Before I get too deep in this discussion, first let me explain what a backlink is and how it works. A backlink is a link on a website, forum, or anywhere on the Internet that links back to you. Simple enough, right? Well search engines come by, see that page that has you as a backlink, and takes note of it in how it formulates webpage relevancy and ranks websites, such as Google’s Page Rank (PR) service and Alexa.

Many years ago, scammers and bad people noticed that if tons of backlinks were automatically created through software automation or hiring overseas people 20 cents per post (not exaggerating this one bit – big business in Phillipines, Vietnam and Indonesia) to make a post on the Internet with a backlink to what they are trying to manipulate on search engines.

If you remember years ago, if you typed in “dog boarding” since the holidays are coming up or “NFL sports scores” you would have to sift through Viagra, porn and virus infested websites.

Google fixed this by updating their Panda algorithm, which is how they rank pages for search results, by taking less of a score by the amount of backlinks you have and more of how relevant the backlinks were. For instance, if you are a company involved in computers and consulting like I am, Google would see my links on other computer forums, computer websites and other relevant webpages as being “better” than backlinks being generated by automation.

Many so-called “webpage designers” and “web consultants” hire these folks to manually create backlinks on popular websites, forums and discussion areas while many pay at least $50 per month (and upwards of thousands of dollars) per month to lease and run software on servers to spam the Internet full of backlinks through automated software programs to create massive amounts of backlinks. Unknowingly, some folks hire these people to create the backlinks for them by telling them that backlinks are how you get better search engine exposure and more results that list your website to visitors.

Absolutely wrong!

Guess what? If you hire, either knowingly or unknowingly, these folks and they create tons of automated backlinks for you – your website will be penalized by search engines, such as Google, and your website may be permanently banned from being listed on search engines!

Now many of these people will claim that “SEO costs money”. Absolute hogwash! Search engine optimization (SEO) does not cost money at all and is nothing more than an excuse for that person to get an additional fee or monthly fee from you to subcontract out backlink creation to a third party for next to nothing while pocketing the rest of YOUR money at the expense of YOUR website being banned from Google.

As for Fernandina Beach, I only know of one web design / consulting business and it would be wrong to name them but you could SEARCH AMELIA Island and find the company very easily who is engaging in this type of unethical behavior.

For instance, if you download and install the Alexa toolbar from Alexa’s website, you can see the amount of backlinks on a particular website. Now with this installed, you will see an “a icon” in a blue circle on the right hand side (well on Google Chrome web browser for me) and if you’re on a website, click it and it will give you information.

Alexa ranks websites with a number. Google, Facebook and YouTube are in the top 10 websites on the Internet. You can see the backlinks with the “sites linking in feature”.

Now if you see a potential web consulting / web design company soliciting you or your business about “SEO services”, with this Alexa toolbar, you can verify their claims. I would ask them if they have client websites that you can look at so you can see how good their work is. If they give you the links to the websites, check them out and verify them with the Alexa toolbar especially if this company says they offer search engine optimization / SEO services.

Also, if a client’s website is not ranked under 2,000,000 – this may be a potential problem. All my clients are ranked under 2,000,000 with little effort upon myself and I’ve seen some folks who pay $50 – $200 per month for “SEO” services without any results whatsoever. You type in what the company does into Google and the webpage is on page 4, which is such a rip off.

What to look for is:

• Article submission websites
• Forums
• Blogs with little or no content (plus they look weird)

All three of these examples are prime ways “SEO scammers” try to manipulate search engine results through automation and try to rip you off. If you see the company’s clients or even the company’s own website being involved in automated backlink creation – keep your money and run as fast as you can! If your website designer says something like “well SEO isn’t free and there’s a monthly cost involved” – RUN.

With that being said, I would like to offer you my services.

I do not engage in any kind of automated submission of links, backlinks or articles. I hate spam with a passion, since I’m a computer consultant, a good bit of my time is wasted cleaning up the mess these automated people create with their fake links, fake comments on websites and forums, and the aggravation a lot of people who were duped by these so-called companies into giving them money.

Unlike those folks, I create “organic” backlinks through manual article submission and manual social bookmarking rather than taking the easy and unethical way out of hiring somebody overseas or purchasing an unethical piece of software to do all this for me. Sure, this takes some time and does cost a little bit of money, but the $200 – $400 I may charge you in your bill along with the yearly cost to host your site and the design have no hidden fees like these guys who may manipulate you into believing that if you do not pay them, your website is going to go offline. If you keep paying them, your site will eventually be ranked less and less each month until it’s virtually disappeared from the Internet from a search engine penalty.

