One of the pillars of a successful business is having a good computerized network. Maintaining it, however, also means hiring qualified IT people to monitor the system round-the-clock. Amid a global economic crisis, spending a fortune on expensive manpower is not really the smartest option.

Straightline Technology Group offers a solution to businesses through Managed IT Services. Imagine your whole network being monitored by a server that records and analyzes all of its activities with great accuracy and reliability. There is no need for you to “call IT” each time something goes wrong because this system enables us to detect and repair minor problems remotely, thus, allowing an environment where your network can always perform at it’s best.

Tasks such as 24×7 secure monitoring, backup management, spyware management, asset management, firewall and anti-virus management, many others, will be handled by the system for you. Added services like monthly reporting, onsite review, remote assistance and phone support makes it a very cost-effective package.

With pretty much everything in the IT aspect of your business covered at an affordable price, you could either take a day off or focus on the areas of your business that need more attention.

A previous blog post already gave you an overview of what Google Pagerank is. Now that you already know the basics, the next step is to determine you website’s Google Pagerank. There are a lot of sites that you can choose from to do this.

One of the sites I like is http://www.prchecker.info/. It’s very easy to use and it doesn’t have any ads that pop up in front of your face. The website is very straightforward and best of all, it’s free.

One of the many things that I like about it is that you can choose from three different icons that you can place in your own site for everyone to see. They are already in HTML format so all you have to do is copy and paste. I like simple and uncomplicated badges so they work fine with me.

These icons will be a symbol of your status in the internet food chain and a reminder of how far you have gone. After all, going a notch higher is not that easy. It takes a lot of hard work, patience and consistency to reach a perfect 10/10, an industry standard. Some people call it a “badge”. I call it achievement.

The good news is, Straightline Technology Group offers a wide variety of services that include Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing.

We understand how a high google pagerank is to every website. We can help you increase it in no time. Our advice to our clients is to sit back, relax, while we do the hard work. Contact us.

This is a list of other websites you might want to check out.

Blog Flux
Google Rankings
Li’l Engine Pagerank Checker

You already know that a group numbers in the following format are called IP addresses right? How do they work? Why are they important?

120.28.240.3
192.168.1.1
216.27.61.137

When you come to think about it, they are more than just numbers. They play a very vital role in the exchange of information between computers.

An IP address is also called an Internet Protocol address, a unique identifying number for your computer in a network of computers. Think of it as a home address in a very crowded street.

When you are using the internet or simply using a computer in your office network, you are sending and receiving big and small amounts of data. It works pretty much like sending and receiving packages via FedEx. Without a specific address, it will be very hard for the FedEx guy to deliver a package and knock on every door while he’s at it. We don’t really want that kind of hassle because time is always of the essence. Same goes for a network with a lot of computers.

There are two popular ways to get an IP address. There’s the static IP which you can forcibly assign to your computer. The other one is called DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), wherein the network will automatically assign you an IP address. The latter often proves to be more convenient since no two computers can have the same IP address in one network.

You can check your computer’s IP address using http://whatismyip.com/.

techstl.com is a website for technology people in St. Louis, MO.  It allows technology workers in St. Louis to communicate with each other, find out about technology events and promote their businesses.

They also have a section on their website that has computer stores in St Louis MO.  It is an ever growing list and is probably the most complete list of computer stores in St. Louis.  They also have a map of computer stores in St Louis so you can just open a map and see where the closest computer store is to you at a glance.  If you are a small business looking to purchase computers or computers parts, then contact us and we can help you out.

If you own a computer store or know someone that does and it isn’t listed then please contact techstl and they will add it.

Computer Stores St Louis MO

If you read our blog entry yesterday, we talked about using dashes over underscores when you name a web page.  So what do you do if you already named your pages incorrectly and you want to fix them?  You 301 redirect them.  You want to do this for many reasons.  First of all, doing this will automatically send all traffic to your new page.  Second and most important, this tells search engines that the web page has moved.  Doing this will transfer all of your PageRank to the new page and eventually the search engines will remove the old pages from their index.  It does take some time so you have to be patient.

