SEO Company ripped me off

Today the director of Chameleon Web Services interviewed an SEO consultant for a position here at Chameleon.

The things that came out of the meeting shocked and scared us. We are not going to name and shame but the SEO company that the SEO consultant worked for certainly should not be trusted.

The campaign program that is set out by the SEO company is not aimed to make the client gain rankings but more to put money in the pocket of the SEO director.

The shocking truth that we were told was that the payments are taken monthly yet the SEO work is not carried out and then after 4 to 5 months an Xrummer type link building software is carried out costing a few hundred dollars and then a report sent to the client showing an amazing amount if links.

Then again at 11 months the same again. No results gained in terms of Rankings yet lots of money paid out for SEO.

Chameleon work very hard and our profits are tight and when we hear things like this it makes us want to work much harder as we will gain in the long run as we have clients sites on page one of google ain all sectors.

FastHosts Down Again

Our clients using FastHosts are contacting us today again saying things are not working.

The problems we face with this is that we spend hours looking into things that out of our control.

FastHosts is one of the larger hosting companys but it seems that they are effected by Downtime more than others.

Fasthosts Internet Ltd has warned UK businesses not to spam their customers with unsolicited newsletters and marketing emails as this is a growing concern on the same day that issue this statement the service fails. One could look at this and think that could see a failure coming sooner than later as the growing number of spam emails continues. Every hosting company has a limit to what it can handle.

The FastHosts Status Website states on Tuesday 13th September 2011 (13.09.2011):-

System Issues

Under Investigation: Virtual Servers Log Entry 1000006667

Some customers may currently be experiencing issues connecting to their virtual servers. Our engineers are working on this as a priority and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Our engineers have identified the problem and are working to restore full service to affected servers as a priority. The majority of servers are now online, but may be operating with reduced performance. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

This issue is presently under investigation:

Systems Affected:

Shared Hosting Network

————————————

Fasthosts is one of the leading hosting provider which is a subsidiary of the global company Fasthosts Internet LTD.

Fasthosts is based in the UK and operates a 24×7 service for their dedicated UK data centers.

Fasthosts hosts over 1 million domains and provides services for over 42 million emails each day.

Fasthosts services include domain registrations, shared web hosting, business-class email, virtual servers, dedicated servers, software-as-a-service, online back-up, secure online storage and unlimited broadband.

Finger crossed Fasthosts gets things back up soon.

Fasthosts Website Down | Fasthosts problems | FastHosts Hosting Down

 

Groundhog Day Song

At work we all at times feel like this is groundhog day. We found on YouTube a music video called “Groundhog Day Song” and this is great.

The guy Richard Warren from the UK is singing about his working activites with a video to go with it.

To watch the groundhog day music video song visit:- http://youtu.be/g7GwoYM1GeA

 

Google Apps mail servers MX Records

To deliver mail to Gmail inboxes, configure your domain to route incoming
messages to the Google email servers. To do that, add MX records that point to
the Google servers shown in the table below.

See Creating MX records for details
about adding MX records to your domain.

Priority Mail server
1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM
10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM

Note: The values in the Priority column show the
relative priorities of the Google servers. The values do not need to be
exactly those shown in the table; different domain providers have different
systems for setting MX record priority. Regardless of the system,
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM must be the top priority record.

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=174125

Configuring Your MX Records with GoDaddy.com for Google Mail

A mail exchange (MX) record identifies a server that handles email messages
for your domain. A domain has one or more MX records listed in priorty order.
When someone sends an email message to your domain, the sender’s mail server
delivers it to the first available server in the priority list. You create new
MX records, or change their priority, in order to change how email is processed
for the domain. (Learn more about MX records
and mail server priority
.)

You create MX records using the administration tools available from your
domain provider.

If you purchased your domain from
GoDaddy while signing up for Google Apps, do not use these instructions. Google
will automatically configure the MX records for your domain when you activate
email in the Google Apps Control Panel.

There are two ways to create MX records for the Google Apps mail servers when
GoDaddy hosts your domain:

To manually create MX records for a domain hosted by GoDaddy:

    1. Log in to your account at http://www.godaddy.com by clicking the My
      Account
      tab.
    2. Under the Domains header, find the domain you’re using with
      Google Apps. Click (Advanced Details) to the right of this
      domain.
    3. Under the DNS Manager header, click
      Launch.
    4. In the MX (Mail Exchanger) section, click Quick
      Add
      .
    5. Add an MX record for each mail server in the table below.
      Priority Mail
      Server
      1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
      5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
      5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
      10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
      10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

      For each MX record, make sure to:

      • Enter the corresponding priority in the Priority field.
      • Enter an @ sign in the Host field.
      • Enter the fully qualified server name of the email server—such as
        ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.—in the Points to field. Include a period at
        the end of the server name.
      • Select 1 Hour from the TTL drop-down list.
    6. Delete any existing MX records, or lower their priority. For now, we
      recommend that you keep all existing MX records, but lower their priority.
      Later, once you have tested your service and confirmed mail flow, you can delete
      these records to ensure that mail flows through the new mail server(s).
    7. Once you’ve added all 5 MX records in the table, click Save Zone
      File
      at the top or the bottom of the page.

