Search engines sometimes have difficulty crawling your website or do not trust your website enough to crawl it deeply. In this case, only a sitemap created according to standards will ensure proper
crawling and hence optimization of your website. A sitemap simply is a file that contains all your links, their
importance to your website and their relation with one another. It gives search engines a bird’s eye view of your
website’s architecture and helps them get straight into the business site crawling rather than being caught up in
a resource-intensive link loop.

Also, when your sitemaps are regularly updated at a particular location where you have notified the major search
engines of, they will check the sitemaps periodically and index new links without crawling the already indexed old
links. This is good for your webserver, your bandwidth and the search engine bots. You see, those bots are just as
lazy as their creators and they would really love to get done with your website and move to the next one. . You
can even automatically ping the search engine bots after your sitemap has been created to notify them of updates.

Summarily, when you use sitemaps, your website gets crawled faster and the search engines will trust your content
before they get to index the same content your evil competitor stole from you so you can rank on top of search for
terms contained within that content.

Make sure you register with the webmaster sections of the major search engines and direct them to where your
sitemap(s) are located.

Learn more about sitemaps
Google Webmaster Tools
Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer

Nairaland is listed in web directories with good ranking. Every wannabe SEO guy already knows that on the web, content is king, and link juice is queen. The most important of these directories are DMOZ and Yahoo. To get listed on DMOZ, your website must have important content, must be a bit old and must have garnered a decent level of trust accross the web. To get listed on Yahoo, you pay $299 dollars a year (Haven’t you everwondered why the dude gets angry when you talk about revenue sharing? ). Both Yahoo and DMOZ have pageranks of 9. The effect of these two strong links is phenomenal in terms of search engine visibility and ranking.Most of the other directories are not as expensive as Yahoo, but you have to pay for the good ones. There are good free ones, but they usually few and theyhave stringent site submission guidelines so as to deter spammers and bots.

The good thing about directories is thatwhile the effects are not immediately visible, they pile up and you will definitely smile when you start getting unique visitors on your web property 6 months after being listed on a directory like DMOZ. Make sure you read thedirectories’ guidelines before submitting.

Nairaland’s link on DMOZ – http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Africa/Nigeria/Society_and_Culture/Chats_and_Forums/

Nairaland’s link on Yahoo - http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/Countries/Nigeria/Computers_and_Internet/

Rule number two of search engine optimizationsays that your keywords should be in your url. Using this trick allows nairaland to have a unique and cool name andstill rank well for the keyword “nigeria”. Anytime you make a seach for “oil jobs in Nigeria” and nairaland comes up, you will notice that the “nigeria” part of the url is emboldened since it is practically the only part of the url that matches the search term.

The other part of the good search engine ranking is played by the content, which is dealt with later. Right now, there is no way of knowing if the nairaland forum is installed in a ‘nigeria’ folderor if the forum resides in the root and is redirected to a ‘nigeria’ folder through mod_rewrite (virtual folder).Whichever way, this is a very impressive piece of SEO ingenuity. If your forum’s domain name already contains the keyword Nigeria e.g. nigeriangist.com, this is not necessary and might even be a better SEO factor although my personal conviction is that a ‘nigeria’ bordered by slashes carries a tad bit more weight. If your domain name does not contain the keyword ‘nigeria’, you may consider this technique although you have to use it logically so as not to confuse your site’s visitors since they are target of any search engine optmization tweaks.

To learn about creating virtual folders using mod_rewrite, use the following resources: http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite and http://www.littlevale.com/utilities/using-modrewrite-with-apache. Note: Considering the amount of extra load the mod_rewrite will put on your server, it is much more effective to install the forum or CMS in a folder with the ‘nigeria’ keyword or whatever keyword is important to you as the folder name.

