• From January 14th 2012 the price for a .com, and .net registration, renewal or transfer will increase to £11.49 per year.
• From January 31st 2012 the price for a .biz registration, renewal or transfer will increase to £10.99 per year.

You can renew your domains now to save money, if your domain is not in it’s renewal period and you would like us to add more years to your domains please contact us for a custom invoice for adding multiple years and where possible we’ll be happy to do this for you.

Win tickets to Britain’s best events

For a limited period of time, when you register or renew a .uk domain before 28th November 2011 you can be entered into a free prize draw to win tickets to some authentically British events.

Just by registering or renewing your .uk domain with us, you could be cheering on England in a Six Nations match. Alternatively, you could enjoy world class tennis (together with the obligatory strawberries and cream) at Wimbledon. Or maybe you’ll spend a night in London’s West End with a theatre experience.

Win daily prizes

It doesn’t end just with the big events. There are also daily ticketmaster vouchers to be won for your choice of events across the UK, together with an additional prize for the best tweet about .uk. It couldn’t be easier.

So you see; there’s never been a better time to be proudly .uk. It really is the best of British! Renew or Register a .uk domain today!

*Domain name industry report 2010: “When users were asked if they would choose to visit a .uk site over a .com site when presented with a search result, 80% said that they would click on the .uk website”

The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors offers a really good insight into it for anyone that hasn’t got the time to read the mountains of resources on the net and wants a quick reference card. The website does dig a lot deeper into each element if you’re interested.

What we have noticed is a couple of people who’ve already made the update have found themselves with blank screens for their blog pages! Generally they think it’s a problem with WordPress itself, but we’ve found it’s mostly due to incompatible themes and plugins.

There are two options:

1. If it’s the theme that’s broken it’s probably worth changing themes or getting the current theme fixed.
2. If it’s a plugin causing the problem, you could disable the plugin or wait before upgrading. Contact the developer of the plugin and find out if they intend to release an updated version.

This is really easy to do, open up the .htaccess in the public_html folder of your site and add:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.your_domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your_domain.com/$1 [R=301]

This will redirect any requests that don’t match the www version of your site to the www version. It will use a 301 Permanent redirect.

So what does SEO really mean these days?

SEO is something that seems never to be far from the conscious mind of the website owner or manager. In simple terms to them it means coming up top of the search engines, whenever anyone types in any keyword relating to their business.

Wall of confusion around SEO

In my view the big problem with the whole business of SEO, is the wall of confusion that has built up around it. Web site owners often believe it is something that is very complicated and definitly not something they could do themselves.

Unrealistic expectations on both sides

However they often have an unrealistic impression of what an SEO consultant can achieve for them (whether this is engendered by the SEO consultant or not) and the likely cost involved.So I thought I’d write a few words to try help the website owner to understand SEO a little better and also see it in relation to other website marketing activity.

The term SEO has gained a wider meaning

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, but the term SEO really seems to have gained a much wider meaning, and can often encompass a whole range of website marketing activity.I think this actually has some bearing in reality. Traditionally the SEO consultant will be focusing on researching qualified keywords and getting them into the web page text and tags in one form or another.

Difference between on-page and off-page SEO

This is known as on-page SEO and is something that most website owners think is important. What is not so well known is that as much as 70% of your web page’s search engine position can come from what is known as off-page SEO and this is something that the website owner may be much better at than anyone else (to learn more about it read my short guide).

Things you are doing anyway may help SEO

So a lot of the thing you might be doing anyway to promote your business are likely to be helping with SEO as well. For example when you go to a networking meeting, you tell people about you business and point them to the website, often when they get back they will search for your company in a search engine. All these sorts of activities help with SEO and search engine ranking, especially in the longer term.

Search engines are also looking at your social media interactions

Likewise with social media. Obviously there are very good reasons to promote your business through channels such as Facebook Pages and Twitter. You’ll hopefully gain followers, friends and Likes on your Facebook Pages. You might review how many of these you have now and then. But it will not only be you counting these. The search engines are also looking at them and the more interactions you’re getting with social media the more it will be helping with your website’s position.

Could you do on-page SEO yourself?

Sooner or later you will need to think about the on-page SEO, that will involve editing the keywords and then putting them on the page (this is the type of SEO people generally don’t like very much). Is this something you should do in-house, or is it better to outsource? Certainly hiring a search marketing consultant, should get the job done to a reasonable standard. Be prepared to pay for this though as there is a certain amount of skill involved and does take quite a bit of time.
But if either yourself or someone else in your company is willing to learn how to do SEO, there is no reason why you can’t do at least as good a job as the professional, if not better, as you’ll know your products and services very well and will likely have a good idea of the keywords people are going to use. You’ll also save quite a bit of money as well. The difficult bit may be finding the time in a busy day, but you can often do SEO tasks inbetween other jobs.

SEO is not as complicated as people think

The simple truth is SEO is not half as complicated or difficult as people think and more importantly once you learn how it’s done, and why, there is a good chance you can build it into your working day without making any major changes. One this is for sure, not thinking about it at all is not an option.

