Although it was feared that there would be a major upheaval of the policies to make them more open to foreign investment, the recommendations seem to support keeping the majority of the existing rules in place but to simply clarify a number of areas.

Below is a summary of their recommendations:

1. It will remain that only Australians can register AU domains, however clarification will be provided on the org.au and asn.au criteria requirements ensuring that there is no confusion on their use
2. auDA will release details of it’s audits to illustrate to the industry how it performs it’s audits
3. The panel recommends that the licence term should be flexible – instead of only 2 years, registrants will be able to select 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 year
4. No changes will be made to explicity discuss leasing of domains, however it will be clarified. Essentially the registrant will remain responsible for the domain in auDA’s eyes
5. The panel suggests releasing single letter domains for registration
6. The id.au space will be relaxed to allow domain names referring to personal hobbies and interests, as opposed to only allowed if referring to the person’s name
7. Direct registrations under AU not to be permitted at this time
8. The reserved name list and mispelling policies will be retained
9. The “Domain Monetisation Policy” will be abolished, instead the existing close and substantial rule will cover domain monetisation

The AU domain policies can be seen as overly strict compared to a .com however this can be a good thing for webmasters and owners of sites within the AU space. Within Australia the general public know and trust that a AU domain means it’s Australian, therefore providing that extra level of trust in dealing with the site.

Domainers investing in AU domains would have probably liked to see the rules relaxed and therefore providing them with a bigger market to trade their domains. However based on this review, auDA doesn’t appear to be allowing the AU domain space to go in that direction.

There is a fear in the Australian webmaster community that auDA will take your domain from you. The findings of the panel appear to of recognised this fear and it’s good to see that they will be clarifying some of these policies, especially the “Domain Monetisation Policy”.

The current “Domain Monetisation Policy” reads as though it only supports the use a domain parking style pages where you use Google Adsense style sdvertising to generate money from it, and not any other content. auDA most certainly needs to clarify this to reassure Australian webmasters that they are developing sites within the auDA policies.

The public have the opportunity to comment on the recommendations until Friday, 10 June 2011. You can comment either in writing or via an online survey.

For more information and to respond, visit http://www.auda.org.au/2010npp/2010npp-index/.

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Personally I have a nightly script that backs up my databases and other data files and compresses them in to a single file – creating a new file each day. Periodically I would logon and download the backup file to ensure I also have a backup locally and clear away old backups.

With my sites growing, space was becoming an issue so I recently decided to look in to enhancing my backup routine by backing up to another server.

As my server is hosted in Sydney and due to the size of data it would be copying each night I wanted to find another Sydney based server for back ups.

I found that a lot of hosting companies don’t permit this type of use on their hosting accounts. I did however find a solution thanks to Sydney based Web City, and it’s free.

Their online storage product is specifically for backing up your data online, and at the moment they offer 10GB of online storage free of charge, or 100GB of online storage for $89/year. You can connect using FTP, SFTP, Samba(SMB)/Windows Share or SCP.

So far it’s working well for me.

There are a couple of restrictions, mainly:

• it must not be used for file sharing – it’s for storage and backup purposes only
• only allowed to use 2 different IP addresses per day
• can only have one FTP connection at the same time

If you are using rsync, the Free Account doesn’t support it however the Pro Account ($89/yr) does.

Note: this is not a paid advertisement, nor am I associated with Web City.

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First there were 2 six figure domain sales – in January poker.com.au sold for US$100,000 to international sport gambling company 888.com, and in the last couple of days its been revealed that Zoupon has paid over $100,000 for deals.com.au.

electricity.com.au and fridges.com.au have also sold this year for $30,000 and $20,000 respecitively.

You can find a list of 2011 AU domain sales at dnTrade.com.au’s Domain Sales List 2011.

Flippa is also showing a number of AU site sales in the past month, including www.apartmentreviews.com.au selling for US$8,700 and ardrone.com.au selling for US$4,995. A collection of 18 travel sites including sea-world.com.au and luna-park.com.au also sold for US$2,900.

