About a year ago I started moving more of my hosting to “the cloud”, basically choosing to use a VPS solution instead of renting servers in a datacentre. It was right after a breakdown, and the danish hosting center that I had used since 2007 (former Plusnet, later bought by Jay.net) had a terrible customer service and the server I was renting was starting to break down. The point where I took the decision to switch, was when it took me over 3 days to get them to change the HDD in the server – in the end they “upgraded” me to a newer server and fixed the old HDD and connected it with a USB cable. But 3-4 days of downtime is just not acceptable, when you are running both email and production websites for your clients.

I have learned a lot more about hosting since then; I am no pro, no do I normally work with hosting, but having more and more production sites online, it makes me extremely annoyed when I get downtime. With this world of cloud-computing, any downtime at all is almost unacceptable. One of the things I did was to make sure all email hosting was no longer on the same servers (I actually use a $10-monthly account at HostGator for all email hosting).

Now with VPS.net I will start by making a short list of the good and the bad, before I try to make a final point. I can however say that I have decided to experience with Amazon in the future, but it will be when time allows me to play with a more challenging project – I already have the ideas to split it up (DB, main source & user data like images apart, using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing to reach fail-over).

Things I like about VPS.net

• Excellent free support goes a long way. When people are nice and usually answers within 10 minutes, it is hard to get mad – even when having problems with downtime.
• The price is another great reason to buy a VPS. Starting at $20 USD per month (or $1 per day if you need a quick burst), and going down the more you buy, the nodes are pretty cheap. I currently pay around $100 per month for 2 instances with 3 nodes each, which is plenty to run for most of my projects. If you ever need more, you can give a quick burst for a day or two with extra nodes, which is a nice option to have.
• Scalability is the last thing I will emphasize. As mentioned above, upgrading your VPS with more nodes is easy and the user interface is really nice. Seeing a growth in traffic? Throw an extra node and make sure your VPS can take the pressure.

And now to the downsides of using VPS.net…

As I said in the beginning, this will be a honest review of my experiences using VPS.net, and going through the positive stuff have given them enough credit. Like I mentioned before I am planning to do some more technical experiences by custom building some application for AWS & spreading out the hosting with fail-overs.

So right off to the main points why I would not recommend you to use VPS.net and the couple of incidents I had..

The might be some downtime – yes I know, “how can you expect 100% uptime?”. This is the cloud. The only downtime should be when I fuck up my settings, or do some other stupid thing. I had a couple of times where my VPS was suddenly read-only, and they had to use some time fixing it. Below is a screenshot of the last couple of months where I have been using Pingdom, with “only” 98.62% uptime. anything below 99% is not good (in my eyes) when we are talking about “the cloud”. As the screenshot shows, I had a day with over 11 hours of downtime – just not acceptable with production servers in my mind.

Now you probably wonder if I am going to end this post either blessing VPS.net as “the best VPS hosting provider” and throwing some affiliate link, or if I will come with some negative crap about “that day with 11 hours of downtime”. But well, I promised to be honest so I can do neither.

In the end, they are providing a good service for what you pay. $20 per month per node including free support (where they always have answered within 15 minutes) is not that bad. But – and this is a big mother-but for me – the best host is where you do NOT need to contact the support at all.

I’d love to hear from you, if you have experiences with VPS.net – just throw a comment below. And if you are looking for a VPS provider, take a look at them. It also depends how serious you are, and how hard you look at a bit downtime. Nobody is perfect, and VPS certainly still have some work to do to become a 100% stable cloud-hosting provider, that I would recommend. If I ever get around to do the project using Amazon’s micro-instances to create fail-overs, I will ofcourse follow up with another blogpost about that.

First of all I expect you to know at least the basics of PageRank and how it flows. Go read up on it on SEOMoz or just Google around for it so you get a basic understanding of how it works. This is the basics of why and how we make our link structure.

