Superb Internet is proud to announce being the recipient of “Windows Server” Award Winning provider by www.dedicatedserverdir.com for June 2009!!!  Superb is committed to provide excellent service in the Hosting Industry to stay “Ahead of the Rest” by being customer focused, network driven, and service minded. In fact, Superb has consistently received numerous awards in the past such as the best Dedicated Server Hosting Award and Managed Hosting Award  with Dedicated Server Directory.

If you like to check out Superb`s profile page at Dedicated Server Directory,  click here.

I often talk about the stiff competition that we face for some of the more coveted search terms in our industry, like dedicated servers, managed hosting, and web hosting. While anyone can spend hundreds of thousands (if not more) on paid links and ads, ranking organically for these terms is significantly more profitable - more targeted traffic, higher click through rates, and these users are more likely to complete the desired ‘action’. With that in mind, it’s important for us to be up to date on the changes in the SEO industry, like the recent change to rel=nofollow.

With the release of Bing, I started looking for information on the differences in SEO for Bing vs. Google (and yes, even Yahoo!). WebProNews had an article that talked about SEO for Bing, Twitter, and Facebook. Among other things, it mentions how Facebook makes a good deal of the web invisible to search, how Twitter, being a real time source of information, means there’s more pressure to be timely with your posts, and Bing, with their related category searches, offers specific segments or longer-tail search terms that can be factored in to SEO efforts.

Another article I found gave specific points on how SEO for Bing is different. From that post:

Domain Age: Bing is a lot harsher about domain age than Google. The longer your domain has been registered, the more favor it will find with Bing. One may consider acquiring older domains to enhance the chances of being picked up by Bing.

Length of Text: For Bing, size does matter. So, ensure that your webpages have content of at least 300 words. The length of the text is more of a significant factor for Bing than it is for Google.

Link Out: Google alters your page rank based on the relevance of the link out webpages. Often, people are unsure of how a particular link out would impact their webpage and steer clear of this option. However, Bing likes link outs and increases the page ranking of those webpages that have more of them.

Title Tag of your Page: The title tag is of utmost importance for Bing. Without the relevant keyword in this area, your complete SEO efforts could be wasted.

Click here for the full article

By having a clear idea of your target users and how results will appear in the search engines, you can design and develop pages that will rank better and increase your ROI.

After countless hours of searching the Internet, uploading pictures to your Friendster account then your MySpace account and then your Facebook account (yes, the same pictures), and several handfuls of forwarded messages that had you not sent in 10 minutes or less to 10 of your closest friends would have given you 10 years of bad luck, your PC might be a little pooped! But before you shell out hard earned dollars for a new PC, maybe you should consider cleaning and upgrading that oversized paperweight in to something that doesn’t cause you hours of headaches as you stare in to that blue screen of death.

This may not work on all computers. If you’ve always purchased the ultra budget, dispoasable PC, your options are limited in comparison to the guy who splurged on the top of the line system, but with belts tightening in this slumping economy, it’s worth considering all options. An article on Computerworld tackles this exact problem - revitalizing an aging desktop computer for cheap. It starts with simply opening up the case and cleaning out the dust, moves to replacing RAM and adding an external hard drive, and finishes with a new fan and some overnight testing so you can ’sit back, enjoy [your] “new” PC, [and] order pizza’.

Changing to a new PC, like changing to a new dedicated server, can be a lot of work and take hours of time to reconfigure, update, and transfer files, and sometimes a more cost-effective solution is to simply upgrade your existing equipment and carefully plan your upgrade for later.

There’s a lot of talk about smart phones lately, and most of the talk is surrounding the release of the new iPhone, the 3G S. Apple continues to do an impressive job marketing their products, and with their legion of die hard Apple fanboys, it’s almost a guarantee that every new product will give them even more bragging rights. Attempting to make a comeback is an offering from the once dominant Palm, the Palm Pre. Most of the reviews that I’ve read about the Pre are fairly positive. The release didn’t have the lustre or hype that was seen with Apple, but the make-or-break effort may be enough to keep the company afloat for long enough to see their app store fill and a second version of the phone released. To finish the trifecta of smart phone buzz, I’ll mention the ever elusive gPhone. While we haven’t been formally introduced to this Google offering, at least not in North America, Mountain View, much like it’s neighbours in Cupertino, has an amazing ability to generate buzz.

There are some that might suggest the iPhone has no competition -  we don’t even have a confirmed name for the gPhone, ION, MyTouch, etc. device, and the Pre, which was under produced and under marketed. However, with a laundry list of features missing from 2 generations of iPhone, like no changeable battery, no expandable memory slot, no MMS, and questions about security, there are some that choose not to believe the hype.

