As you know, we’re big on making sure that you’re all happy as clams with the service you’re receiving from us. How happy is a clam, you ask? I don’t know. I don’t even know where that expression came from, and that’s not important right now.

Anyway, I feel it is important to give you blog readers a heads up on a crazy, world-wide WordPress attack that might be affecting your service, just in case you haven’t stopped by the TurnKey Helpdesk recently. I just had a chat with our Operations Manager, Brian, and since he basically sleeps in our cold containment pods, what you’re about to read is fresh from the kitchen. Watch your hands—the plate is hot…

There is currently a world-wide attack affecting all WordPress sites at all hosts. This is an attack of unprecedented nature, from a botnet operating on 90,000+ IP addresses.

Due to the nature of the attack, memory consumption on targeted servers has increased. In some cases, this has resulted in degradation of performance and unresponsive servers. This is due to a high volume of ‘http’ requests, which can cause some servers to start swapping memory to disk, and possibly run out of memory. We’ve put measures in place at the firewall and at server level to off-load a lot of the attack, however, there isn’t much more we can do at this time. We have disabled all access to wp-login.php to ensure none of our customers are at risk. For those customers needing to log into their WordPress sites, please open a ticket with our support team, and we can provide access to your sites.

We are working closely with our security and channel partners to further address the issue as it becomes possible.

Again, we feel it’s important to stress that this is not a TurnKey-specific issue. Brian and I took a peek around, and it seems like everyone, everywhere is fighting the same, annoying battle.

We’re super grateful for your understanding and patience while the attack runs its course. If you would like further assistance, or have any additional questions, feel free to contact us by phone or email, Live Chat, Facebook or Twitter—however you would like. Owl? Sea plane? Regardless, we’ll be listening. Sit tight, and we will iron this out as soon as possible.

In 2009, Google went from having around 20,000 employees, to having millions of people all over the world working for them. Well… sort of.

You might already be familiar with what is pictured below. If not, let me explain to you a little bit about something that I was recently informed about –this magical thing called “reCAPTCHA”.

 In the year 2000, I was worried about passing the 4th grade. I was anticipating that all the computers in the world were going to explode due to Y2K. I was hoping that I could fend for my family and not die of Dysentery on The Oregon Trail. Needless to say, life was rough.

But Yahoo!—and hundreds of other web companies, for that matter—were dealing with a much larger epidemic than Dysentery—spam. No, not that gross, canned mystery meat, and definitely not George Michael’s Wham! This kind of spam is something (debatably) worse than both… combined!

We’ve all encountered spam in our email inboxes, but now, thanks to Luis von Ahn, we also have all run into what is stopping most of it.

Luis von Ahn grew up in Guatemala and worked in his family’s candy shop as a kid. Later on in his life, along with his college advisor, he was hired by Yahoo! to create a program that could tell the difference between a human and a form bot. They came up with “CAPTCHA”, which—and I’m serious here—stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

While the name isn’t exactly the work of genius, these brilliant guys created a challenge-response test that could be predominantly passed by humans to block those evil form bots and eliminate as much spam as possible. These computer-generated, squiggly words are made so humans can read and submit them, but that computers cannot.

After becoming extraordinarily successful off this creation, Mr. von Ahn still found a weakness in his own program. The flaw? The 10 annoying seconds wasted while someone types in a CAPTCHA every time they come across one. After turning down a personal offer from Bill Gates to work for Microsoft and winning the MacArthur Fellowship Award in 2006, von Ahn re-created CAPTCHA and titled it…erm… reCAPTCHA! Luis von Ahn believed this new idea would be good for humanity, and as far as some other types of crowdsourcing go, I agree.

In 2009, Google bought reCAPTCHA and released it upon the masses. Now, what reCAPTCHA does is take the words we type in and use them to digitize old books and newspapers. These books and newspapers are scanned and turned into text-images by using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The problem remains that computers still cannot read text as well as humans. A simple word like “of” could be interpreted as “at,” since old books and newspapers may have words that are damaged or hard to scan.

