thinkdave.com website maintenance services

Apparently it does. 6 months ago, when I finally made the decision to return to the UK for good, I started actively targeting UK based website maintenance clients by writing content specifically targeted at google.co.uk.

To date the response from Google has been non-existant. If you were to do a Google.com search for ‘UK website maintenance’ you’d find thinkdave.com right up there in the top 5. Great. Except for the fact that the majority of people in my target market use the ‘pages from the UK’ feature on Google. Searching in this way doesn’t bring up thinkdave.com in the first 20 pages - hardly desirable.

It appears that Google looks at (a) your website’s domain name and (b) the location of your web host’s servers when deciding where to index a website geographically. So my .com site, hosted by Dreamhost in the US is hardly likely to inspire Google to list me under pages from the UK in their results.

How to fix the problem

Luckily there are a couple of ways to fix this problem, although neither of them is without a bit of manual labour.

Option 1 - Move hosts. This is the most obvious solution to the problem. By moving my .com website to a UK based web host (with UK based data centres), Google will assume that it’s quite likely that I am in fact based in the UK. And in a few weeks time I’ll start climbing up the search engine rankings for ‘website maintenance’ on google.co.uk.

Option 2 - 301 re-direct. For those of you who just went ‘Huh?’ don’t worry. A 301 re-direct simply tells visitors and search engines that a website has moved and re-directs them to the new site. In my case, I could re-direct thinkdave.com to thinkdave.co.uk and be done with it. Not particularly elegant, but it’ll work. Like the first option it will take Google a few weeks to twig on, but eventually they’ll have to admit that thinkdave.co.uk is most likely UK based.

My solution

Firstly, I’m going to move thinkdave.com to a UK based host. I’m getting a bit sick of moving hosts (this will be my second move this year), but I think it’s important. I’ll also benefit by not having to contact a US based company every time something breaks, although it remains to be seen whether I’ll get any support from a UK host…

Once the server move is done I may install the re-direct anyway, just to make sure. I’ll re-evaluate this problem in a few weeks and see how I’m doing on local search engines.

Why should you care?

If you’ve been having a problem getting ranked on google.co.uk, it may be due to your hosting setup, especially if you’re using any domain other than a .co.uk. Contact your hosting providers and ask them where their data centres are based. And if they’re not based in the UK, you might want to consider moving.

Needless to say, I’ll be moving server towards the end of the week, so expect some minor downtime issues while I’m making the switch.

File Transfer Protocol, or FTP for us cool people, is a simple tool that allows people to upload and download information from the Internet. Because you unwittingly use FTP every time you download a file, a video or an mp3 from your favourite site, I thought you might want to know how to use it to backup and edit your company website. So here goes.

When you use FTP (you’re a cool person now) you Transfer files from a computer on the Internet to your computer, or vice versa. As a micro business owner, this allows you to:

• Download a backup copy of your website (a very good idea).
• Download a web page and make changes to it on your computer.
• Upload edited pages back to your web server for the world to see.

Using an FTP client to manage files

You can use FTP through a Web browser like Internet Explorer by directly accessing your website’s FTP address, but I wouldn’t recommend this for beginners, especially if you’re worried about file protection.

A much better way of transferring files is to use what is called an FTP client. An FTP client is a piece of software that does all the hard work for you, and makes you look awfully clever in front of your friends. Personally I recommend going this route, especially since there are a number of very good free FTP clients available.

I use an open source FTP client called Filezilla on my PC, my Mac and as a portable installation on a Flash drive. Every website I manage is available to me at the click of a mouse button using Filezilla, and it saves me hundreds of hours every year. To get a free copy of Filezilla, visit http://filezilla-project.org/download.php and choose the version best suited to your operating system.

What you’ll need to download a copy of your website

Later this week I’m going to be posting a step-by-step tutorial showing you how to download your website from your web server to your PC (or mac) for safekeeping. If you’d like to follow along you’ll need to have the following handy:

1. A freshly downloaded and installed copy of Filezilla. Just follow the Installation wizard that comes with the software to install it.
2. Your website’s FTP host name (usually yoursite.co.uk, ftp.yoursite.co.uk or something similar). Ask your web host if you’re not sure.
3. Your FTP username and password. Once again, if you don’t have this information at hand, ask your hosting provider.

This tutorial is important and I don’t want you to miss out, so please subscribe to my RSS feed, or use the email box in the sidebar and you’ll be among the first to know when it goes live.

After close to a year with my blue ‘Hello Dave’ WordPress theme, I’ve finally outgrown it. Lately I’ve found myself spending more time making changes to the theme than actually writing blog posts.

So I’ve installed the truly excellent ‘Thesis’ theme by Chris Pearson. I’m going to be setting the theme up over the next couple of days, so please bear with me if things look a little odd.