The specs were right, the price is good and the bandwidth is reliable. For all the Florida customers, the connection is just about the same.

Thanks to all my loyal clients.

This is for those “I can do it” folks who have zero system administrator experience but want to risk their reputation by having data stolen and customers compromised.

Thank you.

If your “hosting provider”, web consultant or webpage designer is relying on it – it shows their inexperience from a “consultant” standpoint and flaws in their ability to offer a proposal to you. With servers becoming cheaper and cheaper then bandwidth becoming more abundant and cheaper, why would you not run your own servers?

Eyes On Internet Technologies runs approximately eight servers in the United States in various data centers from Tier 1, which is some of the best reliable bandwidth, all the way down to Tier 3 data centers. We also have a server located in Amsterdam, Netherlands and another in Cairo, Egypt.

So what if you have a project that is becoming very large and you want to aggressively expand by acquiring more servers, making the site faster and pleasing your visitors – can your “consultant” handle that kind of burden?

Those so-called consultants cannot while I can handle a project of any size with relative ease.

I know how to make your website faster – ditch the shared hosting and run your own server, which allows you to install third party addons on your webserver and make configuration changes to increase the speed. Shared hosting will not allow you to do so, often asking you to upgrade to a virtual private server or dedicated server to do what you need to do. Since you likely lack system administrator experience, you’re stuck and are unable to do anything!

I have over 10 years of hobbyist and volunteer system administrator experience. I can plan a disaster recovery plan, setup a backup solution and make your servers redundant in the case of loss of network connectivity or a sudden surge of visitors to your website due to social bookmarking or social networking picking up on something to drive tons of traffic to your website in very little time.

Shared hosting would likely make your website run slower to keep all the other customer’s satisfied while your current consultant or system administrator just hopes that your website stays online so they can struggle to keep it going.

Feel free to contact me today and I will explain what I can do for you from a consultant and/or system administrator perspective, such as making your website faster. Nobody has ever complained about a website running too fast!

Simply put: search engine optimization is making your website search engine friendly through various techniques to make a search engine index your page faster and your site becomes higher up on search engine results.

A web consultant uses their skills to design you a website and expand your online presence through web applications, hosting your website, advertising and search engine optimization. However, not every web consultant is the same.

Let me explain what to look for.
1. Hosting
Does your provider host their own servers, use shared hosting or have other hosting options, such as cloud based hosting?

This may not seem important to you but if your web consultant is overly relying on shared hosting, to cut costs or for the consultant’s inexperience on the system administrator end of running a physical server, you may be setting up yourself for failure and overpaying month after month.

Shared hosting is approximately $5.95 to $9.95 per month and many consultants host their clients on their business shared hosting while pocketing the rest each month when that money could be better invested in the consultant hosting their own virtual private server or dedicated server, which offers faster speeds, than shared hosting which is thousands of clients on one server. Common shared hosting providers are Go Daddy, Hostmonster, 1 and 1 Internet, Hostgator, etc.

For that price of one year of shared hosting, I could have your website hosted on it’s own server, have your server configured for peak performance, and all of your visitors would complement you on how fast your website is because if it was slow – they would tell you about it!

Shared hosting is dangerous because out of those thousands of clients on one server, a small percentage may be involved in malicious search engine result manipulation where the clients hosted on the same IP address, which is similar to a phone number for computer servers, and the search engine responds by penalizing all domain names on that shared IP address. I will get to more about search engines in the rest of my article.

A web consultant, who is reliant on shared hosting, will respond that what I am saying is untrue but you could look at the Alexa ranking of each domain name of that consultant then compare the results to my clients. The difference is night and day.

What should you ask about hosting?

• Do you use shared webhosting?
• If so, who is your provider?
• Can I see references of your clients?
• What are the Alexa ratings of your clients?

If your consultant hesitates or avoids answering these simple questions, which is meant more to protect you than anything, do not sign any contract and only agree to a month-to-month agreement similar to renting a house from a landlord and do not sign a contract similar to what you would find in a bank!

Hesitation shows their lack of communication and frustration shows a potentially bad business relationship! 

4. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is becoming easily one of the biggest scams ran by dishonest web consultants. I see this every day and nothing upsets me more than witnessing a client being taken advantage of by a web consultant who is engaging in dishonesty.

Many web consultants claim that “SEO services” cost a monthly fee. This is absolutely incorrect and sure sign of a dishonest web consultant. There is minimal effort and mostly the time of the consultant to keep your website up on the top search engine results.

Examples:

• Avoiding shared hosting.
• Keywords.
• A well picked domain name that includes a keyword.