In the same period a number of auctions also failed to close including www.everythingpet.com.au (seeking $10,000), cateringclassifieds.com.au (seeking $8,000) and jotter.com.au (seeking $2,500) all attracting no bids. www.drivingschooldirectory.com.au was also offered however only reached $4,750 which was under the reserve.

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A very popular way of marketing your business online is “forum marketing”.

If you don’t know, a forum is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Generally forum messages are available to anyone on the internet to view.

The right way and the wrong way

With forum marketing there are essentially two methods – one is to become activately involved in a forum, the second is to “litter” the forum with links to your site. Unfortunately many people tend to favour the later and do their business more harm than good.

Be an expert

An extremely powerful marketing method offline is to become considered an expert. For example having your opinions quoted in a newspaper can bring a lot of potentional business to your site, builds credibility and therefore can improve your ability to promote and sell items. Forums can do the same online.

Forums are a great way of exposing your business to people within your market. If you are able to gain the respect of the forum users then it could lead to an opportunity to do business with them should the need arise.

Forums will often have people asking for help or information. This gives you an opportunity to show that you “know your stuff” by responding to these requests. Not only will the person you’re helping be impressed by your assistance, other people reading the information will also appreciate your knowledge.

Don’t be rude!

There is however a line between contributing to a forum and advertising on a forum. Forums are intended to be communities where people help one another – blatent advertising is generally frowned upon and could actually do your business more harm than good.

Going around to forums and just throwing your link around without contributing reflects badly on you. The posts are like you running around your local neighbourhood graffiti’ing your business name on people’s front fence – it’s not a good look. Unfortunately search engines don’t really care about the quality of what you write so people are still “rewarded” for these links – assumming they aren’t removed by the forum owners/administrators.

Which forum is right for you?

To find a suitable forum to contribute to, perform a search using your favourite search engine for your market plus the word “forum”, eg. “woodworking forum”. We’ve also listed some Australian IT, Webmaster & Business Forums previously.

Before joining a forum, make sure you read the forum rules and also take the time to look through the posts to get a feel for the community. Some forums can be “hostile” and may not be the right fit to associate your business with.

Getting Started

Before posting, configure your “signature” to include details of your business and/or web site. Even if a forum doesn’t provide the ability to have a link to your site, still configure a signature. Often later down the track you will have the ability to include a link and the change will generally be applied to your old posts too!

Benefits of supporting a forum

Forums will also often provide advertising opportunities. For a contribution of a prize some they may even host a competition for you to more actively promote your business to their members.

So to recap…

• the right forum will give you access to your target market
• by actively contributing and genuinely trying to assist members you will gain credibility and show your expertise
• your credibility will help you in selling your own product & services (on your own site, not on the forum!)
• as a bonus, forums can help with the search engine rankings (i.e. from signature links)

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The changes standardised the exact date and time that an expired domain name becomes available to register again. Each day auDA publishes an Official Domain Drop List listing all the domains that will be dropping at the next scheduled drop time.

Around the same time a number of services were created which will catch dropping domain names for you. They essentially work by attempting to repeatedly register the domain name for the period around the known drop time (which is 1PM AEST) – depending on the timing they should snatch it very close to it becoming available.

The changes and these services have effectively made it impossible for you to manually capture a desirable dropping domain name without using these services.

These services pre-offer all expiring domain names and when there are multiple interested parties, the domain is auctioned off. Highly desirable domain names are selling for thousands of dollars.

Two examples of these dropping services are Drop.com.au and Netfleet.

Based on the published results, Drop.com.au claim a 98% success rate and the NetFleet results show very cheap winning bids (<$100), this tends to indicate Drop.com.au is the more successful service.

Both charge a membership fee just to be able to bid (drop.com.au is $250 one time, NetFleet is $109.95/yr). If your bid is unsuccessful then you don’t pay anything however the membership fee is still not refundable. Your bid amount also doesn’t include the registration fee (which is $44.95 – $49.95/2 years for a .com.au) and in the case of drop.com.au it doesn’t include the 10% GST either.