Here is where the superpower of humans comes in! We can read the word “of” and correctly submit “of,” instead of “at”, along with a computer-generated CAPTCHA word. So a reCAPTCHA image is combined with a CAPTCHA word, and placed at the login of something like an email. If we get the CAPTCHA word correct, we are in-there-like-swimwear. Even if we get the reCAPTCHA wrong and cannot decipher it ourselves, but get the CAPTCHA, we are still allowed access. The reCAPTCHA word will be tested by many other humans to increase the likelihood of it being deciphered correctly.

Using the aforementioned example of the word “of” being read as “at”, if people keep typing “of”, the word “of” will digitally replace the word that the OCR program recommended. After some time, millions of people are deciphering these scanned reCAPTCHA words and creating digitized versions of old New York Times newspapers and classic books for Google!

In months, with the power of reCAPTCHA and humans’ ability to read damaged words, 20 years’ worth of material is digitized and transcribed thanks to… well… you…me… Alan Rosenberg… maybe Luis von Ahn and Bill Gates… your mom? Everyone! In time, thanks to Luis von Ahn and his team, we will all be a part of digitizing millions of old texts to be distributed online. Now, where are our paychecks, Google?

Howdy-do, TurnKey Lovers?

Jeremy here, with another entry for you to gobble up. “Gobble”? Well, that’s a funny use of the word, but it actually deals directly with my current post. The word “gobble” results in thoughts about turkey. Now, this could be due to the fact that I’m hungry. Any reference to food incites a bout of extreme hunger, causing me to crave that 5-piece spicy nugget from Wendy’s that I have left over. But, I digress.

The reason that I mention “gobble” is really to talk about turkey—not TurnKey—but turkey. That, sometimes dry, meat that you have to cook perfectly on Thanksgiving, or start looking for a gallon of water to just get through the meal. Turkey brings us to Thanksgiving; one of the joyous occasions most Americans celebrate every year by engorging themselves with as much food possible, and then passing out an hour later. Ok, that might just be me who does the passing out part…

There is also another GREAT benefit to this time of the year. Have you figured it out yet? Did you even guess? I’ll give you a hint; it’s the day after you recover from stuffing yourself with delectable food. Queue the jeopardy theme song—BLACK FRIDAYYYY!!!

Black Friday isn’t considered a holiday, but with the sheer amount of people out shopping, you would think it was the busiest holiday of the year. I will give you a bit of history on the day Black Friday:

This day, Black Friday, is the official kick-off to the Christmas shopping season. You will see/hear/read about many retailers opening up at 4AM or earlier to accommodate the large rush of customers expecting to find ridiculous deals on different products. Consumers every year look forward to this one day, so that they can purchase those headphones they’ve been eying for months that were a bit too expensive, or that new 50-inch LCD flat screen that they’ve been wanting to hang up over their fireplace since first seeing the ad on television.

To put this in perspective, I’ve included the table below from our good buddy Wikipedia, which depicts the average amount of money that is spent on this day:

Retail Sales

The National Retail Federation releases figures on the sales for each Thanksgiving weekend.

Now, you may be wondering, “What on Earth does this have to do with hosting?” Well, my friends, we live in a world with a digital economy now, and it seems that everyone and their mother has a website. Almost every major retailer has some sort of ad space where they post their upcoming deals for Black Friday. With so many consumers looking for the best deal, you can imagine that sites will receive heavy traffic spikes due to the demand of finding the best deals.

These large spikes of traffic need to be handled as smoothly as possible, so that retailers and consumers do not experience any downtime during this whirl-wind of a day. Enter stage left—expandable cloud servers, multiple VPS’s (virtual private servers), or another dedicated server to handle the increase of traffic. All of which you can find here, at TurnKey Internet.

Each solution has its unique benefits. For example, let’s say you have a cloud server. On Black Friday, your traffic quadruples. Well, one of the main benefits of a TurnKey cloud is the ability to add more resources without incurring downtime. You could have more RAM allocated, increased disk space, or even increased bandwidth. The scalability is very enticing. Then, after Black Friday has concluded, you can downgrade your cloud server with no issues.