GoDaddy screenshot

Congratulations! Your new MX records now point to Google. Keep in mind that
changes to your DNS settings can take up to 24 hours to propagate through the
Internet, but depending on your host, this can happen faster.

If you have difficulty creating MX records, contact GoDaddy for
assistance.

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=33353

UK based Company Success – Innocent

Three Cambridge graduates back in 1998 had an idea of a money making business selling smoothies. They tested the water at the London music festival buying five hundred pounds worth of fruit and using this fruit created smoothies and sold them all over the weekend of the festival. As a gimmick and bit of fun they asked customers who purchased the smoothies to put their empty smoothie bottle in a yes bin or a no bin with the aim to see if they thought should give up their current jobs. The yes bin was full and they resigned the next day. They setup the company under the name Innocent as they wanted the product to suggest that it was pure, fresh and unadulterated and the name has been well received. The Innocent company now sells two million smoothies a week to over 7,000 shops and has a turnover of £100 million and this success is thanks to the three Cambridge graduates trying to make something that seemed a good idea work.

How many of us have these ideas every day and never do anything about it. We have helped so many clients now live that dream with our website design skills, search engine optimisation skills and marketing know how.

Best London SEO Company

London the heart of the UK for business with large companies such as HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, BT, BP, Hilton Group, Scottish & Southern, Royal Dutch Shell to name a few give London a great area to operate a business from as London based companies tend to have large budgets and amazing projects to carry them out.

But in these hard times London based companies are turning to the second city looking for cost saving for Web Design and SEO and this is one reason that Chameleon being one of the leading UK based SEO companies based in Birmingham is carrying out more and more work for London companies. The best London SEO Company might be operating in Birmingham and with reduced rates due to not having London overheads means that companies are saving and gaining using one of the best Search Engine Optimisation Companies in the UK.

Chameleon has a proven track record for success with London clients and the SEO services that have been delivered for London business outlets can be seen as you search in Google.co.uk and find business after business with the Chameleon stamp on it.

Contact Chameleon today if you are looking for the best London SEO company.

Business Success – Tyrells Potato Chips

One of the strangest success stories over the past few years for UK based companies is the story of William Chase. His farming failure made him success by creating some of the most amazing crisps that nation loves. William Chase bought his father’s farm in Herefordshire called Tyrells Court back in 1984 when he was only 20. The business followed the trend of most farms back in the 1990’s and he was soon declared bankrupt after struggling for a few years. The success came when William borrowed an old fryer from a local fish and chip shop to see if he could make crisps from his potatoes that were officially scrap 10 years later and in 2003 he invested £1.5m into the crisp making venture with no looking back. The theory was to offer customers crisps with no pesticides and fully traceable ingredients all natural from the UK and this won the hearts of the UK and today the annual turnover is over £10 million with upmarket shops selling 500,000 bags a week. William’s success might also be down to the flavours that he decided on such as cider vinegar and sea salt and the much loved Ludlow sausage with wholegrain mustard. William Chase has not had an easy run and fought a legal battle and won against Tesco’s when they tried to sell the crisps without permission and he won.

WordPress Fatal error: Allowed memory size of ********* bytes exhausted

If you have problems with WordPress and you get the error message WordPress Fatal error: Allowed memory size of ********* bytes exhausted then you have a few options.

1. If you have access to the PHP.ini file, change the line within the PHP.ini which controls the allocated memory 32M try 64M:
memory_limit = 128M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB)

2. If you do not have access to PHP.ini try adding to the .htaccess file:
php_value memory_limit 128M

3. Try adding this line to your wp-config.php file:
Increasing memory allocated to PHP
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘128M’);

4. Talk to your hosting provider if you still have issues.

How much does SEO Cost

If you have an online business at some point you will need SEO. SEO is Search Engine Optimisation and if you do not know what this is find out what SEO is all about.

When a company quotes an SEO project there are so many factors that will effect the price that it is impossible to give a fixed quotation. Why is this, well simply put every website is different and the keywords that the SEO project is also different.

When we quote for an SEO project we look at the website itself in terms of domain name age and backlinks, number of pages, how often the pages get cached by Google at that time, the number of pages already in Google, does the site have a blog, etc

We then look at the competition and pick to pieces the competitions website pretty much the same as we do do for the domain we are going to be working on.

If the difference between the site we are working on and the existing sites, the competition then it will take more effort and time to get the site at the same level and then some.

We look at so many factors that when we quote an SEO compaign it can take us a couple of days to finalise a price. But the good thing is that Chameleon will come back with a price that is going to work.

We also tell the truth upfront and be honest even if the client doesnt like what they are hearing. Sometimes things are not possible with the budgets given, and we always explain this and will not start a project and then under achieve.

SEO costs vary a lot depending on how many backlinks are required to catch up with the competition. Chameleon work on the theory thou that it is not all about numbers of links but quality and diversity. We invested a large amount of money into SEO satellite sites and these all hosted in varying registration names, hosting accounts and spread all over the world. Some of these website are used by leading SEO companies and our vision all those years ago has paid off for us.

SEO

SEO is very time consuming if carried out correctly and the costs can be high but you often need to invest to grow.

If you want to find out more information about what the costs are for your SEO project who not contact Chameleon.

Visit: https://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/contact.php