Ecommerce Web Design Blog

A major factor in the package prices for hosting packages is often the amount of disk space and bandwidth you receive. How much is enough for your website needs?

How much capacity is enough for web hosting? This question we are asked very frequently. The answer to it depends on a number of things:

• What will you be doing with the website? A shopping cart website for example will need an allocation of physical hard drive space on our servers to hold the product images, descriptions and any downloadable files you have to accompany your description. If the product is virtual, you may need additional space for that as well. A static content 'HTML' website of 5-10 pages with some PDFs and images will require considerably less. Most small business websites rarely get above 100mb of disk space and many use considerably less disk space than this.
• How many visitors do you expect? This depends on two factors allocated to you by your hosting provider: disk space and bandwidth. Of these, it is bandwidth that reflects amount of downloading and uploading activity to your site - it is the amount of website data transferred to or from your site. This includes your activities managing your products and more significantly the visitors to your site. You can have a site with a small amount of diskspace but if it is extremely popular it might receive a massive amount of visitors and use up its bandwidth allocation. Bandwidth is often referred to as monthly web traffic. Most small business websites use less than 2000mb (2gigabytes) of monthly traffic, however high popularity sites like serious online traders can receive hundreds or thousands of visitors a month and quickly use up 10-15gb of traffic. Our top ecommerce package with Platinum Privileges provides an allocation of up to 20GB meaning even the busiest of websites will rarely need to worry about running out of their traffic allocation.
• For many small business websites, all of our starter packages (Bronze Hosting, Standard Web Design and Starter Ecommerce) offer 100mb of space and 2000mb (2gb) of traffic. In most cases this is sufficient. Customers can contact us to purchase additional space for any given month if they think they will run out (or if they do).

On top of disk space and bandwidth, find out from your web hosting provider how reliable their servers are. How often are the servers backed up? Do they have to be taken down for maintenance? What level of uptime guarantee can they provide you? Osc Works servers are backed up every day have a 99.9%+ uptime guarantee - plus high-performance specifications to ensure that pages are served quickly and efficiently even under heavy load.

If you're trying to improve your search engine ranking, one place to start is to think about what your customers are searching for. Like any marketing activity, doing your research helps. How can you find out what people are searching for? What are the most competitive search terms? What are your competitors doing?

There are a number of keyword research techniques. Since your customers are probably searching in Google, going to the source for your keyword research can be very helpful indeed. Here are just a few keyword research techniques that use Google.

Use the Adwords tool

Many third-party research tools do not offer results that include results from Australia and New Zealand and only focus on the US. This makes Google's Adwords tool is a great starting point for determining what your customers are searching for.

To use the tool visit http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and choose the country you are getting results for. Then try entering the names of your most popular products and services into the 'Descriptive words or phrases' keywords box, or the words you think your customers are searching for to find your site (you can look in your server logs to find this information). Then click 'Get keyword ideas' and you're away.

AAnother advantage of the Adwords tool is that it lets you generate keywords based on the content of other webpages - e.g. those of your competitors. Look up the top performing site or brand in your product category and get some keyword suggestions that way. The tool will give you a graphical indication of how competitive each keyword is and how many searches were performed on it in the last month. All useful information in your keyword research approach.

Also try Google Suggest

Google Suggest offers dropdown suggestions of search terms as you enter a search query. It tells you similar phrases to the one you are typing that contain the first word in your phrase. It also shows you the number of searches in Google USA for that keyword. If you enter your product and service names into the tool, it can give you some useful suggestions./p>

Google Suggest is included as part of Google's Toolbar search box which you can download and install for free on your own computer. Since it bases its suggestions on the first word you type, it doesn't provide suggestions using similar words (e.g. 'mobiles' and 'cellphones') but it is a good quick reference tool.

Yahoo! has produced a similar tool called Search Assist. It returns a much broader range of suggestions than Google Suggest, some of which may not be directly relevant to your products and services. This is helpful because it can tell you the types of results that may come up for the words you are using in your Google Adwords or Yahoo pay-per-click advertising. You can then exclude search phrases that return a lot of results that may not lead to qualified click-throughs.