Search engine optimization is a black art, and it takes a lot of time and trouble to de-bunk all the false advice out there.

Some people do it because they heard a friend to tell a friend that advice. Others do it to sell ten page eBooks on the topic that cost the end user $65 a pop. I am going to help you get something done though by sharing the answers to some of these frequently asked (and answered wrong) questions.

Will having a dedicated IP address help you with search engine optimization?

The simple answer is no. It is a myth that Google or any other search engine will penalize you for hosting on a server that shares an IP address or for not having a dedicated IP address.

Is having static addresses better than having dynamic ones?

To explain, a dynamic address would be one used by a service like WordPress does by default, giving you something like article.php?post=543 after your domain in the addresses bar or something to that effect. When you see a static address, it looks much more like the one you see at WebHostingShow.com when you click on a story to read where it has in the address something like /archive/story-about-hosting.php.

In most cases, search engines would search either one but I would tend to go with the static addresses if you can, because it is more user friendly to the visitor and for keyword reasons. Now having good related keywords in the address, this is a search engine optimization tip that is slowly fading away but is still relevant right now.

For search engine optimization, what is the best way to change a domain name address?

You want to use what is referred to in the business as a 301 redirect. There are a number of ways to get this done so by searching Google for 301 redirect you are bound to find a lot of methods. Easiest would be to put this in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage.htm

A 301 redirect is telling the world that your page has moved permanently, that is what the 301 code stands for.

You should get away from your previous hosting company as quickly as you can?

This is not always the case. You may want to wait till you see your search engine spiders and bots crawling over your new content before you go back to your old web host and cancel your web site’s old hosting account. Not doing so could lead the search engine spiders to a dead end a few times (during domain name propagation) and it might cause your web site to get dropped from the search engine rankings. This is because from the spider’s point of view, you no longer exist.

Have any other SEO myths that need to be de-bunked? Drop me a line or a comment.

We keep hearing about Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail all fighting it out to provide you with the largest e-mail inbox. If you have a web hosting account though, it is very easy to beat all of these providers and give yourself the e-mail disk space you really need.

Now this might be a little different depending on the cPanel skin you are using, but it should work generally for any and all.

Step one would be to login to cPanel and go to your mail settings (usually you can just click on the “Mail” icon to get you there. Next you will want to go to:

Add/Remove/Manage Accounts

This is your Mail Account Maintenance page. Here you can see all the e-mail accounts you have created. If you have not yet created one go to “Add Account” to do so. Here you can fill in the name you want to use (the thing that going before @yourdomain.com), your password and the Quota. By default the setting should be 10 Meg. This stands for 10 Megabytes.

Now it is time for some math. To make things easy, let us say you wanted to bump your e-mail quota to 5 GB of storage.

1 gigabytes = 1,024 megabytes

Using Google, you can do the conversions quicker. Just type into Google “5 GB to MB“. The answer you need to type into cPanel’s quota box would be “5120” which is 5,120 MB. If all goes well you should see the message:

The e-mail account (your e-mail address) with the login (your login) and password (your password) with a quota of 5120 Megabytes was successfully created.

To change that later on, just go back into your Mail Account Maintenance screen, find your e-mail account and click on “Quota”. See, now you know you don’t need a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail in your life to have a larger online inbox.

Have a static web site, but you still feel the urge of having an easier way to manage your data? WordPress is a perfect tool to get this done if your not afraid to do a little tweaking and thinking outside of the box.

You can get this done in four easy steps:

Step 1: Find a WordPress template that you like, and remove the blog related content in the sidebar (or wherever else it is posted). If you can create a WordPress layout by hand you might be better off.

Step 2: Login to the WordPress administration interface and go to Options, then Reading. On that page you can set your front page to be a static web page instead of the default blog list that you get.

Step 3: Mange all the pages on your site, by going to Write and then Write Page inside of the WordPress administration interface. To edit your creations later you can go to Manage and then Pages. From there you should get a full list of the pages you have created.

Step 4: You might have to go in and edit your template files ago to make sure you are linking to all the pages you have created. Since most sites done this way will be pretty small, you can get away with making these links by hand. I am sure there are automatic ways of doing it too using the list pages tag from WordPress. I would not bother though unless your just looking for something to tweak later down the road.

Personally this interested me at first because I wanted to know if it could be done. Now that I have done it with my own personal web site, I have found it to be an easy way to make edits and changes to my little biography on the Web. Another neat perk about doing this is you can work in WordPress plugins into the mix and get some awesome dynamic interaction for a static web site.

With the new year here and not much else going on, this makes for the perfect time for web hosts to review their support pages and see what needs to be improved on.

Traveling from web host to web host looking for news and information I see a lot of people who don’t do much as far as support pages go. On the other side of the scale, you also have hosts that push out so many support pages that there is no way they’ll be able to keep them all up to date.

