In this post I want to point out some critical information that each website owner needs to have handy.  I work with a lot of websites, and often times I get a frantic email, or call from someone saying “my website is down – what do I do?”.  Now I’m happy to help out in those situations, but the fact their their first email/call was to me, is troubling.

Why?

For one, I’m not the hosting company – so all I can really do is contact them.  Second, I’m not checking my email / voicemail 24/7, so your message may sit for hours – meanwhile, nobody is working to fix your site.

So the correct course of action is – contact your hosting company.  BUT – then I get the question – who’s my hosting company?  And that is the real point to this post.

Here’s a list of information you need to have at your disposal when you own a website:

1. Domain Registrar – where is your domain registered  For example, GoDaddy.com is a huge registrar.  Many times your hosting provider is your registrar.  Make sure you have these items:

   -Website URL
   -Access information – username, password

2. Hosting Provider – where is your website hosted?  How do you access your accounts?  Make sure you have these items:

   -Control Panel URL – with login and password
   -FTP information (server, login, password)
   -Support phone number, email, ticketing system, etc.  Understand how it works!

3. Other account info – google login, facebook, etc.  Any logins that are essential for your business should be recorded somewhere together.  In the event that someone else needs to lookup this information, or in case you forget it.
4. Backups – make sure you backup your website on a regular basis – depending how often your site updates.  E-commerce and heavily updated sites should be backed up weekly, other sites maybe once a month.  What’s that you say?  Oh, your hosting provider includes backups with your plan?  Really?  Well, that may be so, and they may actually have backups, but are you willing to risk your business on that?  In the event of a worst case scenario, you want to have a way to recover your site.  Most user control panels have a way to backup your site and databases (cpanel and plesk).
5. Disaster recover plan – this goes hand in hand with the backups.  If your hosting provider shut down unexpectedly, what would you do?  Could you quickly get your site up and running somewhere else?  Having a plan and testing it is great for your peace of mind.  If you ever need to implement it, the time spent will be priceless.

Here’s a link to 25 of the top common passwords:

Stop using these 25 passwords today

The article lists out the passwords and many common variations.  For instance taking a word like “hello” and substituting o for 0 (zero) and e for 3, like “h3ll0″ is no solution either.  It’s just too easy for hackers to break.

A good rule of thumb is to always add some “randomness” into your passwords – like 315$ – I just made that up.  add that to a word like “hello” and you have something that is fairly difficult to break – hello315$.

That said, I wonder how many passwords are stolen using “social engineering” methods – like copying the post-it note stuck to your computer, or posing as a technical support person, and just asking for it.  I think the traditional “brute-force” approaches are less common today, because too many systems are safeguarded from those.

Anyway, it’s never a bad idea to implement secure passwords.  Too much critical information is out there.

Here’s a nice article on SEO, which lists the “durable” seo elements to focus on for your website:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2111842/8-Durable-SEO-Elements

An interesting revelation from Google CEO Eric Schmidt – google changes their search algorithm a little bit each day.  EACH DAY!  So jumping onto the latest hot SEO tip may backfire.

I’d summarize this article as follows – make your site user friendly and provide great content.  That’s it.  Serve your constituency well, and the search engines will reward you.

One great way to improve your search engine rankings is to get lots of backlinks.  These are links from other websites, preferably in your industry.  This has led many sites to buy links on “link farms” or pay SEO companies to set up dozens or hundreds of low quality links to their site.  However, the search engines, notably google, are starting to strike back.

Google recently implemented some search algorithm changes that caused a lot of sites to drop off significantly in the rankings.   Here’s a article that explains some of the changes, and shows you how to recognize a good link from a bad one:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641987

-Jim

Here are a few recent examples of what happens when you hire an SEO firm to “improve” your search engine rankings:

New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google

and this one:

Forbes Accused Of Link Spam

Both of these highlight the dangers of paying for “inbound” links to your site.  In SEO, external links to your site are one of the big ways to quickly improve your search rankings.  But the search engines are increasingly getting better at “sniffing out” these links, and penalizing sites for them.  When you hire a company to do SEO for you, check into the methods they will use, and be careful.   Keep to the slow and steady, white hat methods to build traffic.  Otherwise, you may find your site blacklisted, and all your efforts (and money) lost.