Windows
port 3389/tcp - Microsoft Terminal Services

Linux
port 22/tcp - SSH

Here is the form to get the SMTP port open!

1. What is the volume of e-mail that you’re expecting to send (e-mail per day/week/month)?

2. What mail software are you running to send outbound messages?

3. Do you require authentication to send e-mail messages?

3a. If you require authentication, what method?

4. For servers on GoGrid, what domain(s) will be sending e-mail?

4a. Where are your DNS records for the domains sending e-mail (hosted on GoGrid or specify another company)?

4b. Do all domains sending e-mail have rDNS (reverse DNS) entries with GoGrid and SPF records in the zone file? If not, please list cases where you’ve submitted these requests to be completed. rDNS is required for outbound SMTP access.

5. Do you participate in bulk message sending (subscription lists, newsletters, offer notices, etc)?

5a. If you send e-mail in bulk, how do you generate your e-mail lists?

Answering all of the above questions does not guarantee you will be allowed to send outbound e-mail addresses. All replies are reviewed, and all IPs allocated to your account are constantly monitored against approximately 120 blacklist groups. Discovery of any GoGrid IP listed in any blacklist group may result in your SMTP access being revoked, and a fine of $99 for violating our AUP/TOS.

If you have any experience of Virtuozzo, GoGrids control panel is a bit simplistic. The only tools provided apart from VPS creation are a password reset tool. There is no means provided to backup the VPS, or put it into some kind of repair mode, should for any reason you misconfigure it and it stops working. With GoGrid however you can easily configure a load balanced network for a web server, but from what I can see, thats all you can do.

Cpanel went on OK, but then noticed I wasn’t receiving any email. It was easy to see why. GoGrid automatically block outbound port 25 (SMTP) so mail was going nowhere. I then discovered I had to fill out a firewall request form, from which is was pretty clear that customer virtual hosting would be completely impractical as they wanted a list of each and every domain and detailed questions on how I was going to secure each domain and the expected volume of mail. I can understand why they need to do this, to stop spammers signing up for a VPS, but it makes the service awkward and clunky to use for legitimate customers.

“No problem” I thought. I have other VPS’s on other networks, I’ll just get GoGrid support to open up port 25 to the IP of one of my other servers, and configure Exim to use that server as a “smart host.” That way any mail will seem to eminate from a non GoGrid network. But Go Grid wouldn’t do that. Yes I could configure a VPN or a tunnel, but wanted to keep things simple rather than having to constantly find workarounds to GoGrids highly restrictive policies.

I logged into today by SSH to discover why none of my sites were working. HTTP was fine, but the problem was DNS related. The VPS seemed extremely sluggish - OK I’m connecting from the Uk. However GoGrid in their infinite wisdom had now decided (without warning) to block all ports apart from SSH and http. POP3, IMAP, SMTP and DNS are all blocked. Not particularly helpful. I’m moving my sites over sftp to a proper VPS host in the States. My advise to GoGrid would be to make clear that any kind of virtual hosting, involving POP3, SMTP, DNS, IMAP, is not welcome on their network. Why they wont’ allow a GoGrid VPS to be used as a nameserver is beyond me. Doubtless I could make another lengthy “firewall request” but you know what? I can’t be bothered, and I doubt many others will be either.

In this post I’m going to talk about one such tool, Firepow Blogging Software,because I believe it might just be a cut above the rest in terms of it’s flexibility of use, and overall effectiveness in accomplishing the three primary aims of blogging - creating a blog, managing it or maintaining it, and getting traffic to it.

It was hard to know where to start with this post because there are so many individual features of this software that could be mentioned.

To give you a brief overview of how it works. Firepow is based on the Wordpres platform, and allows a user to install a fully customized and functioning wordpress blog with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you’ve used Wordpress before, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is it’s ability to be enhanced by third party plugins. You’ll also know that it’s not hard to get LOST in all the plugins and potential feature additions that CAN be made.

The first thing great about Firepow from my point of view is that they have done the plugin work for you. The best 50 or so plugins from around the web have been programmed into the software so as to be automatically installed when your blog is.

That’s a good feature, but it’s even better when you consider that while these plugins normally require manual fiddling to get installed, tweaks made to your theme CSS code and more - the software actually does that part for you too - so you click the button, and you have the function of that plugin added - VERY time saving!

The “Create” part of the process is also helped by the ability to create your own custom wordpress theme completely from scratch, with more functionality than we’ve seen from free theme generators EVER before - not to mention the ability to create your own categories from scratch, automatically create the perfect permalink structure for SEO, and more.

Before even getting into the Wordpress panel of the site Firepow creates you’ve also got a site management tab where all your blogs can be managed from one place, an SEO tracking tool to monitor the search rankings of all your sites, and a task manager
that tells you what needs to be done to maintain your blog/s and when.

I dare say though that the best things happen once you’re actually IN the blog.

Here you have crazy abilities to make your post content better, easily being able to add relevant images, videos, or trackbacks (automatically building backlinks to your site) to your posts… and even that’s leaving alot out.