I believe these arrangements favour domain investors rather than your average person trying to catch that forgotten domain name however it would depend on your budget.

If you want to catch dropping AU domains, whether you like it or a not, a dropping service would appear now to be essential.

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Some people (including myself) actually select their domain name before deciding on their business name. If you are going to be promoting your business name, it makes complete sense that your web site also gets the benefit of that.

Here are some hints and tips for when coming up with a domain name:

1. keep it short - sure domain names can be long but remember that people will need to type it in to their browser or email program, the shorter your domain name the better.
2. think twice about hyphens as they add confusion for people, and if left out they could go to a competitor
3. avoid needing to explain your domain name – for example, “the number one” versus “one spelt out”
4. check for bad combinations – there are many unfortunate domain names which aren’t initially obvious, for example Pen Island and Experts Exchange when joined together produce unwanted domain names.
5. keyword rich – search engines consider the domain name very important indicator of the site’s content. Having your main keyword within your domain name will provide massive benefits to your SEO efforts.
6. the extension can also reflect a lot on your business – in Australia for example a .com.au is known for Australian businesses, having a .net.au or a .info instead could confuse people.

The above aren’t strict rules  but make sure you consider them all. In certain circumstances they may not be applicable to you, for example maybe you want to target search engine traffic so length and hyphens are irrelevant.

If you need help finding that perfect domain name, don’t forget our artcile on domain name suggestion tools.

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Google is a piece of software that does two things: 1) works out what your site is about, and 2) works out how credible your site is.

Yep, that’s my SEO secret! When it comes to SEO everything you do should be about making it obvious to GoogleBot what your site (or page) is about and building credibility in your site. Nothing else matters.

Google’s (and other search engines) main purpose is to return relevant and reputable search results. They do whatever it takes to do this. If people do a search on Google and get rubbish then they would use another search engine. The success of Google is because their results are generally spot-on.

Personally I know that if I search on the right thing in Google then I will typically get what I am looking for in the first page – if I was having to wade through 100s of results to find what I am looking for then I wouldn’t be using Google. While ever Google is giving me relevant results I’m not even going to look at Yahoo or Bing. Google knows this and they know that if I’m not using Google then I’m not clicking on their ads and if I’m not clicking on their ads they don’t make money.

So remember, Google isn’t a person who can get a feeling for your site – it looks for specific things and then using a formula works out how to rank your site. Sure this formula can be tricked however chances are that the team at Google will tweak the rules to negate the “trick” once it becomes abused.

So make sure that your SEO efforts are sound – don’t spend time in implementing some SEO trick that may become a complete waste of your time in the future.

For more SEO advice make sure you subscribe to our feed.

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Firstly, PageRank is actually named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google Inc. So the “page” part of PageRank doesn’t refer to a web page but its creator. I think this is where most people get confused – PageRank is not actually an indication of a pages ranking, it is just a small part of it.

PageRank is essentially a score assigned to a web page based on the links to it. It is used by Google as one of more than 200 considerations when ranking search results.

The idea behind PageRank is that a link to a page is a vote for the page’s credibility. The more links a page has the more credible the page is likely to be. It doesn’t stop there – if a highly credible page links to a page then its natural that it’s vote should be worth more than a less credible page.

The PageRank calculation doesn’t take in to consideration any other factors other than a page’s links – it doesn’t look at your code, your title tag, or anything else. It’s based solely on links. Your code, your title tag, your page’s name and so forth are some of the other 200+ considerations used by Google when ranking the results.

It’s because of all those other factors that PageRank shouldn’t be your sole focus and is the reason why Google have now removed it from the Google Webmaster tools and continues to recommend webmasters don’t fixate on it.

It’s completely normal for a page from a PR0 site to appear higher in a search result then a much high PR site because of those other factors. Thank goodness!

Google’s argument is that you should concentrate on your site’s content and attract links because people like your content – which makes sense.