Here we go:

1. After sign-up, login to your cpanel using the username and password that was sent in your activation email.
2. Scroll  down to the bottom of the control panel and click fantastico:
   
3. After the Fantastico page loads, scroll down and look at the left hand navigation bar. phpBB and SMF are listed under the discussion boards section:
   
4. Click on whichever one you want to install, and Click “New Installation” and fill in the fields that show up :
   
5. Click and you are done if no errors are encountered.

To get your own forum within three minutes, check out our plans.

From now till the 30th of September, you can get our Standard Hosting for free by using the coupon code FREE on our signup page.

There are only 20 coupons available, so grab this offer while stock lasts.

Order Now! »

Most web developers and content creators only think about developing their websites and often neglect what happens after development. This has led to an army of Nigerian websites which receive no traffic. It is no secret that Nairaland ranks amongst the top three most trafficked Nigerian websites and its supremacy in this regard is only challenged periodically by the newspaper websites. The high traffic of these newspaper websites comes from their offline popularity. 75% of the traffic that lands in Nairaland comes from the search engines.

Nairaland, created by Seun Osewa is one of the biggest forums in the world and ranks top ten in forums based on SMF in terms of membership size. What has been Nairaland’s biggest strength over time has been the implementation of  proper, careful and dutiful Search Engine Optimization tricks which has enabled it to garner more traffic than Nigerian online communities created during the same period. Nairaland most times, is on the first page when you search for anything pertaining to Nigeria. These SEO techniques have been broken down into seven sections.

1. Clean URLS

Although it is widely believed that Search Engines have gotten better at indexing the major forum scripts, they still hate duplicate content. Every forum which uses PHP session ID will always give the search engines a different session id thereby creating different URLS for a particular page and making the search engines believe that the same content is being duplicated across the sites. A screenshot of phpBB session ID is shown below:

The creators of board scripts have devised various means of getting around this problem. A very fine example is phpBB’s automatic creation of a member account for each search engine bot to prevent it from being treated as a guest and therefore being fed multiple session ids.

Nevertheless, the best way so far to curtail the problem of duplication and improve the search engine crawl rate of your website or forum is to use clean URLS such as on nairaland e.g nairaland/nigeria/board20.html, nairaland/nigeria/topic5784.html

This can be achieved by rewriting the forum’s url during output and making suitable redirections using the mod_rewrite functionality of apache server. In the case of a windows server, the isapi_rewrite module will be used. A drawback to using this technique is an increased load on the server during the rewrite and redirection of the urls but it is generally believed that the increase in search engine visibility is worth the wahala. For most forum scripts out there, there are search engine optimization packs whose major feature is URL rewrite. You can check out SMF SEO, PHPBB SEO or VBulletin SEO depending on the board script that you use.

Do you know that HostMot offers a one-click install for PHPBB and SMF forum systems? Click Here to know more.

If you have a custom website and you want to rewrite your urls without adequate knowledge of mod_rewrite, you should visit Mod Rewrite Forums. The owner is very friendly and is always eager to help.

Most content management systems such as wordpress and joomla come with the ability to switch to clean urls at the click of a button. If you have not activated it, you really should because they don’t come as the default as some servers don’t offer mod_rewrite. If your webhost does not offer mod_rewrite, then its a webhost for the 90s. Its time to switch hosts.

You can even take clean urls a step further than nairaland by injecting topic titles into the topic’s url to give something like: http://nairaland.com/nigeria/independence-day-celebrations-topic5784.html. This improves your search engine visibility and ranking.

Care must be taken however when applying this mods/plugins to a board which already has decent traffic as a wrong application can lead to the old URLs not being accesible anymore and the forum being treated as fresh by the search engines. This can be curtailed by proper 301 redirection from old urls to the new urls till the search engines identify the new urls as the genuine address for the already indexed pages. This feature should come with any decent search engine optimization packs.

Although, this method will improve your site’s indexing and search engine visibility, you should ask lots of questions in the respective software forums and carry out intensive tests on your local server before going live.

