write quality articles. A Google search on ‘ezines’ will bring up a number of sites you can write for

3. Forum postings: if you’re a member of a forum, have a link to your site in your signature, but don’t spam as you’re likely to be kicked off the forum

4. Press releases: there are many websites which will help you do this

There are also many other more exotic ways to try and boost your rankings such as:

Creating a blog and marketing that

Creating profiles on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Faceparty, etc.

Uploading videos relating to your site to uTube

This is only a brief introduction to SEO - it requires a fair bit of knowledge, a lot of planning and a lot of time but if done correctly it will be the make or break for your site. If you don’t think you’re up to the job there are many companies who will offer to do it for you, but beware and read the small print correctly. Additionally, beware of companies who claim to have worked for corporations such as Burger King, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc. - these corporations do not need SEO as everybody knows them already!

Ever wanted to make a certain part of your site ‘members only’?

The Password Protect feature is an extremely useful way to password protect certain parts of your site. Simply click on the directory you wish to protect you you will be asked for the following

• Password Protect Checkbox - you MUST tick this box to switch on Password Protection
• Protected Resource Name - this will appear in the password box the user will see, for example you could have ‘mysite.com member’s only area’
• Username
• Password

Please note this is only a very basic (and not totally secure) way of password protecting areas of your site