Category: Domain Related

December 14, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

One page that is most often visited on a website besides the front page is the “About [Us] Page”. People want to know where a particular website is coming from, so they can better judge and trust the source of information or your business. However, most websites don’t utilize the “About Us” page to better form a relationship with their visitors. It is often used to present important key information about yourself and/or your business. It is a page that can help you form more of a personal connection with each of your visitors. If people can relate to you or have respect for the history of your business, they will be much more inclined to do business with you. Be Humble When you elaborate about yourself, your accomplishments, or your business, you should do that in a way that won’t turn off your readers. If you just list your accomplishments, that will likely be off-putting to your readers; which will make it harder for them to relate to you. A way around just listing your accomplishment is to speak of your accomplishments inside of a story, the more humorous the better. The focus of your About Page should really be about your visitors People like to have the focus on themselves as well. If your about page just talks yourself and your accomplishments if will be like have a conversation with somebody who is just talking about themselves. So try a different approach and try to make your “About” page about your visitors. One way to do that is to tell them all about the benefits they will gain if they keep reading your website. The aim is to keep it as interesting as possible. If you address their needs right away, they will stick around. read_more Write with emotion and feeling, this will help to get them more fascinated about what your website is offering. Try to make your visitors feel like they are wanted and invited to be part of the action. When you can relate that you deeply understand a person’s needs; then it is much easier to get someone to join in and take action....

December 7, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Part II, as continued from our previous week's article: https://4goodhosting.com/blog/seo-clarity-2016/ I. Keyword Research There has been a significant change in SEO methods over the past year, but the aspects of keyword research have remained stable. You still want to identify the words & phrases that prospects are most often using to seek out your products and/or services. There are a variety of ways we can do this effectively: · Analyze your website analytics to identify the set of keywords that are already generating traffic to your site, particular which keywords are most likely generating sales. Then use that information to find new, related keywords, and to build additional content based on those words. · Use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Searchmetrics’ Keyword Analysis tool, SEMrush, Ubersuggest to compare popular keywords and phrases that are not overly competitive. · Focus on longer keywords; as more natural language searching becomes more popular. · Examine the competition’s top-ranking pages to identify which keywords they are targeting. J. Link Building The “old school” concept of link building, which mainly consists of reaching out to other sites to exchange links, or manually submitting your domain to web directories, and placing “spammy” comments and forum post, is still dead and buried, maybe forever. Savvy users know that these previous link building tactics are not only ineffective; they can cause ranking penalties to their site. However, the emergence of non-linked mentions (so called “implied links”) are now being considered in the ranking algorithms. This has changed the perspective across the industry on link building; and it has become apparent that building a brand is more important than building links. Business owners and marketers should be working towards organically building links through publishing high quality content. While the significance of back-links as a ranking factor is changing, they remain a significant ranking factor. Here are the content types that are most likely to accumulate a high number of links. These are: · Opinion forming journalism · Research-backed content · Long form content over 1,000 words read_more So, what techniques remain viable for link building aside from publishing fabulous content and then hoping it attracts eyeballs? Guest...

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 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...

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...