Author: 4GHadmin

November 30, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

This is going to be a two-part article about equal in size, with Part II coming next week; with so much to cover, we don’t want to overwhelm you or overwhelm ourselves in putting it all together all at once. Topics were ordered in random order, as every different site needs varying amounts of different things. Many of these ideas are in alignment with Searchmetrics’ 2015 Ranking Factors report; which has placed extra emphasis on optimization for mobile this year. Perhaps you are using the same SEO techniques and strategies from yesteryear? Or maybe lessons learned from 2010? 2015 was a tumultuous year in the world of SEO. It truly is hard to stay on top of it all. We have witnessed some significant shifts over the past years when it comes to getting your link landing on that coveted first page. Successful ranking optimization doesn’t happen automatically, unless you hire a professional. If you don’t have the time or ability to adapt simultaneously to Google updates and other changes in the world wild web. Part I of this report will cover much of you will need to know about search ranking optimization in 2016. A) Keywords within content: Continue to use your site specific set of keywords throughout your content. One thing that likely will never change is the basic fact that proper search keywords you have identified for your site should be implemented smartly into your content; definable in the title, in headers and sub-headers, introduction & conclusion paragraphs. According to the most recent Searchmetrics report, top-ranking pages increased the total set of identifiable keywords integrated into the body of page texts. Keywords are one of the most important ranking factors, but not all of them. You should devote time to understanding the rest of the techniques listed below and in next week’s Part II. B) Content structure: Properly structuring content in the most logical way possible is good for both rankings and also for user experience. There are a number of ways to iron-out optimal structure for your content: * Use un-ordered lists (bulletpoint; <li> tags ) to clearly section the page information into more readable chunks....

November 23, 2015

Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A representative from Google tweeted out something many Webmasters and SEO-minded people have usually presumed there was no issue with. However, in the case of having your page content indexed by the Google search engine, for best results your content should be plainly visible on the page as it loads, instead of being hidden in on-screen widgets that are typically programmed in Javascript. The representative, Gary Illyes, said in his tweet that Google doesn’t consider (or ‘index’ in search engine lingo) content that is programmed into Javascript. So, basically if important parts of your content are embedded in Javascript code, then you may want to reconsider the design of your website. This doesn’t imply that Javascript functionality isn’t ‘worth it’. It most likely is. Only if say 20% of your content is hidden by it until the viewer clicks “see more” or “expand”, then it might be worth trying another design technique. Google “won’t see the content behind tabs if the content under the tab is dynamically generated.” What did Google precisely admit in their most recent statement? Gary Illyes of Google said on Twitter: “ If you put content in a Javascript array and only expand them when you click e.g. ‘…’, those contents won’t be indexed by Google.” Here is a snapshot of his November 4th tweet: How can you check if Google is indexing your web pages? If Google cannot index your web pages fully or correctly, your web pages probably won’t rank as high as they probably would rank otherwise. It is a good idea to check if Google, and other search engines, are indexing your pages in full - and that your pages contain everything that the various search engine robots expect or require when spidering over your website. If you’d like help with your SEO efforts, please write us at support (at) 4goodhosting.com and we’d gladly consult and provide a quote to you for SEO optimization for your website.

November 16, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System). Sometimes though, if the proper precautions are not taken into account or if not used in the most optimized way, you could ultimately end up with a slow loading site. For repeat visitors, that could be a major turn off - and by that fact alone, could cause you to lose subscribers and customers. Also slow loading sites, in Google’s eyes, do receive a negative ranking factor. This article could go on for pages, but the point will be to cover the top dozen ways that have been discovered to visibly tune up and speed up WordPress. Speed Is Important in several ways When a visitor opens your site for the 1st time, there is really only a few seconds to capture their attention and convince them to continue navigating the site. Microsoft’s Bing conducted a survey regarding this. The report found that a “two second” extra delay in page loading and response diminished visitor satisfaction by 4%, with as estimated lost revenue per visitor of 4.3%, and a inhibited page clicks by about 5%. If your site just takes “too long” to load, most people will just click off or back to the rest of their search results; before your website even had a chance with them. It is worth repeating that Google now includes site speed as a significant factor in its ranking algorithms. Therefore a websites’ speed has an effect on SEO. So a slow site is reducing your business in two major ways. If you have a Wordpress site, how can we fix it? How can you tune-up WordPress? The following tips are not listed in order of speed or importance. I guarantee that using even a few will help speed up your site. A. Choose 4GoodHosting to make sure you are on a fast underutilized server When just getting your feet wet, a shared host with overloaded servers might seem like a bargain. It comes at another cost: painfully slow site speed and all too frequent down time.. Periodic stress of having your site frequently slowing or going down is enough to create a some more gray...