In the end, it’s important to choose the phone that is right for you. Do you do a lot of mobile browsing and searching, take and send pictures and/or video, or sending emails and keeping organized? Start by identifying the features that are most important to you and your needs, and eliminate the device or devices that don’t make sense. In the end, you may find that you don’t even need a smart phone, or the one that seemed the worst choice is the best solution - or it may confirm what you suspected all along. Like web hosting, choosing a cellphone or PDA is something that can only go more smoothly with a little bit of reasearch.

Many people haven’t even heard of the rel=nofollow attribute, and yet it is a heavily contested and debated topic. So I guess an important first question would be ‘What is the nofollow attribute?’ The nofollow attribute is a value used in HTML scripting to instruct (most) search engines that the page rank of the link’s target should not be influenced. In other words, if you added the nofollow attribute, you were basically saying you could not/would not vouch for the credibility of the target link. This was established in 2005 as a response to an increase in comment spam on the popular blogging platform Blogger.

When Google introduced this attribute, it was only a matter of time before SEOs and SEMs would find a way to exploit it. Individuals looking for that extra tweek to improve their site ranking and indexing started using the nofollow attribute for PageRank sculpting or PR sculpting. This is a topic best left for another post, but the gist of it is that people were able to actively influence the way Google was ranking pages, and Google doesn’t like that!Basically, the attribute was no longer being used as it was originally intended and was being exploited, so changes were made, and these changes were officially announced.

Being in a competitive market and vying for ranking with terms like dedicated servers and managed hosting, I’m always looking for that edge as well. Apparently, using the nofollow tag isn’t that edge. Matt Cutts, an unofficial guru of SEO and Google search, recently posted an article discussing PR sculpting and the changes to the rel=nofollow attribute. It is an interesting, albeit complicated, read that you can check out here.

Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition is named as America`s largest and fastest growing trade show after becoming the world`s largest e-retailing conference. IRCE has been growing consecutively for four years.

Superb Internet is excited to attend IRCE 2009 for the first time! The Exhibition starts this coming Monday June 15, 2009 in Boston. Our President/CEO, Haralds Jass, Dir. of Sales&Marketing, Dale Bunten, Dir. of Business Development/Operations Manager, Dir. of Dedicated Services, Ken Nunes, and Sales Manager, Shaun Deering will be there to meet you personally.

At our booth, #1333 (across from WebHostingTalk), we will be presenting some of our new and exciting web hosting offers and managed hosting solutions for the Enterprise - including information about our brand new, state-of-the-art datacenter in Springfield, VA (opening June 30, 2009). Superb Internet Corporation will proudly present its powerful dedicated servers for clients looking for the very best in network connectivity, 24×7x365 live support, and custom managed solutions.

We would like to invite you to visit us in IRCE 2009 for some homemade Hawaiian cookies and macadamia nuts while chatting with the Superb`s team.

Mahalo!

Earlier this month I wrote about the decline of online ad revenues in the US; the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a report that online advertising revenues had declined by 5% in the first quarter of 2009 compared with 2008 (and an even worse 9.8% from the fourth quarter of 2008). Another report on online advertising was released, this time reflecting the industry in Europe. Robin Wauters may have said it best - The gist: growth in digital advertising significantly slowed down last year, especially in more mature markets, and the outlook for this year is grim (ref).

As mentioned previously, a decrease in digital advertising spending isn’t surprising considering the state of the global economy. Search is the leading format of digital advertising in Europe and accounts for nearly half of the online advertising in the 19 markets analyzed. With search engine advertising, it is typically easier to track, review, update, and justify - if I run campaigns targeting dedicated servers and managed dedicated server, I can easily compare the number of views, number of clicks, number of conversions, etc. and decide which campaign should be maintained, test different variations, and do it all ‘on demand’.

For more information, please visit this article.

Red Hat’s Fedora Project, which works on the development release that will become Red Hat Enterprise Linux, released Fedora 11 yesterday, the latest and greatest version of the widely popular ‘not-just-for-dedicated-servers’ dedicated server operating system. Not to be confused with Unix, Linux refers to Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Fedora 11 has few changes to the Linux kernel and its related systems software and application stack, but includes some changes related to virtualization and general usability.

Some of the features in Fedora 11 are:

•  ext4 as the default file system
• experimental BTRFS activated by IcantbelieveitsnotBTR at bootup
• Faster Bootup aimed at 20 seconds.
• GCC 4.4
• KDE 4.2.2
• Gnome 2.26.1
• 2.6.29-4 Linux kernel
• Netbeans 6.5
• nVidia kernel modesetting through the nouveau open source driver.[54]
• OpenOffice 3.1.0
• Python 2.6
• Xfce to 4.6
• X server 1.6

For a complete review, please visit this article.