Web Hosting blog from Just Host

Just Host proudly announced today that we’ve just signed up our 150,000th web hosting customer. This follows reaching the milestone of 100,000 clients back in August, four months earlier than predicted. We have doubles our email and phone support teams since August and put a heavy emphasis on the billing phone team which is based in the UK. In those four month we won 11 web hosting awards for an array of features including our prices, support services along with multiple Best Web Host awards.

To have reached 150,000 clients before the end of 2009 is a dream come true for us. Our work ethic has always been to put in 200% and believe that anything is possible. We set our sights on being the best web host in the world and it’s so encouraging to know that 150,000 people now believe that.

Our obvious next target is 250,000 customers which is set for May 2010 and I’m so proud of our whole team who have made this figure a reality. We work so hard on providing our customers with the best and most relevant features for their websites. We want to see them make the most of their sites, which should ultimately help propel their business or see them rank at the top of the search engines under their key terms.

Sophy / Marketing Manager

Backlinks are essential for your website if you are hoping to receive free visitors from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. A back link is counted when Website A links to Website B. Search engines recognize when one website links to another and therefore considers that website more worthy of appearing within your search results.

So to sum up, with the more back links you have pointing to your website, search engines will reward you with higher rankings.

How do I get back links?

Gathering back links (or link building as it is known) sounds complicated but there are many ways you can obtain links to your website with very little effort.

- Free Internet Directories

Before there were search engines the web was filled with directories, people browsed these directories to find the website they were looking for. This has left thousands of directories on the internet such as Dmoz and Jayde, many of these are still in business and accepting new links.

The majority of these directories all work in the same way, you choose the most relevant category that suits the nature of your web site then you suggest your URL to be included. Once your link has been approved your listing will go live and you will have just achieved your first back link. Use Google to search for free website directories, there are hundreds out there.

- Link Exchanges

A link exchange describe 2 websites linking to each other, so Website A links to Website B and Website B also links to Website A. This is a great way of quickly gaining back links, a free link exchange service is a good place to start.

- Article Directories

Article directories allow you to write articles and publish them within the website’s directory, in exchange for your hard work you can include links to your website within the article. Ezine Articles is the most popular of all but there are plenty more free article sites on Google.

- Link bait

Link bait is a term used to describe articles or pages on your website that are intended to attract back links from other websites. Controversial subjects, useful tools and free resources are just a few ideas, the art to bait link is about being creative – go in at an angle never thought of before.

Link bait is the most difficult form of link building but since the back links are 100% natural, the results are very rewarding.

These are just a few ways you can increase the number of incoming links to your website, there are literally hundreds more. SEOBook.com has compiled a list of 101 ways to build link popularity, the article offers some interesting ideas.

Luke Kendall / Affiliate Manager

Google is the most widely used search engine in the online world and took over 84% of online search queries in October this year leaving Yahoo with just 6.68% and Bing with only 3.49%. But we often forget that Google is not just a search engine, Google offer a handful of other services (mostly free) which can be extremely beneficial to webmasters.

So we talked before about the caffeine update from Google, changes to Google’s indexing infrastructure that should produce even more results per query, drastically faster with the inclusion of real time news headlines as and when they happen.

Matt Cutts today announced on his blog that the first stage of the caffeine update will be rolled out after the holidays starting with just one data center and as feedback is collected, Google will begin rolling out the update to other users. Google’s now closed the official sandbox tools so if you didn’t get a chance to try it you are going to have to wait until it goes live.

So why all the fuss? The big hype came when Google engineer Matt Cutts hinted at the possibility of some minor changes to Google’s algorithm. Their algorithm determines the importance of each website within Google’s index in relation to your search term. SEO experts worldwide face losing some big rankings with an update of this size. Initial trials of the Caffeine update through Google’s Sandbox tool revealed little changes just as Matt Cutts had suggested. That said, it isn’t too late for Google to through a few surprises at us as they roll out the entire update on their infrastructure.

Right now all can do is wait and see how the update affects each of our rankings.

Luke Kendall / Affiliate Manager

At Just Host we just don’t seem to be able to stop winning awards at the moment. This month we’ve been awarded WebHostingReport.com’s November 2009 award for Best Cheap Hosting. We have been awarded this because of the way we’ve “established [ourselves] as a leader in the web hosting industry by offering quality hosting features, reliable uptime, and top-notch customer service all at a price that is one of the most reasonable in the business.”

We have also been ranked the #1 web host by TenHostingReviews.com for November. They explain the reasons for their choice are “due to [Just Host’s] high stability, excellent service, quickness throughout the month and [our] fast responsive to assist [our] clients. Through TenHostingReviews.com, we have received good customer experiences and that’s why we recommend Just Host as our #1 ranked Best Web Host November 2009.

Thank you to both WebHostingReport.com and TenHostingReviews.com for awarding Just Host these top web hosting awards. As we are constantly striving to improve our services and are always adding new features to ensure our customers get the best service possible, getting recognition like this from such sites means we must be making the right choices and really appreciate the support.

Sophy / Marketing Manager