The issue I feel is that because Google is so secretive about its algorithms, people fixate on PageRank because it is one of the rare ways you get an indication of what Google thinks of your site.

It is important to have a PageRank however remember that it’s only 1 of 200+ considerations and spend your efforts accordingly.

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Having a favicon is a great way gaining a little bit more attention and build your branding. Some people even suggest that having a favicon can help your search engine rankings as they believe it’s one of the indicators use by Google and other providers to determime the trustworthiness of your site.

The favicon will appear on the toolbar of your visitor’s browser, and if they bookmark your site it will also appear next to your listing in their bookmarks list.

There are two ways of implementing a favicon.

The first way was the original method, implemented by Microsoft with Internet Explorer 4. It simply involves creating a ICO graphic file and placing it in the main folder of your web site.

The second way is creating an image (in ICO, PNG, GIF or JPEG format), upload it to your site and then add the following HTML code to your pages (between the <HEAD> tags), for a PNG image:
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/png” href=”http://example.com/image.png”>
or for a GIF image:
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/gif” href=”http://example.com/image.gif”>

The second method is considered more correct (and better supported by browsers) however the simplicity of the first option can be very appealing.

With the first option it’s still recommended that you also place this line in the <HEAD> section of your HTML pages (at least your main index page):
<link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

There are a number of free favicon creators online (eg. http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/) as well as downloadable programs (eg. http://icofx.ro/). Other popular graphic applications such as Photoshop and Paint.NET also support ICO files – some will need add-ins (eg. Paint.NET requires http://www.evanolds.com/pdnicocur.html).

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1. features,
2. reliability, and
3. support

I don’t feel that either one of these factors is more important than the other, they are each critical to the success of your web site.

Features

This is an obvious one, the host must be able to provide the features you require.

In todays market though most hosting companies ultimately provide the same features with perhaps a few minor differences.

The only real major consideration is whether you require Windows hosting or Unix hosting – this is generally dependent on whether you are running any scripts with specific requirements. Unix hosting is the most common and cost effective however certain scripting languages (e.g. ASP.NET) will require Windows hosting. The general rule is to go Unix unless you have specific Windows requirements.

You also need to consider the number of sites you intend to run as there are often limitations on the number of domains permitted, some only allowing one.

Finally you also need to decide on Shared, Reseller, VPS or a dedicated solutions. Even if your requirements are minimal at the moment it may be wise to consider your future requirements as well, e.g. can you upgrade from Shared hosting to a dedicated server down the track.

Reliability

Let’s face it, if your host is up and down like a yo-yo then you may as well not have a web site. You never know when that next sale or opportunity will come in. If your site is down then you can miss that chance.

The only real way of measuring a hosts reliability is through reviews and feedback from existing and previous customers. When reading reviews be mindful of negative comments as those complaints could be based on unrealistic expectations – make sure negative comments are supported and relevant to your specific requirements – rarely will you find a perfect host. The best places for reviews are typically forums, see Australian IT, Webmaster & Business Forums for suggested forums.

Some hosts will publish their uptime statistics however be aware that this can be only relevant to one server and not to all server’s they manage.

Some hosts will also offer a guarantee not to exceed a certain amount of downtime, and should it happen they will refund part of your hosting fees. This can show a commitment to providing uptime.

Support

I think this is the key to finding a good host. In theory if the reliability is there then the support shouldn’t be needed however you almost always need support as some stage.

Again without actually trialling the host the only real measure is through reviews and feedback. Again negative feedback shouldn’t necessarily rule out the host – try to understand the particular situation and see whether the complaint would be relevant to your circumstances.

Other considerations

Price

Some may argue that price is a factor as well. Personally I feel that the cost of the hosting should be insignificant as cheap hosting could cost you more in lost revenue and stress than paying a little more to get the reliability and the support.

Hosting Locally

If you are located in Australia having your web site hosted in Australia can be of significant benefit. This can include better support, better performance and even better search engine rankings.

If you have anything to add, please let us know in the comments.

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