We will be happy to entertain your questions concerning clean urls. All you have to do is comment below.

A: Nobody. Even North Korea now has a Twitter Account.

You can follow us bumper to bumper on Facebook or Twitter. Other channels coming soon.

Why Should I follow You? I have better things to do!

Periodically, we announce special offerings, tips and tricks, giveaways and gifts on these channels.

Sometimes ago, we offered a whopping 50% discount coupon on Twitter.

If you were not following us, you probably missed the free hosting dashed out to five of our Facebook Fans.

I want In!

Fine. Welcome to the elite club. Click the appropriate links below:

Like Hostmot on Facebook • Follow HostMot on Twitter

The reasons for the introduction of our Linux Shared plans are outlined below:

1. Standard Plan Coming in at N8,000 a year, our Standard plan is basically an unlimited plan that removes any constraints on the web-hosting that you see anywhere. It sports unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases, unlimited subdomains, unlimited fanatical HostMot Support alongside other unlimited features. Just think about any web-hosting feature alive today, if it is measured in terms of numbers, then it is unlimited in the HostMot Standard package. The only thing that is limited and absolutely cheap is the price tag of N8,000 per annum.

2. Explorer Plan During the planning phase, we wanted to strip out this plan. We then pondered upon what would happen to our Christopher-Columbus-like clients if we did not have a plan to accomodate them. Simply put, this plan was introduced for people who want to test out our services before jumping into the Standard or Infinity Plan ships. Its comes colourfully painted with 100MB disk space, 1GB of monthly bandwidth, 5 Databases, 5 Subdomains amongst other limited features.

3. Infinity Plan This plan was introduced for a special niche: the webworkers i.e. Web Designers, Web Developers, and Internet Entrepreneurs. We understand these people because that is exactly what the team at HostMot is. We are web workers too. So, this plan was tailored specifically to meet a certain need: the fact that webworkers always have numerous websites belonging to them or their clients. Therefore, this plan entails all the juicy features from the Standard Plan along with the special magical much-sought-after ability to create multiple web-hosting accounts associated with your single account.

There you  have it. Click here to browse the specific features of these plans and view our comparison table. Be sure to read our terms and conditions when signing up for any of these plans.

Our much-awaited affiliate system over at HostMot has finally been launched. At a certain point, it was decided that launching a trustworthy affliate system would lead to reduced marketing costs and it will also ensure increased commitment with our exisiting clients. A breakdown on how much you will be earning per referral is provided further below.

The Pay

The earnings per referral for our Linux Shared plans is 50%. As other packages (e.g. Developer Hosting, Semi Dedicated Hosting, Reseller Hosting) are introduced before the end of this year, the commisions on these products will be published along with products launches.

As it stands, 50% commission on each of our Linux Shared Plans boils down into:

1. Make a referral for Explorer Plan (N2,500) – Earn N1,250

2. Make a referral for Standard Plan (N7,500) – Earn N3,750

3. Make a referral for Infinity Plan (N50,000) – Earn N25,000

Why The Huge Payouts?

Despite the fact that we offer quality services, we still spend huge sums of money on marketing in order to bring new clients over to HostMot. Over time, we figured it would be better if people referred customers to us and we pay them the money we would have spent on traditional marketing.

This kind of system paves way for a win-win-win scenario:

- We get a new customer. We are happy.

- The new customer you have referred to us experiences web hosting coated with honey. They are delighted.

- You earn a substantial amount of money referring them to us. You achieve true financial security.

Should I Signup Now?

Depending on the succcess of the program, we might at some time in the future decide to suspend the sign-up of new affiliates. If you would be comfortable reading news about people who have made tonnes money via HostMot some months down the line, you can come back at a later date (when you might probably not be able to sign-up again).   Otherwise, you can sign up now!

This is part of the fulfillment of our promise to serve you better.

We will appreciate any review and  feedback that you pass along to us concerning the new design.

Thank you for choosing HostMot.