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If you’re looking to integrate a credit card payment solution onto your website, the following steps are a guide to applying for, enabling and taking payments online. At first glance, the prospect of integrating a payment solution on a website can seem unwieldy, what with the vast array of payment options and technical acronyms. This article breaks down the entire process into bite-sized pieces, helping you understand the process much better.

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Moving my website or backing up my entire website is something I do often. If you've never attempted to move or backup your site before you might want to find out if your web host supports SSH / Telnet.

Without it, moving (or restoring from a backup file of) your entire website including webpages, scripts and mysql databases is going to be a nightmare! Also, I am assuming that you're on a *nix / Apache server.

Just to give you an idea, it usually takes me just about 15 minutes to move my website.

SSH Secure Shell login

Login at your old webserver. Once you're in, type

cd public_html

or it could be -

cd htdocs

depending on the structure of your webserver.

Hit Enter and you should be in your WWW root where your web pages reside.

If you want to be certain that you're in the right folder, just type

ls

hit Enter, and you should be able to see all your web pages and folders listed. Once you're certain you're in the right directory / folder, you can proceed to create the backup file of website or tarball (compressed file) of your entire* website.

Create a tarball

Now, you will want to type in a command that will collect all these files and folders, and compress them into one little file - a tarball.

Type

tar -cpzf filename.tar.gz *

hit Enter. Using your domain name as a filename is a good idea, I think. So what I usually do is something like this:

tar -cpzf desilvabiz.tar.gz *

but, the filename you set for yourself COULD be anything!

Within seconds, it should be done and now you can either download this file through your regular browser by just pointing to it; i.e. http://www.desilva.biz/desilvabiz.tar.gz or 'get' it using a regular FTP program from your webserver just like you would any web page, image file or script off your webserver previously.

Since I am trying to move my website, I have no need for this file on my HDD, so I will usually skip downloading it altogether.

As soon as I have finished creating my backup and compressed it into a tarball on my old server, it is time to log into the new server.

SSH Login at your NEW webserver

Chances are, you don't have a domain name to go to, right? So to get to your new webserver you should use the IP address that came with the account details of your new webhost. e.g.:

putty -ssh 64.191.5.105

As you can see, I use PuTTY to handle all my SSH work, you could use anything really but PuTTY is FREE. Login with your username and password and get to your WWW root or
path: /home/username/public_html
folder as described in the previous page.

Wget

Don't worry if you don't know what 'wget' is - as soon as you try it out once, you will quickly figure it out - and it might even give you some other ideas for it's uses.

If your host does not have this feature (wget) installed - look for another host! That's all I can say...

Remember, you have to be at
path: /home/username/public_html
before you do any of the following!

Now, type

wget http://www.old_host.com/~username/desilvabiz.tar.gz

and hit Enter ... and unleash the magic! Yeah, it's magic if you have dialup to work with (like me) and your website is reasonably large!

What did you just do? Well, you just moved your tarball off your old web host, directly to your new web host, without having to download anything onto your PC! You also did that at speeds that you probably could not match through your 56k modem!

Extracting the tarball

Once the file has completed it's transfer to your new web server, it's time to extract the tarball (uncompress the file). Just like compressing, uncompressing is also done in one line!

Type

tar -xzf desilvabiz.tar.gz

and hit Enter. Take a bow... Your website is moved!

Do NOT forget to remove desilvabiz.tar.gz on your old web server when you are certain everything is working with your new site.

Did you know that you can customize this web-page? This will keep you from losing viewers when you delete a page or mess up a link ... funneling those "lost souls" back into your site. This is especially important for search engines ... you don't want to lose all that SE traffic when you move a page!

Directions

1. Open a text editor (Windows notepad will do), and copy the following onto the first line:
   
   ErrorDocument 404 /error-page.html
   
   Now, save the file onto your hard-drive as a text file (.txt) and name it ".htaccess.txt". Yes, I know that is a weird file name, but that first period is necessary. We'll rename the file after we upload it.
   
   
2. FTP to your web-site's root directory (where your homepage is located) with a program like WS-FTP. Copy the above file into the main directory of your site.
   note: Be sure to upload in "ascii" and not "binary" format.
   
   
3. Rename ".htaccess.txt" to plain old ".htaccess"
   
   
4. Finally, create a custom web-page with your html editor, name it "error-page.html", and upload it into your root directory.