Or, let’s say you purchase an additional TurnKey VPS to handle your increase of traffic. You could then have those extra VPS’s decommissioned. You see, the real winners on Black Friday are the consumers/retailers that plan ahead. They purchase the additional bandwidth or add another server before the day occurs. As my college professor would say, “Prior preparation prevents poor performance.” That could be increasing your Turnkey cloud resources, adding an additional Turnkey VPS, or purchasing a new Turnkey dedicated server ahead of time. That way, you can keep your sales flowing in and your customers happy.

Now, my chicken nuggets are calling. Until next time, TurnKey lovers!

Search engine optimization is all the rage everywhere you look, and for good reason when traffic equals sales. But optimizing a site for search engines is harder than it sounds, especially if you’re not ready to spend hours and hours learning about how to do it right. Over the past several months, we’ve been asked by clients over and over again how they should configure their hosting to make the most of the search engines. Then, suddenly, it occurred to us: why not set up a hosting plan that is already optimized? So we did.

Today, I am happy to announce SEO Hosting from TurnKey Internet!
Now our clients don’t have to wade through the mountains of conflicting information to get an indexed website with decent traffic. You don’t need to know anything at all about SEO to make the most of these hosting plans. Everything is automated and ready to go from the second you gain access to your account. In addition to a boatload of features which I will get into below, your sites will be hosted on our lightning fast Dell Poweredge R410 servers with 8+ cpu’s and raid 10 disk protection, hosted from our tier-1 New York datacenter. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry: it’s good!

Those days of slaving over tutorials are in the past!
We’ve configured our SEO servers to allow clients to take complete control over their portfolio of websites, while easily managing everything from one location. You will access your account via cPanel, and will have full WHM (web host manager) access. This means you can create an unlimited number of accounts, domain names and web sites each with their own dedicated IP address. This is the key to great SEO!

Dedicated IP Addresses
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, index sites on dedicated IP addresses as unique properties. This is very important for SEO. It is easy and cheap to set up hundreds of websites on the same IP, and to link them all to each other to try and build up some SEO juice. The search engine hive minds know all about this strategy and, if they weighted those sites that “live” in the same neighborhood (same IP’s) the same as sites on unique IP’s, they’d be sending traffic straight to the people trying to game the system. By privileging unique IP’s, search engines are trying to ensure that sites are naturally indexed, and that that indexing is a result of unique sites hosted by unique people.

For businesses, this is not good news. Building links is one of the most popular and effective methods for driving traffic and, until now, it has been necessary to buy several different expensive hosting accounts with different IP’s to get the proper indexing. Now, that is a thing of the past with TurnKey Internet’s SEO hosting package! We provide unique IP’s all under the same hosting account, so you can set up many different sites that all get indexed as unique properties. This will save you immense amounts of time, effort and money, while ensuring that your sites get privileged by the engines. And, as I mentioned above, you can manage all of these properties from one easy location.

Many Class-C IP Ranges
Not only do you get many different IP addresses with TurnKey SEO Hosting, those addresses are spread over many different class-c blocks. This means that, even if the search engines were to start recognizing IP’s on the same block as “living” in the same neighborhood, your sites would still keep their unique status because they are on different blocks. In the SEO game, so much rests on the whim of the search engines. They can change the rules as they go, and we all have to race to keep up. Keeping your IP’s on separate class-c blocks pre-empts the possibility that the search engines will recognize this sort of SEO hosting and penalize it, protecting you and your properties from the whim of Matt Cutts and his cohorts.

Additional Advanced Web Hosting Features
First and foremost, TurnKey Internet is a web hosting company. We take pride in what we do and in the features and services we offer. Our SEO hosting packages are no different from our other hosting packages in this regard. With each account we offer Fantastico, Softaculous, WHMXtra, RVSiteBuilder Pro, and R1Soft’s continuous data protection backups. These are all built right into your cPanel controls, so you can implement any and all of them as you see fit. We see this SEO hosting package as everything we already have and more.

To learn more about our SEO Hosting packages, visit: http://turnkeyinternet.net/seo-hosting

So, you’ve worked hard building your website. You’ve created tons of interesting, well-written content, optimized for SEO, and designed a stunning series of pages. Finally, all your effort has paid off with the one thing most people only dream of: traffic volume. Now that you have lots of visitors checking out your site, you have to be smart about how to keep them there. Keeping your content fresh and new is only one of the many challenges you now face. Consider each of the following ideas carefully. The success of your website depends on it!