How Do You Find the Problem?

Check out your web site statistical information (one of my favorites to use is Google Analytics) and with your support pages see where you are getting the most hits. Now navigate yourself to a few of these pages and see if there is anything that could be improved on or updated.

Another thing you could do while support might not be so busy is to surf around your support pages to make sure there are no broken links. Now these are sometimes harder to find - but the worst thing you can do to a customer looking for help is lead them to a dead end.

Is There an Easier Way?

Now with both of those suggestions out of the way, we can make your job easier. How can you do that? Well, time to include a link leading to a contact form at the bottom of each of your support pages saying something to the effect of:

“Dead link? Out of date? Send us an e-mail and let us know!”

This will give your customer, clients and visitors a way of contacting you to let you know you have some work to do. Getting even a little more fancy, you could setup a special address for this and have it forward over right to your designers or a specific part of your support team so they can get these fixed as soon as they come in.

Web design is a mysterious art that some can do and not many have mastered. When it comes to a Web hosting web site - people expect to see certain things as customers and if your lacking in these areas it could hurt you down the road. Sure fancy flash and really hot pictures of server racks are nice, but they won’t win you any clients.

Keep it Simple

Some web hosts out there like to fit as much content, flashing banners and overdone graphics on the front page as they can fit. This is not the best way to go. Personally, I like it when web hosts keep it simple.

Give me the Basics

I do not need to know every single detail about every single plan. Here is a basic forumula for what I want to see on your front page:

• Company Name
• Little Information About You
• Plans (Disk Space/Bandwidth at Least)
• Links to Other Pages for More Information

Finding the right balance between hype and helpful details is hard to do. Once you have done it though, I promise your current and potential clients will really thank you.

Sell Yourself in a Few Words

If you doing something great it shouldn’t take that long to convey the message to others. As much as having paragraph after paragraph about how good plan number one is or how great you are in general might look, keeping things short and sweet will go a long way.

Here are a few examples of web hosts who do follow all my rules:

Hostgator.com | Lunarpages.com | HostMonster.com | StartLogic.com

It might take a while before you find the layout or design that is just right for your particular business. The basics you need to remember though are to make sure you are different from the rest, touch base with everything that you cover and don’t be afraid to try something a little different.

Want to snoop around and see what top secret information you can find out about your web host? Ok, maybe this information is not all that secret, but you do have to jump through a few hoops to find out about it. Web sites like domaintools.com make it fairly easy to look up some general stats about your web host.

Doing a search on your own domain name you can find out:

• How many other sites are hosted on the same server.
• The server’s status on the black lists out there.
• The type of server your web site is hosted on.

Another good place to find stats on a specific web host is webhosting.info. Just type in the domain name of your web host into the search box - and then select “Web Hosts” in the radio box selection and hit the “Go” button.

You might want to keep in mind that if they are not large enough they might not get picked up by the rankings. Also if they are using several different domains for their servers you might need to do this lookup several different times with each domain and add the final numbers together.

Last but not least - there is always doing a few searches. Personally I would search for: “Insert Company Name Here” sucks.

Now you might not get the best review this way because these are often people that are just mad at the web hosting question and want to spew something out about them. It is always good to take the good in with the bad though. Google aside - you may also want to search hosting forums like WebHostingTalk.com to also get an idea of what others have had to say about your web host.

Web hosts till tell you that they are always looking to build a better mouse trap when it comes to getting customers the answers that they are looking for. Love them or hate them, quick responses are a part of the web hosting business.

Bottom line? They allow support workers to get often asked questions answered as quickly as possible.

Let AutoHotkey Do the Heavy Typing for You!

Thinking outside the box though and trying to see what you really need when it comes to quickly publishing these answers - well, there just has to be a better way. Personally I set out to find something that would allow me to type in a few letters - hit enter, and automatically paste a four paragraphed answer to a question. I found my answer after spending some time playing with AutoHotkey.

AutoHotkey is a free mouse and keyboard macro program. The part your going to be interested in is the AutoText feature which allows you to write up a simple script, type in a few letters - hit enter and have your quick response typed out for you. It does have a learning curve to master but once you do get it down it is a powerful tool for anybody who finds themselves typing the same thing over and over again.

Your Own Virtual Notebook

Another tool I like to keep at my side at all times is my Google Notebook. While doing my own tech support work - it is handy to have some of the most asked questions there at my fingertips. Not much has to be said about this, because the concept here is so easy to understand.

Copy and save things you need to type out or access often inside of Google Notebook. While going through the e-mail or help desk at your hosting company, keep it open in another tab and you have yet another personal list of quick response tools.

So there you have two great ways to make your customer support work just a little easier on you.