SEO is not:

• Not just submitting your website via a search engine submission form.
• Not outsourcing your website to the Phillipines for them to engage in prohibited behavior.
• Not engaging in search engine manipulation

The analogy of shared hosting could be let’s say you live in an apartment complex in a bad part of town. The rent is cheap, the service is bearable and you cannot afford anything else. In this apartment complex, there are drug dealers and gang members. The police start looking at you like you are one of them.

This is how Google looks at shared webhosting providers like Go Daddy, Hostmonster, 1 and 1 Internet, Hostgator, and other “bargain” providers who generally charge $5.95 – $9.95 per month for “unlimited”.

If there is a client on shared webhosting who is engaging in link farming, content duplication and other prohibited search engine tactics – the search engine will punish the entire IP address everyone who is using it on that shared hosting, similar to my bad apartment complex analogy.

If you think that you may be a victim of this, I could look up all the domains hosted on your shared hosting provider if you provide me your domain name, and I could point out some questionable websites which may prevent you from being displayed on Google and other search engines. I offer this to you for free and will even send you the link to the website that tells you who is on a particular IP address.

Keywords and a domain relevant to your keywords is another essential thing a web consultant should explain to you. “How do you want to be found on Google” is the question that consultant should ask you rather than their “I will have you the top result for everything” because SEO is a process that can easily take a year. For example, my client Breitling Autoworks, took less than a month to be one of the top results for “Jacksonville collision repair”.

If your web consultant relies on search engine submission forms, automated programs or outsourcing it to Filipinos – you are setting yourself up for major disappointment. I have never used a search engine submission form, an automated program or relied on outsourcing because if you are caught engaging in prohibited search engine manipulation, you risk being delisted by the search engine permanently such as Overstock.com who was caught manipulating results through backlinks on college websites – your revenue from your website could easily drop 60% if you run an ecommerce website and you would disappear off of the Internet overnight.

This normally happens when SEO is outsourced and the consultant sits back collecting upwards of $500 – $1000 per month while spending less than $100 per month for prohibited manipulation.

Outsourced SEO often involves spamming, link farming, irrelevant backlink building and other prohibited tactics. Spamming involves purchasing a program or hiring a spammer to leave comment spam linking to your site on every website on the Internet. Not only is it prohibited by search engines, it is illegal in many countries. Link farming involves artificially boosting your results by purchasing the ability to host links to your website, often on shared hosting sites, called “link farms” who’s sole intention is to inflate your search engine results artificially. Irrelevant backlink building is similar to comment spamming and is ineffective.

Breiting Autoworks has never relied on any prohibited search engine manipulation, never will and all my SEO is “in house”, done by myself. Your business to me and my reputation as a business man is too important for me to compromise what is right and what is wrong for monetary gain!

5. Advertising
Does your web consultant know anything about effectively using advertising campaigns to bring more traffic and customers to your website?  Advertising is an investment which may not see quick results like everyone wants, but if you have money in your budget for advertising – it may be very effective and lucrative for you.

Conclusion
Not every web consultant is a dishonest person and if you have been burned by one, do not think all consultants are the same. Ask for personal and work references, ask for a client reference and inquire how many clients they have. All that information I am more than glad to provide to anyone who requests it.

Eyes On Internet Technologies is constantly keeping up with trends in web hosting, advertising, search engine optimization, advertising and system administrating. I can host the smallest of websites for you to maintain a “virtual presence” or I can run a website for you that can handle thousands upon thousands of hits per hour which would not work on shared webhosting.

I have personal web projects that have went from the lowest of search engine results to the highest results in less than six months, which is a normal time frame. It is consistently the top result in many relevant search terms and phrases, while content farmers try to steal the information off my webpages to artificially boost their rankings on their shared webhosting.

If you would like a free consultation about what I can do for you and look at your webpage to see what services I can improve upon, contact me and I will get back to you as quickly as possible. I have been on the Internet since 1996 and self taught myself how to be a system administrator since 1999, with more experience and better solutions than system administrators who went to college.

Thank you

From a small business owner perspective, Facebook is a great tool to add to your arsenal to help out your business but just as easily as Facebook can help your business, inexperience can hurt your business.

I see the biggest mistake business owners make on a daily basis and after sending polite private messages that do not get replied to, I have decided to come out and make an article on my website explaining how it happens and why it happens.

First and foremost, if you are running your small business on a personal profile – you are making the “big mistake” which could easily embarrass you and would be a public relations nightmare if you are an established business in your community.

You should be running a Facebook page, rather than a personal profile, for the reasons listed below:

1. Adding users
With a page, the users add themselves and with a personal profile, you have to keep manually adding everyone. This cuts down on how often you have to keep checking in so you could do other things which are more important.