There is several ways to organize your content, and make a map of the link structure of your application. Some people create “graphical maps” with an easy overview of the pages and the “virtual sitemap”. Personally I create a kind of “technical sitemap”, but that is usually also something I use when building the technical description of a project. This especially helps me when dealing with a lot of dynamic content like in directories. In most cases you want focus on getting PageRank and crawlers directed to your content pages, to make sure they will rank on long-tail keywords as well as get crawled and indexed more often by Google.

At the MozCation in Lima last Friday, I got a few tips that I hadn’t thought about before; Tom Critchlow was talking about SEO for Enterprises, and mentioned one of the things he doesn’t like is pagination. Instead it’s better to use some kind of tags or other content-related to sort your content pages. Based on this I will try to make some updates on BusinessPeru as we have always used pagination on categories with a lot of entries. I will be testing several things to see if they affect the rankings and traffic we receive, as well as the crawl rates from Google.
The same thing goes for my other project, FeedOrganizer, where I am working on a smart way to categorise and sort the content automatically, instead of using basic listing and paginated pages.
I will probably return with a more specific result about my tests and the results thereof, once I actually get to complete all the updates above. Now to get back on track with what the article is actually about…

Internal Linking is both for your users and for the search engines! Like Google time after time is saying, the most important thing is creating good content and making a good experience for your users. But while your users is important, there is no need to make it harder than necessary for the spiders. Make sure that every content page is easy to get to (I usually have the rule of thumbs that it should be max 2-3 clicks away from your home page), and that there is some logic in the structure. If you are trying to rank on specific phrases, make sure they are available directly from the index page of your site; but don’t fill it up with links. Another rule of thumbs is max 100 links on each page, otherwise it might be looked as a spam. Another is to remember the rules of PageRank; filling your pages up with lots of (internal) links, will make the PageRank flow being reduced.

I hope this can help some people to get a better idea of the Internal Link Structure and why it is so important to think about before you develop your web applications. Please throw some comments at me, especially if you have some experience with ways to avoid pagination or just other tips for managing lots of dynamic content in terms of SEO.

This is part 4 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

The event was (as far as I understood) arranged by Lima Valley, a group I have mixed feelings about. (And as I just realized, have the most terrible SEO ever in spite of using WordPress). Nonetheless the event was allright, with a free buffet and some wine – and even free T-Shirts as you can see on the photos in the bottom of this post.

Most surprisingly I actually thought that the people attending this event knew at least the basic of SEO. But when the first speaker came on and asked “How many knows what Keyword Research is?”, only 2-3 other people in the room put their hands up. This was a bit of an “omg” moment; because this is so basic and fundamentally important for SEO in general.

All in all the event gave me some nice inspirations and thoughts about the state of SEO and Internet in general here in Peru. It hasn’t moved much since I came here, and although it is changing bit by bit, the process is really going slow. I’m hoping to spread my series of SEO for Developers a bit in the community, it is certainly something they need to learn here. All good SEO starts with the developers – if your CMS is directly hurting your rankings, all other optimizing is pointless.
I also think there might be some good opportunities in this field now, and to be one of the first movers. This might be something I will try to focus on in the upcoming months.

To sum up, then I am looking forward to following the development of the SEO as the markets in Latin America starts to mature and get more traction. It will definitely be interesting to follow an upcoming and merging market like this.

What is your experiences with SEO in Peru and the Latin American markets? Where is the biggest differences, between SEO en Europe / USA compared to South America?

Let’s start with the meta description, which is really the most important meta-tag you need to remember. First I want to kill a typical myth about this tag: it does not help your site rank higher. The only purpose for the meta description is to provide at snippet about the current page for Google. Now why is this tag so important? Because it gives you a chance to write 160 characters to get the users attention – this is what differentiates your results from the other results on the page. I have seen several sites having the CTR on search results improve a lot, just by optimizing their meta description.
Another important thing to mention with meta-tags, is that meta keywords is useless; it is out-dated, and no longer used by Google (most likely not by other search engines either). Generating or writing meta-keywords is a waste of time in terms of ranking and SEO, so just skip it. Save the bytes in your HTML for more important tags (like the canonical!).