Now there are many ways to do a 301 redirect.  It depends on what type of server you’re on and what type of files you’re dealing with.

PHP Redirect

This is how it is done with PHP pages.  You would basically take the content off your old, underscore pages and then put it on your new dashed pages.  Once you do that, add this code to the old page and you are good to go:

<?php
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(”Location: /new-web-page.php”);
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”/new-web-page.php”
%>

.htaccess

A .htaccess file is a special file that you can use on a Linux server. You can add this code to the .htaccess file.  If your site is just html pages, this is the best way to go.

Redirect 301 /old_web_page.html http://www.yourdomain.com/new-web-page.html

There are many other ways to do this with other languages, but these are the most common.  If you believe that your web pages are incorrect and you want to fix them, contact us and we can work with you to get them fixed.

For SEO you should use dashes instead of underscores in web site URLs.  There has been a lot of debate over this and Google has said it will start seeing underscores as spaces, but it’s just better and safer to go with dashes.  The results for underscores and dashes are always different and we know for sure they see dashes as spaces.

The best time dashes would be used is in file names.  Take our Chief Technology Officer services page, the page name is chief-technology-officer.  This is to let Google know that it is 3 words, not 1.  If our page name was chief_technology_officer then Google would consider that 1 word, potentially.

But what about your domain name?  The domain name can also benefit from this, but there is a time and a place for it.  I would not use dashes in your domain name unless you had to.  If your domain name is only used to be found in search results, then I would say it would be alright.  However if this is your main domain of your business I would not use dashes unless nothing else was available.

One of the services we offer for our web design or web development customers is Google Analytics statistics.  Google has a great web statistics program that you can view to get all the information you could ever want about your website and even more.

Here is some of the information you can get using Google Analytics

• Visits during any time period
• Web browser information
• Search engine information
• User operating systems
• User screen resolution size

If you sell products online you can track your sales, conversions and leads.  If you would like more information on getting Google Analytics statistics on your website please contact us.

Screen Resolutions

Search Engine Source

Operating Systems

Screen Resolutions

Users browsers

SEOmoz has a video up discussing PageRank, what it is and how it works.  PageRank is the number that Google assigns the pages on your web site.  Since Google doesn’t release definite information about PageRank and how it works, there are a lot of theories.  We know a majority of your PageRank scores comes from backlinks (links to your web pages).  There are tons of other factors that calculate your pagerank and hopefully this video will clear at least some things up.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-What’s PageRank Got to do With It? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Bschool.com has released an article titled “50 web tools to keep tabs on your competitors.”  There is actually a lot of good information in there.  One of them is Google Alerts.  We previously discussed Google Alerts for monitoring your own company.  Well you can use Google Alerts to monitor any keywords, including ones that might include your competitors name or the type of business you are in.

Check out the whole list here

After installing update MS08-037 on Small Business Server 2003 some people are noticing random problems with services.  MS08-037 is an update to help prevent DNS spoofing.  One of the problems I ran across after this update is:

IP-based AUTD failed to initialize.  Error code: [0x80004005].

and

IP-based AUTD failed to initialize because the processing of notifications could not be setup.  Error code [0x80004005].  Verify that no other applications are currently bound to UDP port [2883], or try specifying a different port number.

These errors were in the event viewer and the Source of them was Server ActiveSync.

The way to fix this is to add these ports to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\ReservedPorts registry key:

• 1645-1646 - Used by IAS
• 1701-1701 - Used by L2TP
• 1812-1813 - Used by IAS
• 2883-2883 - Used by AUTD
• 4500-4500 - Used by IPSEC

Don’t delete anything in this key, you can just add the new ports below the current ones so that it looks like this:

After you add the ports, reboot the server and you’re good to go.

Please note that this fix should be a preventative measure.  Even though the update was released in July 2008 and you haven’t had any issues yet, that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.  It could take months or years but it could still pop up down the road.

You can find more information about this at technet:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956189
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956188