November 9, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Recently thought up a brilliant idea for a new website and/or product? Maybe you have already brainstormed a fantastic new website name, come up with a clever slogan, and dreamed up the website design... Then the moment of truth, after typing it into a “whois” search, you find out that the domain is “already taken” or “unavailable”. Generic domain names are often held by domain brokers, or individual domain holders, so many of the best names are either already being used, or are sold at a premium price for thousands of dollars. This is amazingly all too common. Despite all the doom & gloom, stories like these can have happy endings. Rather than having to make your choices from a limited selection of generic domains, now you can choose from other domain extensions, known as TLD (top level domains). By thinking outside the box, you can choose a domain name that you like and serves the full purpose of your website. For example, maybe your passion in life is playing folk music on acoustic guitar and making the world a better place through your music. You dream up the perfect domain name and it is meandmyguitar.com, but when you go to register it you find out that is already ‘taken’. Oh no! Now you are faced with a number of options.... Solution #1 Add hyphens, numbers, or any 1 character of difference so you can register something similar to your intended domain. For example, me-and-my-guitar.com or perhaps myguitarandme.com. However these URLs are slightly more difficult to remember and users might have a hard time navigating to your website; unless they are looking you up through a search engine like google. Solution #2 Add 1 or a couple more words to your desired domain until you find one that is available. After some experimentation you’ll find that, and meandmytrustyguitar.com or justmeandmyguitar.com are both possibilities. However, short domain names are best of course; a domain name that is too long can be difficult for some people to type in correctly. read_more Solution #3 Chose a domain extension that is also relevant to your website. With just a passing glance at the search...

November 2, 2015

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Do you already have a blog? If so, you might have a potential money-maker on your hands. When you find yourself investing your time & energy into something like a blog, it’s only natural that you eventually get paid for it, not only to help sustain yourself, but to also be able to push yourself further to offer more. A blog by itself meets all the criteria of a full website, and therefore it is possible to use it to create a small business. By posting interesting, high-quality content, and by adding in the right measures for optimizing SEO (Search Engine) exposure, you can gain hundreds if not thousands of visitors. If you have a stream of visitors, you can you convert that into a revenue stream. So how do you go about making money with blogs? Here we list the most popular advertising techniques that paid bloggers utilize daily: The quality of your content should never be compromised for the sake of advertising revenue. If your content becomes overpopulated with advertising techniques then it will only corrupt the flow of your content, it will seem too commercialized and you will surely lose readers over it. 1. Create or Promote a Product A great way to earn money is to produce and ship a product and make some extra money from that. It can be a digital (downloadable) product too; such as e-book or even an online course. Creating your own digital or physical product as a blogger should be an exciting path to online success. Types of products a blogger might create and sell: Retail (or wholesale) merchandise Ebooks, Webinars, Online Courses Software, Plugins, Apps Video, Audio, DVD Reports Note: a successful product launch also begins with great timing. You probably will feel a sense of urgency in introducing your service or product, but rushing could also foil your ambitions. If after second thought, postponing your product launch until everything is perfectly in place could mean the difference between experiencing no traction or receiving glowing reviews. 2. Use of Affiliate Marketing What is affiliate marketing? It’s very likely that you’ve heard it before. Affiliate marketing is the process of...

October 19, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The goal of generating new content is firstly getting as many eyes as you can get onto. Simply, the more the better. The more popular your content becomes also means more people coming through your website; which means more exposure of your brand, and therefore increasing revenue over time. Content campaigns typically encounter, at one point or another, a leveling out of visitors per day; even when introducing new topics and consistently good/original material. Basically it is difficult to get as much exposure for your content as you would otherwise like. If you are recently starting out, the reality is, no matter how much your would like to believe otherwise, original and great content won’t maximize the number of readers all by itself. At some point there needs to be some kind of initial spark, for attracting first rounds of visitors; who can then spread the word on their social media pages. Providing this ignition spark requires extra work on your part. However, we are outlining a handful of effective methods (below) to help you fast-track on your new content marketing efforts. If you follow these steps periodically, the greater the compounding effects will be. Whenever you post a new piece of content, pursue these some of the following ideas to expand its reach and increase your blog (and brand) exposure: read_more A. Create new links from other sources to the content piece. Your content is fresh, which means it doesn’t have much traction or authority on its own. To give it a little extra boost at the beginning of its life, try linking to it from multiple different sources. This will give more direct foot traffic to the page in addition to improving its authority in search engines. Start by interlinking it with pages of your own site. For example, you might look back to similar posts you’ve written in the past on your blog, and use those as opportunities to link to your new post. Then, look for opportunities in blogs and forums outside your own site—just be sure that those opportunities add value to the visitors who encounter them. Never post a link to your new content...