Now let’s move on to some of the other important HTML tags. First of all you should always remember to use h1, h2, etc. where applicable. If possible also wrap your paragraphs into the p-tag, and in general make sure you follow the W3C guidelines.
A small tip is to take a look at your generated HTML (yes, go to your browser and use the view-source function), and read through your page. Now ask yourself if the page is easy to read? (Is it easy to identify title, content, and other objects?)
If it is easy to read your page as a human, then it is most likely also easy for Google to read and understand. If this is not the case, then you should probably start to work on optimizing your HTML.

To sum up, here is a small check-list when going through your HTML source:

• Always make sure to have unique title-tags (Google only shows 60 characters, but it will read much more than that, so don’t be afraid to have too long title-tags)
• Make sure to create a unique meta-tag description for each page. Never have the same meta-description on all pages.
• Use h1, h2, p, strong, em, and so on to format your text and content. A rule of thumb is that if your HTML is readable for humans, it most likely is readable for Google as well.
• Don’t use meta keywords, it is a waste of time and bytes.

This is part 3 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

The main thing to remember with URL’s are to get the keywords in. If you are allowing your users to create dynamic content (fx. CMS pages), make sure to generate the URL string from the title or give the user control of creating a URL.
Another thing Google likes, especially if you have dynamic content and nested categories, is using the URL as a “breadcrumb” structure. A good idea would be to have for example:
/category/subcategory/item
Just remember not to have too long URL’s, and follow the basic rules. Also make sure that nested URL’s like the above are actually related and it is the correct path for the item.
Note: Google is in general really good at understanding breadcrumb structure, but always make it as easy as possible. The above example is both easy to understand for the crawlers and for the human eye.

Another thing to remember when making pretty URL, is that while the robots and browsers in general can read, crawl and understand special signs (fx. ñ in Spanish) it is generally a bad idea to use those in urls. I learned this the hard way, and discover that Google doesn’t encode the url, so if you for example use urlencode()/urldecode() in PHP, you will get different requests from Google and from normal browsers. So remember to always make urls plaintext; no exceptions.

A last thing about URL structure is that you should choose one and stick to that. Make sure that once content has been created, and has an URL (fx. /category/item), they will not change. Make sure that you create the proper 301 redirects if you change the URL structure, and implement the canonical tags as described in the last post.

This is part 2 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

• Your “linkjuice” / PageRank-flow is spreading to different pages.
• The Search engines will treat each page as individual and index them as different pages
• In worst case scenario you will get punished and get lower rankings

Duplicate content can be of many variations. Here is a couple of examples:

• www.domain.com and domain.com(could be ANY subdomain like server2.domain.com)
• domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/(The trailing slash in the end WILL be seen as different page)
• domain.com/index.php and domain.com/

Luckily for developers, there is many easy ways to fix this. Lately my favourite has been using canonical tags, but you have to be careful with those. 301 redirection is in many cases the best option, and is a MUST if you already have DC problems.
By implementing canonical tag with the full url (fx “http://domain.com/page1”), Google knows that it is the original page, and will stop thinking /page1/ or /page1/?x=y is different pages. But be careful: just a couple of weeks ago, I pushed an update to a site with large amounts of dynamic content. I didn’t notice that I forgot “http://” in my canonical tags, and suddenly I had over 30.000 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, because Google couldn’t find “http://domain.com/domain.com/url”.
Now when shit happens, like in the case above, 301 Redirects is the absolute best way to go. This will pass pagerank on to the original page and redirect both visitors and the crawlers.

So to sum up about Duplicate Content: avoid it. Before it goes wrong. Make sure that all subdomains 301 redirect to your original (or www-version if you use that) – or that you at least have canonical tags implemented. Also make sure to decide if your URL’s should be shown as /content, /content/, /content.html or whatever you prefer. If you do not implement these things your site will most likely get punished. If your competitor is of “evil mind”, and see that you show the same content on all subdomains without canonical tags (common mistake) he can linkbuild to your different URL’s and get your site punished for DC.
(suddenly you might see “looser.domain.com”, “imanass.domain.com” and whatever ranking instead of your original page – that wouldn’t be fun, would it? And worst case scenario, get de-ranking and even de-indexed as punishment for Duplicate Content)

What is your experience with Duplicate Content as a web developer? Do you implement and use 301 Redirects & canonical tags in your projects right from the start? Be sure to leave a comment, and feel free to come with more tips and corrections.