From a business standpoint, you can add additional “page administrators” to your Facebook page compared to using a personal profile as a makeshift Facebook page. This would prevent you from sharing a username and password with multiple users, so if that employee would become disgruntled, it would prevent that employee from doing something malicious against you that would be a disaster for your business such as locking you out of your account, changing your password, or think of the most embarrassing thing that can happen.

If you are set as the “page administrator”, an administrator you add cannot remove you as the page administrator so you can minimize the disruption from that disgruntled employee.

2. A Facebook page is safer than a personal profile
I have seen this happen on small to medium sized businesses, non-profit community organizations and everybody inbetween including community leaders: embarrassing links and being “tag spammed” for other people to fall for malicious or embarrassing scams.

For instance, I witnessed a local organization unknowingly post on their Facebook wall a pornographic link when that organization is geared towards children. Organization owner, how would you feel if you got tons of angry Facebook messages, emails and phone calls because you clicked on a malicious link while logged into your Facebook personal profile that you are using instead of knowing that you need to setup a page?

Many of these malicious links are exploiting curiosity of users and the Facebook “like feature” to encourage others to fall for the scam because it preys on the “trust” of the like button. Why would anyone knowingly click “like” on something harmful to have it post on your Facebook profile, especially without your knowledge? This is why malicious links are so successful on Facebook because it exploits the trust of a social network!

Facebook pages have their weaknesses but if you fix some of the insecurities in the default configuration, you can have a much safer and less embarrassing Facebook experience than having a public relations disaster because a pornographic link is on your Facebook profile without your knowledge.

3. Search engine results
Put in your business name into Google and see if any results from Facebook show up. Do you see anything? If you had a FACEBOOK PAGE, instead of a PERSONAL PROFILE, your Facebook page would show up in the results. After the person finds your Facebook page, they could ADD THEMSELVES, and would be in your page members rather than waiting for your to manually add them to your profile.

Many businesses who were delisted for prohibited search engine behavior, like JC Pennys and Overstock, have seen declines of 60% in their revenue and once delisted, you cannot appeal your delisiting with the search engine. Is that a risk worth taking?

Conclusion
Facebook is an awesome tool, but many users and business owners are clueless how to maximize the effectiveness of Facebook.  To mitigate this and help your business appeal to the social networking platform, I am offering a limited time special of $50 for a Facebook consulting meeting where I could discuss the vulnerabilities of Facebook, offer you solutions and if you want to move your personal profile over to a page but do not know how to, I will gladly do it for you for no extra fee other than my $50 consulting fee.

Eyes On Internet Technologies is offering cutting edge solutions, while other so called “web consultants” and “system administrators” are clueless how to capitalize on social networking. If you think your “web consultant” is really good, put your business name in Google and if your webpage is not higher than your Facebook page – your web consultant is lying to you, especially when that web consultant mentions “search engine optimization” in the services they offer.

For example, my client Breitling Autoworks who does Jacksonville collision repair for vehicles, displays up at the top for Google when you search for the company name. Does your website display as the top result when you put it into Google? If not, talk to that “web consultant” of yours.

“SEO” is becoming the biggest scam to generate business for so-called “web consultants” who often take your monthly fee and outsource their SEO to individuals overseas for $20 – 50. It may work in the short term, but those individuals who were hired by your web consultant often do questionable things that search engines will list you up at the top on Google or your search engine of choice, but months later – your website will disappear from search engine results because it has been delisted for engaging in questionable SEO practices as link and content farming, which many search engines frown upon.

Eyes On Internet Technologies
EOIT is a one man operation who offers all their services “in house”, while other companies charge a much higher fee for a lower quality of service while they have your website hosted on shared webhosting providers, such as Go Daddy, which many search engines are ranking lower due to the malicious activity that happens on shared webhosting providers. I run all my own physical servers in quality datacenters, configure all my server’s software, and can handle the smallest to the largest projects while other “consultants” just take your money because you do not know what questions to ask.

Contact me for a free quote and I can tell you what I can do for you to increase the quality, speed and availability of your website on search engines. I can walk the walk and talk the talk while others are just primarily talk.

Thank you.

Right now, you could be running a community that is very simple and all I do is the hard work. You bring me the idea, I give you a quote on how much roughly it’s going to cost and we execute the plan. I repeat, I do all the hard work!

Through affordable, targeted advertising we can find an audience for your community and make sure they start using your website or forum with promotions. I do all the hard work!

I can run vBulletin, phpBB and xenForo forum software, WordPress for low and high traffic websites, and keep the servers running during those amounts of heavy traffic by using reliable webservers and reliable bandwidth from hosting providers.