Communication

In addition to plying your visitors with interesting articles, you need to keep in touch with them more closely. Start a mailing list and a site newsletter. Each time you have a new article, interview, top 10 list or review, let your audience know about it. Check out TurnKey Newsletter for a comprehensive newsletter platform with autoresponders, easy contact management and hundreds of great design templates.

Monetization

You don’t just want to have a website, you want to make money off it. There are many ways to do this when you have traffic, including: selling ad space, selling products and ebooks. But you have to be careful. These days, people are inundated with advertisements everywhere they look, and tend to feel alienated when a favorite site suddenly fills up with ads. You can keep your ads in one section only, like on your front page, and keep them off the rest of your site. You can also come up with clever alternatives to traditional banner advertising. Offer a few prime forum threads for paid ads. These can become extremely lucrative if you have a hopping forum, and they don’t impinge on the rest of the discussions. If you’re looking for a great ecommerce solution, check out TurnKey Website. This service offers complete store set-up as well as a huge selection of tools, apps, templates and value add-ons to give your site all the functionality you need for making money off of your blog.

Syndication

If you have a popular website, you probably already know about syndicating content. However, not all syndication tools are created equal. Make sure you choose one that can accommodate unlimited growth. Look for functionality: video, audio, ads and images. Your feed is one major way you connect with your audience so make sure it looks as slick as the rest of your site.

Monitoring

It doesn’t matter how hard you work at making your website interesting when your server is down. Chances are you’re too busy to be monitoring your site 24 hours a day. Check out TurnKey Monitoring, a complete 24×7 monitoring service (that’s completely free, I might add). TurnKey Monitoring will ping you if your site goes down, so you can relax and worry about other things.

Handling Spikes

With popular websites, traffic spikes are inevitable. If you post a particularly newsworthy article, or a review of a brand new product, your going to get lots of visitors… fast. It’s important to make sure your site infrastructure can handle the spike in traffic, so you’re not brought to your knees when you should be flying high. Purchasing a dedicated server is a safe and affordable solution—you’ll have lots of extra bandwidth and managed support if anything goes wrong. You’ll also have the peace of mind of knowing that your server is yours alone. There is no other content on there to slow you down, and you can add more space as you go.

As the available domain names grow scarcer by the second, many of us are left wondering how to choose a domain that will make any sense, let alone one that will drive traffic and brand our companies. While there are still many great domains out there, especially if you’re a creative thinker, the short, sweet, easy to spell, easy to say domains are not quite so forthcoming. If you have a very specific branding idea or an absolute favorite name that just isn’t available (for any price), misspellings might be your best shot at finding a name you love. Often, you will only have to switch two letters, or add a “k” in the place of a “c” to find an available name. You may even end up with a name that is more memorable and unique than the original name you wanted, and that sets you apart better then the dictionary spelling of a common word ever could.

Why would I want a misspelled domain anyway?
In addition to the cute, web 2.0ness of a misspelled domain, you may also end up growing your traffic wholly by accident, or, if you are particularly shrewd, wholly on purpose (I won’t tell). The name of the game is targeted traffic—if you choose a name like “hoogle.com” (which isn’t available, but permit me the example) you will end up with boatloads of traffic from the fat-fingered and, in America, that’s a lot of people. You will also end up with a bunch of people who are looking for a search engine. If you happen to be Bing, this is excellent news.

Which Misspellings Work Best?
As I mentioned, you’re aim is to target your traffic, so start out by finding your most popular competitor. You can choose to go the blatant route and pick a misspelling that is obviously keyboard-based (again, like hoogle, or like godadsy) or you can think like an English teacher and switch i’s and e’s, a common mistake for many spellers. Regardless of your tactic, be sure to pick a company that is offering the same products or services that you are offering. Get as close as you can, because the end goal is to make a sale. If your products are too different, that visitor will just correct their misspelling and vamoose.