That should do it! Want to see mine in action? Just click on this link below. You should be redirected to my own error-page (my homepage):

Small business owners we talk to love to embrace the do-it-yourself attitude, so we thought it would be a good post to present the basics for do-it-yourself online marketing for local businesses.  We often here: “Why should I pay someone if I can do it myself?”  Of course, that’s usually if we had all the time in the world.  Unfortunately, Local SEO can become time consuming very quickly, especially due to the complexity of the fragmented local search market.  However, it is possible for owners to work on a little bit each month to improve their rankings on Google Maps for Local SEO, or improve their Yelp profile (Online Reputation Management) to reach new traffic, or add fresh content or a blog to their website (Search Engine Optimization) in order to improve their Google Search Rankings.  Part of the do-it-yourself marketing strategy is to prioritize your efforts based on what you’re trying to achieve and the amount of work that goes into each effort.  Many of our customers seem to ask a lot of the same questions, so we wanted to put together this list and prioritize it for those that are just getting started.

Local SEO in the context of this article is the activity of updating your company’s business listings  and content (on both local search sites and your website) in order to improve your rankings on sites like Google Maps, Yelp, and other local sites and search engines.  After you have mastered, Local SEO, then you can start tackling Social Media Optimization (SMO), but that’s for another time.  Here we go, hope you’ve had your coffee today!

1.  CLAIM YOUR LISTING.   Everything starts with this.  Claiming your listing can have an immediate impact on improving your rankings on Google Maps and others.  Also, you need to have control of your listings for effective online reputation management.  In addition, you don’t want anyone (especially a competitor) to hijack your listings.  Be sure to perform a vanity search on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps, Yelp, Citysearch and Yellowpages.com.  Add listings where you’re not listed and claim all the listings you found.  You will need to go through a simple verification process.

2.  DETERMINE YOUR RANKINGS:  Where do you rank when you search for your primary category and local city?  Are you in the first couple pages?   Start by getting a good understanding of where you rank today in order to set some goals and track your performance.   If you have a website, check your web search rankings for your category/keywords.  If you don’t have a site, get one!  Even if you don’t really need a site to drive business, it will help with validating your business and listings for local search optimization (Local SEO). You can get a very basic site up and running pretty cheap these days.

3.  UPDATE/ADD CONTENT:  Update your listings.  Be sure your information is accurate and consistent.  Consistency of your business details is important throughout the web.  Avoid using call tracking numbers if possible.  Add photos and videos.  Create/add a video on YouTube and link to it on your Google Place Page.  This content can help improve your rankings, but will also differentiate you from others and provide with control over your online reputation.  This content improves how a potential customer sees you, hopefully motivating them to take the next step (call or stop by).  Be sure to update your categories as well.  Complete as much info as you feel comfortable and maintain accuracy (Hours, Payment Types, Menus, Email). This will help you with both improving rankings as well as online reputation management.

4.  ACHIEVE BUSINESS LISTING NIRVANA.  Consistency is vital across the web when it comes to business details.  However, there are so many sites with your listings today, it can become overwhelming. If you’ve ever moved or changed your business name, then you’re old data could still be moving around the web.  However, you can start at the source.  Most business listings come from 3 primary listing databases.  This is a great way to add your listings and clean up old data.  Consistency will help search engines aggregate all references to your business (establishing “trust” for your location and listing, which can help improve your rankings for your local business).  If a site has conflicting information it can’t be tagged to your business properly as a citation, losing the value of that reference from an SEO perspective.  Only with true consistency everywhere can you achieve business listing nirvana! Add/update listings on these top 2 databases.  Axciom is the third, but they don’t allow self-provisioning.

5.  UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE’S CONTACT PAGE:  Be sure that search engines can find your location data.  At a minimum, your contact information should be in clear HTML (not an image or flash).  To really comply and ensure that search engines can find you accurately, provide your contact information in an hCard or add a KML to the site.  You can create a KML file (like a sitemap) to Google directly via the Google Webmaster Tools.  For those of you that now have a blank stare on your face-ask your webmaster, local seo consultant, or your nephew to look into it.  Here are some easy to follow blogs explaining each along with links to the tools.

6.  UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE PAGE TITLE TAGS.  On your home page and throughout your site, be sure to include targeted keywords (your categories and services) in the title tags along with your most targeted geolocation keywords (cities, neighborhoods, etc).  This is very important if you are trying to improve your rankings and for General Web Search Results and optimize for your website.  You may also want to have your internal site links/URLs updated to have some of these keywords integrated there as well.  This will let search engines better understand what you do and what locations you serve, resulting in a greater relevance for these keywords.  This greater relevance will results in higher rankings for the keywords you are targeting.  Once these steps are completed and picked up by the search engines, go back and check your rankings again.   For your contact page, be sure to have your business name in your title tag and listed on your page near your business details.  This will provide greater validation and authority that you are the owner of these business details.