OR the crazy abilities to monitor your blogs success, like being able to split test the results of different posts, monitor your traffic through in depth reporting (utilizing Google analytics), monitoring your search spider activity, the popularity of your posts, the terms people are searching on your site, and more still.

I feel like I’m getting too salesy in this post to you but I can assure even with everything you’ve read here, I haven’t even really touched the surface of what’s going on inside this thing called Firepow - heck we didn’t even get to the promotional tools.

The best thing I can probably do is tell you go to look at the darn thing yourself:

http://www.weycrest.co.uk/links/firepow.php

Oh and I could also tell you that if your into blogging and you don’t, you’ll probably regret it big time.

I hope you’ve found the information here valuable, and don’t hesitate to leave your comments on Firepow here to share with others.

http://www.weycrest.co.uk/blog/google-nemesis/

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Setting up your domain you bought at 1and1.com and Blogger as your …

Anyway here is my own version of the tutorial and this will only works for domains bought from 1and1.com It works easily if you follow the step by step procedure, I have done this to all my 3 blogs so I know it really works. …

1&1 Domain prices currently start at £2.99 per year for a UK domain and £8.99 for global domains (.com, .net etc).

Configure 1and1 mail.

To configure your 1and1 mail settings login to your hosting service account, click the ADMINISTRATION button and go to CONTROL PANEL. Click the Show E-mail Settings or the E-mail icon. Either will bring you to the same place. (more…)

Worth pointing out that 1&1 Instant Mail now comes with 2GB storage as well as full Spam filtering and Anti-Phishing scanning for all accounts as well as free Webmail.

Click here for more information on 1&1 Instant Mail

Well the other day I was playing with spyfu.com. However there service appeared to be down so I started looking for something else. I came up with Keyword Spy and so far I’m quite impressed! Being based in the UK, its important ithat you can select the area where you want to “spy” fairly accurately, rather than being sole US based. You can choose UK, Australia, Ireland, Canada & South Africa, in addition to a “Global” option.

Keyword Spy will then tell you what keywords your competition are bidding on (you enter the URL of your competitor). Obviously its not going to be 100% accurate but will give you a prett ygood idea of what keywords they have optimised for!

The best feature is that you can then see the paid for ads related to the keyword, find competition on each and what they are bidding on a each search term. Its gets pretty adictive - almost like spying on the neighbours. Ummm, OK well not quite. Too much information there!

I dount of this replace a really good keyword tool and proper market research, but its a starting point in building substantial keyword databases for your campaigns.

More information at Keywordspy.com and there is a free trial.

Many of you will have heard these terms before and thought it was all about teenagers in bedrooms. Wrong! There are many specialist social networking sites springing up and covering your niche as well as popular social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, simpy and so on . Importantly also all the advise in the book is 100% white hat techniques. No dodgy spamming. This is important when building a social networking presense - turn the sales hat off for a while and participate in the communities. Your reward will be better “link love” and the search engines may smile upon you!

There is a particularly good section on setting up and configuring your Wordpress Blog in order to achieve maximum results. This is especially important if you are used to a hosted blog service such as Wordpress. Which begs the question whether to use a free blog service or host your own under your own domain.

The answer is both, use the properties and authority of the Web 2.0 communities to help propagate buzz and authority back to your web site. Sad fact is that you created say a squidoo “lens” today on your topic it would rank and start to get traffic far quicker than your brand new domain and website, due to the fact its built a degree of respectability in the eyes of the search engines. The Authority Black Book is written by one of the leading Social Marketing experts, Jack Humphrey who provides for first class techniques for free. To see what I mean you can visit his blog The Friday Traffic Report

The Authority Black Book will teach you:

1. How to turn your website into an “authority presence…”
2. Recommendations on the “Web2.0″ tools and resources to get buzz, rankings, links, and all the traffic you want to any site on any topic you can think of.

So if you want to learn more about social power linking, social bookmarking and social marketing — be sure to get your copy. You can download your free copy at the link below…

Authority Black Book Download

By following these steps you will see that most closely guarded secret– the search algorithm. Remember the movie “the Matrix?” The Matrix is there, you just can’t see it. So is the search algorithm. It’s easy to pay a Search Engine Optimizer to give your pages some ranking power. Unfortunately, given the inherent time factor involved in climbing the ranks, your money may be long gone before you know if you’ve spent your money well.

There is no magic bullet
Forget any advertisement you see for instant number one search results or automated this or that. Most are scams, and the ones that aren’t might get you positioned, but it will be very short lived. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Achieving and maintaining a high rank, especially on highly competitive keywords, requires constant maintenance. If you do find a legitimate SEO firm, it is well worth the money to pay their monthly maintenance fee and let them continue to help you after the initial project. At least for 6 months or a year as you establish yourself.

In this article we’ll look at some of the intricate and complex tasks of optimizing a page for long term ranking power. You will learn how to read between the code and the content to find what is necessary to bring you to the top. Being number one is easy to say, but is quickly overwhelming when you stare at tens of thousands of pages you want to out rank. So how do you begin? The starting line on the road to that first page SERP (search engine results page) ranking is not as blurry as you might think. In fact, you can uncover the starting line, the route, and all the scenery along the way to the finish line without knowing the search engine algorithm.

