I've been hosted with Blacknight for two years now and I'm very happy with the service.

Yesterday and today I was installing WordPress and bbPress on the same domain for a blog/forum solution. I was trying to set up seo friendly permalinks on bbPress all day yesterday with no success. Lots of people have had problems with getting seo friendly permalinks set up on bbPress. I could have used another forum solution but I wanted a blog on the site too and nothing integrates with WordPress as well as bbPress. I contacted Blacknight's support at 11.52 this morning and Jonathan had the issue resolved by 11.59.

He checked the ftp error logs and highlighted the fact that the server did not support Multiviews

[Thu Jul 22 12:41:28 2010] [alert] [client 86.46.136.168] /usr/local/pem/vhosts/xxxxxx/webspace/httpdocs/forum/.htaccess: Option MultiViews not allowed here

I removed this from the bbPress .htaccess file and this fixed the problem immediately. So a 7 minute turn around time for something that I was trawling forums for all day yesterday. If you need a working .htacess file for bbPress for a blacknight hosted solution feel free to contact me and I'll send it on.

This isn't the first time I've dealt with Blacknight support. The last time I had problems with Wordpress .htaccess and Jonathan also helped me fix the issue.

So if you're looking for web hosting in Ireland, I would thoroughly recommend blacknight! Just wish I contacted them yesterday

Since adding my blog to all of the major search engines and doing some seo, I've seen a significant increase in my blog traffic already. I haven't had any direct hits from any search engines as yet but today's traffic increased to 3 times the previous daily high for unique visitors since starting this blog. The number of referrals from other sites such as my Twitter Account has gone up slightly but not enough to warrant that level of increase.

photo credit: Daniel*1977

I wondered was it because I changed my settings to inform search engines each time I added a new post, but most of the traffic looks like it's coming from people and not robots as it's just 2 to 3 page views only. I've also searched for my site using Google and Yahoo and it doesn't look like it's indexed yet so I'm surprised with the level of increase. No complaints though as this is what I set out to do with the seo and with adding my site to the search engines. I'm not sure exactly how this happened but I'm sure as I start becoming more familiar with Google Analytics, I'll get a better idea of where the traffic is coming from (if it keeps up )...

I installed Google Analytics on this site today as I'll hopefully be using it on the first of my new 'potential' partnerships, one of which I've already completed a guest post for. There's no point in me doing nothing about it now and then torturing my new partner with tons of questions on how things work when I can use the time now to familiarise myself with tools/plugins/widgets I know I'll be using when we go full steam ahead with the project.

I mentioned a couple of days back that I had now gained direction on where my blog is going and that I wanted to gain the trust of my readers. It looks like I've achieved this, as the site owner has created a WordPress user account for me and I've been adding some content there already. There's a lot more work done on that site than this blog in terms of SEO so I had a look about at what was installed and used it as a guide.

photo credit: marciookabe

When you sign up for Google Analytics, you're provided with a piece of code, simply paste this in to the bottom of your footer.php file above the call to footer and teh closing body and html tags, and you're good to go. I've already got aws stats installed as part of my hosting account so it'll be interesting to compare the two and see which I prefer. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been looking at how much traffic this site is getting already (the numbers are low ) but I'm starting afresh now with Google, and I'll try and use it as motivation to drive more traffic to this blog.

Next thing I did was install the seo all in one plugin. I configured the all in one seo plugin using this video tutorial as a guide. I should have done this earlier as I'll have to go back through my blog posts and add sef (search engine friendly) titles, descriptions and keywords to each one of them. But anything that gets me more good traffic makes this effort worth while.

photo credit: K2D2vaca

Finally, I added the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which generates a sitemap that is recognised by all the major search engines and makes your blog easier to search and index. The installation is easy, there's some tips here and all you need to do is add two files: sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz to the root of your blog and make them writeable. The sitemap is then auto-generated each time you do a new post. I'll be having a closer look at the configuration at a later date.

One more thing I did do was remove robots.txt from the root of this site. I had i it there to stop search engines indexing this site until I had enough content but it's time to pick up some traffic now, so come on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and the rest of you come and find me...