Analyzing Traffic
The Internet is an incredible tool, as exemplified by the convenient misspelling traffic analysis provided by many different websites, for free. Investigate the traffic reports for misspellings that are not yet owned via Google keyword search. You may also want to consider domains that relate to distinct events, rather than existing companies. For example, if you are a vendor selling soccer equipment, consider a misspelled world cup player or team for your domain. There were millions of misspelled searches during the world cup. If even a small percentage of those people had come across your online store, you would have made some great sales—especially if you’d been clever enough to offer team jerseys at deep discounts to hardcore fans. And maybe even some vuvuzelas?

“Borrowing” Traffic
So, it might not be the most morally righteous thing in the world, but traffic on the Internet is not an entirely fair enterprise to begin with. Google ranks websites based, in part, on existing popularity. This means, we all start out at a disadvantage. Google also encourages website owners to populate their content with keywords and search terms—so, in a very real sense, we have no choice but to cater to the search engines from square one. A misspelling is not copyright infringement. It is not illegal. However, you can further protect yourself (and brand your very own company as a stand-alone) by choosing a misspelling that is it’s own catchy word or phrase. The less your domain relates to a recognizable brand while still sending you misspelling traffic, the better. So, while Godadsy might be a little obvious, Fodadsy is very much it’s own thing. While two letters isn’t quite as good as one, you’ll still get the fat-finger traffic while maintaining your very own name that is recognizably yours. You can always buy Godadsy too and point it to Fodadsy for a little thing I like to call the best of both worlds.

A Word of Caution
If you are a business owner who already has a domain, you may want to consider buying up all the possible misspellings of your name to protect yourself from just this type of traffic squatting. It’s nefarious and slightly dirty, but it works. Use it if you need it and watch out for it if you don’t.

There has been a lot of controversy lately about how best to use blog comments to boost SEO. While it might seem awfully counter-intuitive, several popular bloggers have demonstrated that turning off comments can do wonders for traffic. That is, if you happen to be popular to begin with.

They theory is that, by turning off comments, you force readers to respond to your articles on their own blogs and social networking sites, linking back to your post in the process. This not only encourages linking-in but it also prevents spammers from hitting your blog with their own links. If you happen to be a blogger with a loyal readership, I can see how this method might improve your traffic. However, I can also see how it could kill your blog—and fast.

Not only are you counting on your readers to stay loyal after you ban them from discussing your post on your site (which, frankly, is kinda rude), you are also counting on them to care enough about your post to write their own. Maybe it’s naïve of me, but I think people tend to be a touch lazier than that in real life. The beauty of comments is how easy it is to leave one. You read a post, you have an opinion, you share that opinion, you go on with your life. In a perfect world, comments demonstrate to new readers how fascinating your post has been to past readers, and encourage discourse among your budding fan-base.

When you turn off comments, you turn off the discussion. Unless your readers are super bloggers with unlimited time, and your content is, like, the most compelling thing ever, you’re taking a big risk. Not only are you shutting down a pipeline of traffic, your sending an elitist message to your readers. My advice: let people comment, heavily moderate for spam, and encourage readers to blog about your blog by writing good content. It’s the best of all possible worlds.

The first step in driving traffic to your business website is to create a compelling  site that is logically laid out. Invest some time and money into creating a site that reflects your business philosophy and business goals. Make contacting you easy, and streamline the shopping and check-out process – the faster the process, the more sales you will make. Once you have the site ready, here are some techniques for bringing people to it:

• Brand your product and website consistently. Every time your brand makes an appearance, you are building your brand recognition. Keeping that brand simple and potent is the key to building your business. Don’t dilute the brand with multiple versions of your logo. Don’t dilute your brand with different website templates. Keep the look of your company consistent and it will get consistently recognized.

• Make your website trustable. Always make sure your content is well-written, authoritative and slick. You want to instill as much trust as possible in every single visitor you get because every visitor is a potential client. Keep your security software active and updated and let your visitors know you run a secure site. If they feel like their information is safe with you, they’ll be much more willing to spend money with you.

• Create strong business policies. Write up a solid company policy. Include return-policies, money-back guarantees, and a strong code of ethics. Display this information prominently in your website’s footer and refer to it in your advertisements. If you have a company newsletter (and you should—more on this in another blog post soon) maintain a stringent privacy policy and make it crystal clear to your subscribers how they can opt-out. Spamming is the number one absolute no-no when it comes to building consumer trust.