If you have multiple locations, consider creating a separate page, URL and title tag for each location. (For example: www.tamaleheaven.com/contact/sanfranciscomexican) That way when a user searches for your services in that city, you’ll be highly optimized for that specific location.

7.  GET CITATIONS/INBOUND LINKS.  It’s time for you to tune your PR skills.  If you’ve made it this far, then it’s likely you really are really intent on SEO.  Citations are references to your business including your address or phone number and they can have a big impact on improving rankings on Google Maps.  Inbound links are other sites that link to your site and this can tell search engines how important/respected your site is by others.  This, in turn, can impact your rankings on general web search results.  At this point, you have likely received inbound links by accident. Hopefully you’ve had some articles written about you or joined your local BBB.  But for SEO, you need to kick in the PR machine.  Effective SEO strategy today is often more about what is going on “offsite”.  This means that search engines use content found throughout the web about your site/business to help validate it and increase the value of your site/service.  For web search, this is called Page Rank.  The other important thing to understand is that different sites that point to yours have different values.  So if you have a New York Times review linking to your site or business listing, this is much more valuable than Mary’s Family Blog who just loves your Butter Cream Pie.  The Times article is exponentially more valuable.  But quantity is important too, so don’t spend all your time hounding the New York Times food editors.  There are much easier ways to get started.  For building inbound links and citations, take any of your competitor’s sites and see where they have links and ask for coverage. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is free and one of the most comprehensive.  A well known paid tool is available from SEOMOZ called Linkscape.

8.  GET REVIEWS.   If you don’t have any reviews, get some.  If you already have some, get some more!  Drive a review campaign either quarterly or monthly.  If you have a customer database, send out an email.  Or print some business cards with reminders on them for people to review when they get home.  Put it on the back of your appointment reminder cards.   Make it easy.  You can try to offer an incentive, but this can be a delicate line, so be careful with this approach.  I suggest you just give great customer service and just ask nicely!     Be sure to have your reviews posted spread across various sites, including Yelp, Google, Bing, Citysearch, etc.  Not only do reviews do have an effect on local search rankings, but more importantly, they create a positive online reputation for prospective customers looking for your services.  Be sure to address any negative reviews immediately by reaching out to customer and try to turn that negative into a positive.  If they have an iPhone or smartphone, get them to do it before they leave!

9.  SCOUT THE COMPETITION:

Once you’ve done some of the basic blocking and tackling mentioned above, you can start to scope out the competition in order to get some clues on what’s working for them.  For mapping sites, review what competitors are in the top 7 on Google Maps.   Things to look at include:

• # of citations (Quantity and Quality, such as BBB)
• Review quantity and quality (Overall Rating)
• Content (Photos, Videos, Hours of Operation, Email, Categories)
• User Content (# of times an end user has tagged the listing)

For general web search, you’ll want to look at some of the following.  Keep in mind; this is just a place to start.  There is a lot more analysis that can be done once you’ve mastered this.

• Page Titles (Do they include keywords for services and localities.
• Page Description (Do they have a brief, but effective description of the site so searches are inclined to click when they see it in the search results page)
• URLs (Do they have keywords included in any urls)
• Keyword Density (Are they repeating keywords evenly throughout the copy)
• Fresh Content (Do they have a blog and/or regularly post new articles)

You can also take your competitors websites and check them out at www.keywordspy.com to get a list of keywords and see if they are running any pay-per-click marketing.  In addition, you can try www.websitegrader.com, which can give you a sense of what they’ve done for SEO optimization.

10.  TRACKING AND ANALYTICS

One of the most important aspects to any effecting marketing plan is to measure results along the way.  We are big believer in the value of analytics to measure performance and learn what is most effective for your business.  That is why we built chatmeter, so please sign up today if you have not already.   The chatmeter will report your monthly rankings on both local and web search sites, measure customer feedback across multiple review sites, and indicate the amount of chatter you’re getting from blogs and social media sites.  In addition, be sure to check your Local Business Center for reports on your Google listings.  A great tool for your website is Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to use, and very comprehensive.  If you are driving traffic to your site at all, then you must have a measurement tool in place.  These tools can be great ways to measure the effectiveness of your do-it-yourself marketing strategy.