STEP 1- Your Keywords are the crowning achievement of gruelling days of work
If you have investments in the stock market you know how much research and thought goes into choosing those securities. Now take that same effort and multiply it by three. That’s how much planning and revision your keywords should take.

A simple, broad key phrase like “shoes” could hypothetically bring you up in a countless stream of different searches. Women’s shoes, baby shoes, sneakers, high heels, etc. If somehow you manage to settle into a good ranking (which would be difficult) you would have more traffic on your site than you could handle. But traffic is worthless is it doesn’t get to it’s destination. Chances are, you weren’t that destination.

Your keywords must be focused and precise, specific to what you are selling. Using a key phrase like “Gucci mens black leather loafer” will bring a targeted lead to your site. You may not reach as many people as the more generalized keyword, but the people that do come to you have a much deeper interest in the specific product you are selling.

Therefore you have much greater chance of converting that targeted lead to a sale. Your keywords are your magic beans, your winning lotto numbers, your energizer bunnies, your sales force, whatever you want to call them. They must be perfect.

STEP 2 - Want to be Number One in the Search Engines? Look at who already is
Competition Analysis- no SEO book can give you this information.

Now take your keyword list and type them into a search engine. Who comes up in the first ten results? That company that is number one is because they have most closely matched what the search engine algorithm says should be number one. You can learn a great deal from them.

Internal Factors - sometimes known as “onsite optimization”
Take that number one page, and the other top 9 pages and study them, look at the code, break them down. You are looking at the first half of what is needed to rank in the top 10 pages for your key phrases on that particular search engine. The list of what to look for is enormous.

Studying the Internal Factors on a page is taking it apart to see how it’s put together. Not how it works, but statistical research into the precise construct and layout of keywords and phrases in relation to each other within the page.

Start with these areas:

URL address,
Page Title,
Meta description,
Meta Keywords,
First sentence on the page,
Body copy,
Bold or Emphasized Phrases,
H1 or other tags,
Alt Tags,
Navigation system
Keyword densities- the number of times your phrase and each word in your phrase appears compared to the text around it
Where and in how many times the same phrase and words appear in different sections
The word and character position of each phrase in each
The total number of characters
The total number of words
The quality and thought of the content

Beginning with these comparisons should keep you quite busy for a while. A spreadsheet is quite useful. Some commercial products are also available that can make this daunting task much more feasible. Keep looking for other patterns and differences. You want to duplicate them in your own page. NOT copy and steal. You want to mimic the patterns that are bringing that page to the position it is. Then move onto to examining the external factors of these pages.

External Factors (sometimes known as offsite optimization)
External factors of a web page deal with the links to, from and within a web page, both inside the same site, and out into the web. This analysis usually takes more time because it involves more dissection of pages beyond the one you’re trying to optimize. In this analysis as with Internal Factors, you want to compare and contrast your page versus the top 10 competitors, find similarities and differences. Here is a list of criteria to get you started.

Number of internal (to the same site) on that page
Number of external links
Number of links pointing TO that page* (see below for details)
The link/anchor text- which keywords are used and where
Google Page Rank value of incoming links
Alexa Rank of incoming links

*To get a listing of the links that point to a site, type the following into Google, MSN and Yahoo searches: “link:www.domainname.com”. Google tends to only show a small portion of the links back, but MSN and Yahoo will give you much more pertinent data.

Now you want to compare the content on each of these pages to the one they point to. Is it of similar theme, in what context does the link back appear and where. Subject of much debate, the consensus is that Google Page Rank does not mean what it used to. However, if it is in some fashion a measure of how significant or “important” a site is, it is worth looking more closely at the sites that link back that are of high page rank.

Professional SEO tools
Now, this is definitely a ton of work to do all by hand. There are software programs that can help do some of the digging and mathematical computations for you, figuring out densities and organizing information.

Tools like this are definitely ones a professional SEO will have in their arsenal. But remember, these are tools, not miracle workers. It takes a human being to evaluate and realize connections, similarities, draw conclusions and interpret the data. Then, you have to extrapolate this data.

Remember, you want to do one better than every site you just examined. To do that you have to draw some conclusions and make some educated guesses and link to even better sites.

Final Thoughts - Test and Check Keyword Phrases
You have access to the inner workings of every page that you want to beat. Learn from them and do one better. This process is not a one-time shot. It is ongoing. Check your key phrases every week. Do the same people still rank in the top ten?

Some have probably moved. Remember too that they’re going to adapt to maintain their positions too. If you want the ranks, you have to spend the time, and not just once, or pay someone to do it for you.

Don’t ever believe anyone who says they can guarantee any kind of results. And ask them how they will optimize your pages. If they explain to you something like the above, then you’ve probably got yourself someone experienced and honest. You money will be well spent and you’ll quickly recover it.

About the Author
John Krycek is the owner and creative director of theMouseworks.ca web design in Toronto. Learn more about search engine optimization and internet marketing in easy, non-technical, up front English!