Content is king, but other than being able to spot great content, Google and other search engines are very good at finding mistakes. Just imagine your dedicated server has just failed on you when the Google bot was actively crawling your websites.

SEO is dependent on your website. Not only on how you optimise it, but also on it being available every time.

Therefore, there are a few things you should consider/monitor.

Website monitoring

Having a good idea regarding the availability of your website (the response code), the performance of the server (load) and the speed load time (response speed) is a great first step. These are the three main elements that you need to monitor to make sure that things are running smooth. So before choosing your hosting company search online for reviews and make sure that others have had good results being hosted there.

Also, you should know that there are a few tools you could use:

• Pingdom — offers a free service that monitors the availability and response time of your website
• Server Density — paid service that offers a lot more alerts (and graphs, too)

Server Location

If you’re wondering if  the server location will affect your local search rankings, you should know that it does. Having a website and looking to grow in the UK market, it’s only natural that you’ll go for a .co.uk domain name and a hosting company with servers located in the UK.

Just think of it. When the average user goes on Google from the UK, they are likely going to be redirected to Google.co.uk, hence, they’ll see more pages hosted in the UK because they rank higher over pages hosted in the US (or India, or whatever). It’s a good idea to know your market niche so that you can find a server locally — sometimes, this gives you a little edge against competition.

Shared, VPS, Dedicated or Cloud?

There’s no secret recipe regarding what hosting plan you should get, but depending how big your business is you get to choose from shared hosting, a VPS or a dedicated server, or being hosted in the cloud. What does it mean to you?

• Shared hosting: it’s cheap, affordable, but most of the time crowded making your pages slow if the hosting provider oversold your machine.
• VPS : more expensive than shared hosting but not by much, gives you a bit more room and allows for more changes on your machine;
• Dedicated servers: expensive, but unless it’s a managed server (which is, most of time, even MORE expensive) you should have a good understanding of Linux/Unix, server good practices and the likes;
• Cloud hosting: designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers, cloud computing is a set of pooled computing resources and services delivered over the web; most of the time it’s the best solution (price-results)  for  a complex business with plenty of traffic.

If you’re looking for a great hosting solution for your online business, a free marketing consultation or maybe one of our SEO services, then don’t hesitate to contact us.

For the last two years, things have advanced so much in social media that it’s quite hard to keep up. Studies pop up every day saying how our lives have changed, in good or bad, or predicting that we may have just hit the peak of the hype cycle. Both are true, and while we’re hearing more and more the doomsday scenario, it looks like 2012 is about to change the way we perceive social media.

Growth & the value of social

You stop calling your friends, you check their pics, leave comments on their posts, and you announce all kinds of major life milestones on the web? That’s “connecting” in the 21st century folks — and it has changed the way we feel about people we know, about activities and what not. Because, in the end it all goes down to trust. And many of us actually trust sites like Facebook, Twitter.

But there’s a bunch of resisters out there who’re still not interested, who think that the experience makes you feel, more or less, alienated. That’s why, although Facebook is preparing for an IPO in 2012, visitors growth was up a “mere” 10% in the 12 months ending in October, down from 56% a year earlier.

And while math freaks would say that it’s better to grow slow on a huge user base, rather than growing big on a rather small user base — which is true — we can’t help noticing that “Social is running out of hours. Social is also running out of people.” [George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, said at the LeWeb conference]

On top of these all, things are changing as business are running out of patience, too. They want a high return on their investment in social media marketing, and some don’t understand that it takes a long time to grow a community. It’s all about engagement and education, but they’re paying now, and they want it now. That’s one of the reasons why there are a lot of noise makers, a lot of spammers who claim to understand social media, but instead of adding value and acting as a voice for the company they represent, they actually bring poor results and lose the faith of their clients.

It’s not the end of it

A year ago I was traveling to India and was speaking in front of a group of students interested in blogging, SEO and social media. One of t he best question I was asked was inspired by one article the guys read in the newspapers: “Is blogging about to die?” That was a very good question and my answer was … “No, but it’s going to change a lot.”

2012 is going to be different for businesses. It’s going to be the year of “prove it.” So if you’re a social media technology provider, make sure you stand out in your niche — work on the user experience, engage your customers and give them the information they need.

A great social media strategy can do that for you.