This is part 1 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

This is the most basic stuff that can really harm your rankings in search engines like Google. I’ve seen sites drop, get de-index and suddenly triple their visitors from search engines, just based on simple onsite changes. However the worst thing is that many developers out there are basically ruining their clients websites, by not knowing what they do; and implementing potentially harmful codes.
Let’s get on to the list of 5 SEO tips every web application developer must know! Below is links to the different parts of the series.

• Part 1: Avoiding Duplicate Content With 301 Redirects and Canonical Tags
• Part 2: Using Correct URL Structure
• Part 3: Using Correct Meta-tags And Other HTML tags
• Part 4: Internal Linking In Your Web Application
• Part 5: Using Webmaster Tools And Analytics

I am planning to post one part every Monday, with the first part coming next Monday, 5th of September. So stay tuned, and feel free to comment with inspiration, what you think is the most important onsite SEO every web developer should know, and of course if you thing I am wrong, feel free to correct me in the comments.

For the first time, I will not vote. Theoretically I could (and should) go to the Danish embassy here in Santiago and make a letter with my vote.

But to be honest, it just doesn’t matter anymore. When I look back at Denmark, the current government is increasing public spending, hidden taxes and making new stupid rules and legislation. The opposition (which according to polls are to win) is suggesting even more taxation, public spending and new rules and legislation. And this is where the chain falls off, and I no longer can identify myself with today’s Denmark; the subject of the election debates are economics and public welfare. With the left-wing parties constantly yelling about the rich having to pay more tax (we currently have up to around 62% tax-rate, and they want to increase it further…), putting taxes on the banks and companies. They are talking about helping the weakest, allowing people to retire when their 60 and healthy, and in general just increase spending to “help the weak in our society”.

No wonder several of my friends from other countries call me a socialist; even though I am liberal (and probably extremely liberal on the danish scale). When I tell people about Denmark, our minimal salaries, tax-rates, free hospitals, free education (Where you get PAID to study!) and all the other stuff that we take for granted in Denmark, I am of course a bit proud. I love Denmark, and I love that our system is taking care of the weakest in the society, making sure we have free (and compared to other countries over here) good-quality public education.

But we cannot continue on this road. We are dooming ourselves. Just as “the greedy gets greedier”, the danish society is getting too greedy. And this election is making me sick. I feel the urge to vomit, when I read about Danish politicians, saying that the “rich of Denmark” should “pay more to the society” and that we are “not good enough at taking care of the weakest”. Now take a look at Denmark today – who are the weakest? Well, about 1/3 of our small population is supported by the government in one way or another. Either working for the government or receiving some kind of support. That means we have 1/3 left to actually pay for the rest. But if we keep doing this (with the suggestions for the left-wing parties in the economical plan), the group of 1/3 will continue to become smaller and smaller. Their defense is that the evil “rich people” and “banks” are earning money off the others (The currently 2/3 who are supported by the government?), and therefore its fair to put more tax on them. Oh yea, even though we already have the highest taxes in the world, and the so-called “rich people” already pay 60+% (minimum taxation is around 40%).

It just doesn’t make sense! The only way to increase a country’s economics, is to create jobs in the private sector. To increase exports and production, and to have private corporations that expand from operation in Denmark, to operate in the rest of the world. How else are we supposed to bring in money to the government, so we can pay for healthcare, education and the people who can’t find jobs? How else is we supposed to get money for the elder, and caring for one another? And there is the fundamental problem I see in the Danish culture. Being successful is bad. Earning a lot of money is bad. This is one of those weird negative impacts of having a flat class-culture – Denmark is all one middle-class. And if you are in the top, you are a bad person.

