Complete Martial Arts Blog

So you have a brand new martial arts website that you want to start promoting but don’t know where to start. Sure, you can pay money and buy bunch of banners or text links but why not start with something free?

The very first place you want your site to be listed is in this Martial Arts Directory. This is by far the Largest martial arts directory that’s constantly being updated with new sites and gets a plenty of traffic from targeted audience. (You will have to link back to the site to be included)

Another place you want your site to be listed is Martial Arts Listings. You get to choose where you want your site listed and how you want your title and description to be displayed. It’s free to add your site, for now, and it doesn’t require you to link back to the site.

You want more? How about joining a Top 50 Martial Arts Sites and let the world know why your site should be ranked higher than others.

How about some free martial arts traffic? You can join a Martial Arts Banner Exchange program. Your banner will be displayed at other martial arts sites and will get great exposure. You get bonus impression to get you started.

Join a Martial Arts Forum and put your website link on your signature. The more you post, more your links will be visible to other people interested in martial arts.

Not only will those get you free traffic from targeted audience, it will also help you raise your Google Page Rank.

We can talk more about the paid advertising and Page Rank at another time.

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Now that you’ve decided to start your own martial arts website, what kind of hosting do you need?

Before you choose to go with a hosting company, you need to figure out your hosting need, so you can do apple to apple comparison.

Hosting companies offer several options. The most popular and cheapest option is Shared.

The advantage of shared hosting is that they put your website on a same server with hundreds, if not thousands, of other sites. Since all the websites are sharing the same server, you also share the cost of that server so the cost is very minimum, less than $10/month and sometimes even less.

The disavdantage of shared hosting is that sometimes you don’t have full access to the server root directory, since you are sharing with all others they can’t let you mess up for everybody else. This may or may not be a problem to most people. Other disadvantage is that your website may load a bit slower since other sites are being loaded at the same time. For this reason, if your site gets too much traffic, your hosting company will either tell you to move to more expensive hosting plan, if they are nice, or just kick you off their server, if they are nasty.

When you are getting too much traffic to share with other websites, you can choose to have the entire server to yourself. This option is called Dedicated Server Hosting, and can be very expensive depending on what type of server configuration you choose, and can run several hundred dollars a month.

The advantage is, you have full control over your server and you can host any many sites as you want and not have to share with anybody. You might even notice that your website loads faster on its own dedicated server.

The disavantage is obviously the cost and you may need some knowledge of running a web server. If not, there are hosting companies that offer you assistance. (Some may charge you separately while others just include it with your hosting fee)

And if you are too big for Shared but Dedicated Server is too much, some hosting companies offer you something in the middle called VPS, Virtual Private Server. Basically, it is still a shared hosting but you only share with 3 or 4, not hundreds and thousands of websites. You still get the full access to the server root and enjoy the full benefit of a dedicated server at fraction of cost, since you are sharing with few other guys in similar situation. The price is typically under $100/month.

For our website, we started off with shared hosting initially. However, as our traffic grew and our revenue grew, it made sense for us to move to a dedicated server. We did have few problems during UFC events when our site brought down the entire shared server so they “made” us move to a dedicated server few years ago. We still have plenty of capacity on this sever for this website so we also host many of our other sites on this server as well. So far, we’ve upgraded twice to a faster machine with more memory and we should be OK for now.

The lesson here is, the hosting cost is minimal compared to running your business. If you have outgrown your old shared hosting, make the smart investment to dedicated server or faster server to grow with your business.

Maybe we will discuss hosting companies at a later time.

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Did you know that when you type “yourdomain.com” or “www.yourdomain.com”, they seem to both point to your website, but they are not the same?

Why would this matter?

To the search engine, they are actualy treated as two different sites and you are not getting the full credit for the incoming links or traffic. (It’s like two sites splitting your credit into 2)

Here is our site indexed by Google with www.

Google Index

Here is our site indexed by Goole without www.

Google Index

Even though we used the trick below to keep the numbers exactly the same, they are still slightly different.

One way to avoid this is to make sure yourdomain.com is always transferred to www.yourdomain.com so one site gets all the credit. Is one better than the other? That’s debatable and probably not.

Here is how you would automatically point yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com by editing your .htaccess file.

AuthName www.completemartialarts.com
IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^completemartialarts\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.completemartialarts.com/$1 [R=301,L]

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We have over 5,300 martial arts sites categorized in our Directory. It was done through a search bot (similar to all the ones used by Yahoo and Google) that goes to all the sites, captures their title, description, and contents to look for martial arts keywords and report back to us whether certain sites should be listed in our directory or not.

Many times, some of the webmasters don’t bother to even put the title of their website which makes it difficult for people or search bots to know what that site is about.

So, our recommendation #1 is make sure your site has the proper title for your site. This should be very easily done by adding this line of code at the top of your main hompage code. Your title is typically the name of the site.

[Title] CompleteMartialArts.com [/Title]

It’s also our recommendation that your other pages have a unique title of its own, that is different from your main title. For example, if you have an About Us page then something like.

[Title] About Us - CompleteMartialArts.com [/Title]

That way, both the human visitors and search bots will easily know what that page is all about.

Here are all of our pages indexed by Google. Notice the different titles for all the pages.

Google Index

If you want to see how many pages of your website is indexed by Google, click on the link above, change the site to yours (site:www.yourdomain.com)

Hope this information helped you in someways and look forward to your comments.

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This blog is dedicated to all martial arts site webmasters.

Our main site www.completemartialarts.com has been around since 1999 and is one of the largest and one of the most popular martial arts sites on internet.

We want to share whatever we’ve learned over the years with other martial arts site webmasters. We also want to hear from you on what worked for you and what hasn’t. Feel free to leave your comments whether you agree or disagree. We want to hear from you.

Please come back often as we will continue to add new materials on regular basis.

Popularity: 100% [?]