• Name each of your web pages with an SEO friendly keyword. Get your webmaster to title each of your pages accurately and with an eye towards the search engines. Internal navigability is critically important but in order for it to matter, people have to be able to find your website in the first place. Titling with keywords makes your website index-able and indexing equals traffic.

• Add as much value to your website as possible. There are many techniques for making your clients feel like they’re getting a whole lot out of their relationship with you. Affiliate programs achieve this while also helping you mobilize your traffic to build itself. Recommending links to other related content can also add value. Ideally, you want to cultivate repeat-traffic. If you serve as a kind of index or reference for your visitors, they’ll keep coming back for more. You can also offer e-books as a bonus for purchases, filling out surveys or joining your mailing list. There are e-books out there on pretty much every topic imaginable.

• Add a favorites or “bookmark this site” script to your pages. This one is pretty self-explanatory. If visitors can easily mark your website when they visit, they will be more likely to come back in the future. Make this as painless as possible.

• Add a “recommend this site.” Word-of-mouth is as important today as it’s ever been—maybe even more important as social networking makes us all aware of everyone else’s opinions all the time. Make it easy for visitors to recommend you to their friends and colleagues.

• Create a “what’s new” page, or a “recent news” section. This is especially important for large sites with a lot of fresh content scattered among many pages. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to check out new updates. This is important for maintaining visitor interest and for maintaining visitor participation. It is well-known that traffic expands exponentially. Popularity builds on itself.

• Make your site SEO friendly. I touched on this earlier, and have written about it in several other blog posts. There are several SEO websites where you can learn all the dirty secrets for optimizing your site. Here is a brief rundown of the basics:

  • Title tags: These should be 60 characters, and include keywords.
  • Header tags: These are numbered from 1-7, and aren’t recognized for every search engine but, when they are, they’re important.
  • Keyword meta tags: Meta tags should be 15-20 words long (to avoid getting flagged for spamming) and should be as directly relevant to your site content as possible.
  • Text area key words: It is particularly important to include keywords in the beginning of sentences and higher up on the page, but keywords anywhere will be helpful.

• Submit your site to search engines. It takes a whole lot longer for search engines to find your site organically, so submit it! It can be time consuming, but submitting your site to each search engine individually will yield the best results.

• Keep on top of links and repair or delete broken ones. Dead links are a sure give-away that you’re not keeping your website up-to-date. Clean house regularly manually or with a link-checker. There are several free link-checking tools available online.

• Conduct periodic contests. Contests are an excellent way to build traffic. Everyone loves to win something, even when it isn’t worth a lot of money. The spirit of competition is a powerful thing. Make sure you keep a running tally of the rankings, visible to the public. If you run a contest over a few days or even weeks, you will keep contestants coming back again and again to check their standings. Contests that involve voting are especially effective. Voting gets people to involve their social networks. This can lead to a huge increase in traffic in a relatively short period of time.

• Keep content fresh. I know. I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this one, but I really can’t stress enough how important it is to keep your website current. Nobody is going to bother coming back to visit if there isn’t ever anything new to look at. It’s obvious. It’s true.

While Cyber Monday has come and gone, all the studies show that the shopping season is far from over. In fact, we’re being told now that consumers will most likely continue to increase their spending through the end of the month. If you’re an online retailer, you will probably be seeing a steady increase in traffic to your website. As a former online retailer myself, I remember my greatest fear around this time of year: website slowdown, or worse! Today, as consumers expect faster and faster shopping experiences, this is an even scarier prospect. When the tiniest glitch during selection or check-out can send customers surfing, making sure your website is running at top speed is just smart business.

Take this snowy day (if you’re in the right half of the country) to have a look at your stats and, if they’re in the red, upgrade your service to handle the extra load. If you don’t have stats to look at, get in touch with your hosting provider and ask if your current plan could handle double the traffic it has now. If not: upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Doubling your capacity might be overkill, but you only have do it once a year. Besides, the potential lost sales from a slow-down will more than pay for the upgrade.

If you don’t upgrade and your site goes down, I won’t say “I told you so” because I’m not that kind of girl… But I’ll be thinking it!

Anneke Rudegeair
Marketing Director