This is the reason why I fear that the Denmark I know, love and “brag about” is not going to exist in the future. Unless we can start changing our culture, and learn to respect, admire and credit the people creating jobs, creating companies and earning good money, we will fall into a hole of self-pity. Unless we learn to be independent and not expect our government to wipe our ass, we will end up worse than Greece. I fear for the day where Germany, Britain and other European nations have to bail us out and force us to start working again, because we simply didn’t realize that we had to grow up and be more independent.

The Danes no longer seem liking vikings. We got settled, and instead of wanting to explore the world and conquer territories, we prefer to sit on our couch and blame the government. Or the banks. Or the rich people. Lately I have been seeing news, about parts of Denmark where the local region sends out people to wake kids, who are sleeping over and not showing up on time in school. Are you fuckin kidding me Denmark? This is what I fear is the future for our country; parents sitting on their ass, blaming the society, claiming they need help to wake their kids.

Today the people seems to be so dependent of the government; so if you can’t find a job, there is something wrong on the job market. I recently read about a person who was 37, and has been supported by the government for almost 20 years, and for the first time got a real full-time job. Again: Are you fuckin kidding me? When I commented on this, I got comments from other Danes like “you don’t know the persons story”, “one can get trapped in the unemployment system” and other similar comments. If you are unable to support yourself for almost 20 years, there is only one person to blame; yourself! We have free education, where you even get supported while you take your education. If you really can’t get a job, maybe it would be an idea to try to take another education? Or maybe just look at yourself, and see what you are doing wrong? Why do we have to get the government to “baby-sit” us, and blame everybody else for our life?

Dear Danish people: stop discussing how the government should help you wipe your ass. Wake up and realize that the only thing that can bring us forward is hard-working people. Entrepreneurs who doesn’t give up, and who chase the dream. People who rightfully so earn a lot of money. Stop being so dependent on the society and jealous of the “rich”, and take the consequences for your own actions.

I hope for the best, but fear for the worst.

Similarities

- Family-oriented culture

This is one of the things I previously blogged in Danish about, especially as you can get some frustrations when you are coming from the much more liberate western culture. The Chileans also tend to live for very long with their relatives, and it is not uncommon that they still live with their parents in the beginning of their 30′s. However I will admit, that this culture seems to be changing bit by bit as the middle-class advances, and with the cheaper 1-bedroom apartments that one can find around the center of the city, where many students and young people seem to settle down to avoid living far away from their universities.

– Willingness to accept mistakes & responsibilities

This is not something I cannot confirm personally, but it is something that I have heard from other entrepreneurs and Chileans alike. In Peru it is one of the main frustrations in doing business with Peruvians or hiring Peruvians; we had bad experiences with both individual programmers and outsourcing everything to companies. Most of the time you will hear the “I will fix it tomorrow!” instead of them simply admitting they have problems or asking for help. And apparently this is also one of the things that stick in the culture of the Chileans, so I expect it to be very general in Latin-america.

– The culture of big companies

It is mostly wanted to get a job in one of the big companies after your education; especially LAN is something most of the Chileans wish to work for when their finish their education. (They fact that LAN, according to several friends working there, is a terrible place once you get hired is another point)

This also makes it all that harder for the smaller companies and startups to attract the good talent, because most of them will prefer the secure and often higher salaries of the big corporations.

– Lacking talent-pool for Tech StartUps

It is near impossible to find good developers in Peru; there are very few of them, and the ones who are actually really talented work for either the big companies (banks, etc) or at one of the few developing houses that makes solutions for the biggest companies. This also makes the few talents all the more expensive, and not really an option for bootstrapping startups.

The same situation seems to be here in Chile, where 80% of the StartUp Chile teams from last year have been looking for developers, and very few has found them. Either the talent pool in Chile is also too small, like in Peru, or there is simply a lack of communication. I have also met other startups, including two Danish entrepreneurs using Chilean programmers, who has confirmed that finding skilled programmers is extremely hard in Chile.