October 12, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Google, as the main search engine on the internet, is in competition to provide the best listing of results for each particular search query. To perform this, Google, and other search engines, calculate various parameters of each unique webpage. One such recently critical parameter is the reputation, and trustworthiness, of a “backlink”, which includes the quality and uniqueness of the surrounding content. Along with the advent of search engines, since the beginning of the public internet itself, the stage was set for the emergence of different manipulation strategies being developed by SEO consultants and webmasters to achieve better ranking results. So for many years, an uncountable “tonnage” of irrelevant or ‘low-quality’ backlinks paved the way, temporarily at least, for webmasters to reach higher rankings. But each new algorithm update progressively changed the rules of the rankings. Regarding artificial or ‘spammy’ backlinks, with their “Penguin” update Google decided to get tough against backlink manipulations. Initially, they decided not to pass “link juice” (which can be considered as “ranking credit”) through spammy backlinks. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of websites across the board and all around the world, would up penalized because of bought, irrelevant or poor-quality backlinks that were laid-down in the past. The more the link spam - the higher the penalty was. So how can you remove “Toxic Links” From Your Backlink Profile? Let’s first examine - how badly was your site penalized? If your position in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) has or is dwindling and you’re not yet sure why, it most likely involved a penalty. To reclaim valuable web traffic and therefore increase business, the best thing to do is to simply move forward. Listed below are the items and the process that you will need to follow, how to clean up your backlink profile, and ultimately how to achieve grace with Google, and possibly some of the various other search engines as well. A) Understanding Your Website’s Penalty If the number of business leads from organic traffic are declining, you are likely witnessing either a manual or algorithmic penalty from Google. In order to better resolve your website’s drop in traffic, it’s important...

October 5, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As part of establishing your business online, generating leads from an online source is vital. It is necessary to create an engaged list of email subscribers. In recent years, a large percentage of internet marketing professionals, have been predicting the demise of conventional email marketing, due to the sudden popularity of social media. However, it is a generally known fact, that 3/4 online business operators, still consider email marketing to be essential to their business. Other studies reveal that: 9 out of 10 consumers use email at least once per day. More than half of mobile purchases are influenced by email. These figures clearly paint the picture that maintaining an email list should be a part of your online marketing agenda. To attract mail-list subscribers, you need to offer something of value to entice them to enter in their email addresses. Free blog subscriptions are just not enough anymore. Besides a standard newsletter, here are some creative ideas to help out : Offering special content through digital downloads A digital download is usually, but not necessarily, a free giveaway that provides them additional content, typically a PDF e-book. A quick web search will show the available stand-alone applications and plug-ins for applications like WordPress for offering digital downloads. Another form of email list opt-in incentive is the “free user toolkit”. A toolkit is a bundle of useful tools that your subscribers can benefit from. It can include things like worksheets, spreadsheets templates, recipe books any free items you choose. You can bundle all of these items together; offering it as a .zip or .rar archive file. It is more of a tempting than a simple eBook. Free Email Course Offering an email course, for free, in order to add more subscribers on your email-list. You then build the opportunity to convert them into sales leads through your expertise about a particular subject. Many bloggers, marketers, and freelancers use free email courses to attract subscribers. People like email courses because they’re easier to learn from over time. Many such email courses last over 7-10 weeks; where list members receive 1 or 2 emails per week. If you would like to set...

September 28, 2015

Domain Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Google Analytics (GA) is the most popular website statistics and analytics application used by almost every other webmaster; 60% of the top million websites use it. However, most use it lightly, and don’t use GA to it’s potential. Some studies have shown that 8 out of 10 of ecommerce webmasters are using GA in a non-optimal manner. Simply viewing daily/hourly traffic statistics, page views, and identifying sources of traffic is only a very basic way of using GA. As a webmaster, you can utilize GA in a more advanced manner to derive useful insights that you can use to fine tune your marketing campaigns and traffic strategy. In this post, we will discuss a few ways to use the information generated by GA to fine tune your SEO, improve your website’s content structure, and thereby generate increased traffic. A) Keyword Reports You can increase your website’s traffic by using the most relevant keywords within your content; you can use the keyword report in GA. To view this report, click on “Traffic Source Keyword Report” within GA. This is where you can locate the top keywords that are bringing traffic to your website or blog. We suggest you focus on just the top ten keywords, those bringing in the most traffic. These are the keywords that your website ranks well in Google. The objective is to improve the click-through rate, CTR, for these keywords. To improve the CTR keywords: · Use these high traffic keywords in your page title and description. Keep your page titles about 55 characters, and meta descriptions less than 156 characters. · Create more blog content using your high traffic keywords. · Use these keywords in the titles of the images on your website. · Use these keywords as alternate tags in the images on your website. · Make these keywords a part of the anchor text of your internal website links. · Understand the ways in which people are searching for high impression keywords, then create content that is useful for those people. read_more B) Referral Reports: Divide your website traffic into 3 categories: referral traffic, organic search traffic, and direct traffic. Use the “Traffic Source...