SEO Lessons coming soon with online support

I’m currently working on a range of SEO Lessons, coming soon in the ReallySimpleSEO E-learning Centre. Access to them will cost just £25/month, with full online support. Visit the E-learning Centre for more.

Special Offer

To celebrate we have a special offer (and no it’s not an April fools joke!) from 1st April to 8th April (midnight BST) if you order a UK hosting package with a .co.uk domain name we’ll let you have the .co.uk domain name for just 7 pounds*! To take advantage of this just enter the code: BWSREG0411 at the checkout!

* The domain name will renew in future years at full price. You can make multiple orders taking advantage of this offer but it will only be applied once per order. This offer is available to both new and existing clients.

We generally tell people that there are two answers to this:

1. You pay Google to be there (see Google Adwords), or
2. You become “popular” enough to be there (see below).

Google is trying to mimic human thought and interaction in a lot of ways, presenting the most popular and relevant information for any given search at the top of it’s results. For a long while I’ve used a playground analogy to explain this as it’s something everyone understands….

Google and The Playground

Being Popular (LinkBuilding)

• If you’re the new kid in the playground, you have no popularity whatsoever and nobody knows who you are, this is the same as having no links to your website. Nobody knows you exist and so people are unlikely to visit you!
• If you start talking to the other kids, you’ll gain some popularity (probably!) and hopefully they’ll start talking about you to their other friends (in a good way).
  
  In this scenario the other kids are owners of websites and are providing links on their websites to you.
  
  The alternative here is to stand on a box and shout, this is advertising yourself (whether free in the form of Twitter/Facebook, or paid) and will help attract attention.
• However not all friends are equal (see how close to real life this all is?), making friends with a popular kid is like getting a link from the BBC or some other very popular website, this will really help your site!

Being Relevant (SEO)

If to all these new friends in the playground all you talk about is things they’re not interested in, then they probably will stop listening to you. Sites won’t link to you, and Google will realise you’re not relevant as well.

Make your contact relevant using your keywords, sensible content and structuring your site well to help Google crawl it.

Finally : Cheating

Nobody likes a cheat, least of all school children! Cheat the system at your peril, the other kids may ignore it or may report it to the Headteacher (Google!) and generally there’s no right to appeal when Google puts you in detention!

Paying for Friends!

There are companies who will both make sure your content is well structured, relevant and will get links for you from other sites for you. We’ve just partnered up with one who will be doing this for our customers at very reasonable* rates. Contact us if you want more information on this.

* Reasonable we’ve added a note to, this is manual labour intensive work it doesn’t come cheap!

Anyone that is offering to do this for you at low cost (and is probably promising you the earth!) may be using automated tools (this is the same as putting posters all around the playground saying what a great guy you are – everyone will eventually ignore them!) or is cheating on your behalf, and if they’re cheating on your behalf it’s you that will end up detention!

photo credit: rachaelvoorhees

We haven’t launched our affiliate program yet (don’t worry it is coming!), but the sight of summer has already gone to our heads and we’d like to offer to all of our existing hosting clients a very special offer, and it’s really simple!

We know that our clients often refer us to friends, colleagues and other businesses so we’d like to reward them for doing that….

During the month of June:

• Refer two hosting clients and get one domain name* extended for free.
• Refer four hosting clients and get one domain name* and one hosting package** extended for free.

* Domain name extensions only apply to .com’s and .co.uk’s, for the minimum term (2 years for .co.uk’s, 1 year for .com’s) and only apply to domain names you have registered with BetterWebSpace.

** Hosting extensions are for your single next hosting invoice (annual for Easy customers, monthly for Easy Resellers), including backups if you have them.

Free extensions will be applied on 1st August 2010 to the next available invoice to be generated.

When referring clients, ask them to let us know that you referred them and provide you with their customer ID. Once you have two, or four customer ID’s contact us with those details to have the credit applied to your account, really simple!

Note: You can do this multiple times, so referring 8 clients would mean you could have two domains and two hosting packages extended!

photo credit: Seattle Miles

Whilst we’ve been really busy, we’ve got one or two open slots coming up for both design and automation work!

Spruce up your Website!

For those of you that aren’t aware our new designer has been with us for around 6 months now and has produced some great designs during that time, which several of our new and existing clients have been exceptionally happy with!

Jenn specialises in custom themes for WordPress, which means that once she has designed your site for you, you can then update pages through a simple interface that doesn’t differ too much from your normal word processing package (of course if you’d like us to do your site updates for you let us know). We’re also happy to create sites ranging from simple one-page solutions to large database driven websites.

Things to consider:

• Do you keep your site regularly updated (search engines tend to like that) – could this be made easier with a WordPress theme?
• Would you like us to convert your existing website to WordPress to make it easier to update?
• Would you like a fresh new design (either with WordPress or without)?
• Would you like a summer and a winter design?
• We’re also now taking orders for redesigns for Christmas (I know it’s a long way off, but the closer it gets the busier it gets!)

Prices start from just £100 for a single page website, and could be ready for you within a fortnight (depending on demand!)

Making Life Easier!

Since we launched our Office Automation brand we’ve been busy making our clients lives easier, in some cases saving them several hours every day! If you’d like us to look at some of the things you do online in a day and make them easier do get in touch!