Differences

- Much better infrastructure in Santiago

I have to admit that one of the things I hate most about Lima, is the terrible infrastructure; there is no metro, no fast means of transportation. Only terrible and crazy combies and taxis - admittedly very cheap, but also annoying, chaotic and directly dangerous for your health. The Metro de Santiago is such a great thing, and even though it can be very crowded in rush hours, it is a billion times better than the public transportation of Lima, and well worth the price.

- Rising middle-class in Chile

The middle-class which is so ever-important for the economy and stability of a country is growing fast in Chile, and creates not only a much higher market for the StartUps here, but also the politic stability which is missing in countries like Peru. Thanks to the huge lower-class and small middle- and high-classes of Peru, they have put themselves in a situation that (in my opinion) will set the country back many years, no matter who they choose for a president. Its pest or cholera; Humala who is a left-wing Chavez-wannabe on the one side, and Keiko Fujimori, the young daughter of ex-President Alberto Fujimori, in prison right now charged with corruption and breaking human rights. Thanks to their appealing politics to the lower-class (which is, sorry to state the fact, the un-educated part of the country), Peru is now much less attractive.

- Corrupted Peru vs a Chile with almost no corruption

In Peru you can bribe pretty much everyone; from the government officials to the local police-man stopping you while driving. In fact they mostly just stop you to receive a bribe, as low as 5 soles, and this makes a huge different in the respect of authorities and growth of the country. Chile is with its low level of corruption, a great example for the rest of South America.

- Rising Entrepreneur culture and meetup groups in Santiago

Since I am fairly new in Santiago, I have enjoyed spending up to several evenings during the week, going to the different meetups arranged here. Originally starting with Start-Up Chile organizing events every Thursday, we have have several events like Mapocho Valley mentioned in the beginning of this very long post. It is a great and very inspiring way to meet new people, and I have personally made both new friends and great business contacts through these events. Furthermore it makes it a lot easier to get closer to the Chilean startups and the talented Chileans (for example developers and graphic artists), plus with the new 110 StartUps coming around June/July it will furthermore help to inspire the local Chileans to jump into entrepreneurship.

If you made it all the way down to this last paragraph, it meant that you read my more than 1000 words on differences and similarities of Peru vs Chile. Either you just have too much time, or are really interested on the subject, so please feel free to join the discussion and add whatever similarities and differences you know about between South American countries in the comments.

Even though my search for apartment is not complete yet (currenlty waiting for confirmation on the apartment I want), I thought I would write a post with some of my experiences. Looking for an apartment here in Santiago have not been the most easy process, but it is certainly less frustrating than looking for apartments in Lima.

Get a Chilean chip and use your phone

Just like any other latin-american country, chileans are not the best at answering emails. Though I have seen much more agents utilize email (and some of them are decently fast at answering), most of them don’t answer or follow up until you call them. So if you find a flat you really want, keep calling them; don’t rely on them sending you a long email explaining something. Most email I receive from them is usualy 1 or 2 lines, and rarely answers my questions.

Decide on your price-range and location

While those two factors usually go together, the above mentioned and if you are renting furnished or unfurnished are some important factors. In my experience so far, if you are looking for a small 1-bedroom apartment on budget for at least a year, renting unfurnished is the best option.

The best place for a decent price 1-bedroom apartment seems to be Santiago Centro, where you often can get apartments between 100.000 and 150.000 chilean pesos ($200-$300 USD), close to Metro stops, restaurants and so on.

If you can afford it, better districts are Providencia and Las Condes; comparable to Miraflores and San Isidro in Lima. While these are great areas, prices also clearly go up; and they are just a few Metro stops from the center.

So if you are serious about moving to Chile, go on PortalInmobiliario.com and make some searches. The site is in Spanish, and that would in general be a big advantage in searching for an apartment here. The site is not the best, but the only really active site I found here for the renting market.

As soon as I get settled in my new place, I will most likely post a followup with requirements for renting a flat, as the owners here are usually asking for a lot of documentation and security.

If you have any other tips and tricks for renting a flat in Santiago, feel free to post them in the comments.