Category: Domain Related

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...

September 21, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

When building a new word-press website, template choice for your WordPress site is extremely important. WordPress.org now has an huge collection of both free and premium templates. In this ocean of choices, how do you best decide which is the right combination of template function and style for you? Premium template portals, usually have helpful search filters, that separate the themes into categories and sort them by functions or features so it helps to have a comprehensive idea of your criteria - determined by the type of website you are planning to launch: a business site, a personal or news blog, an internal site for content collaboration? read_more In this article we will go over the basics of picking and choosing among the many potential templates. Top concerns What is your budget for a premium template? Budget concerns are typically near the top of the list in regards to priorities for a particular project. You can find and download a free template, but don’t expect to find the best ones for free; although there are some gems out there. Fortunately, most premium WordPress themes are rather light in price for what you get; between $40 and $80. Of course hiring a developer for custom theme will cost much more. Custom themes are (usually) built mostly from scratch by a developer, and you’ll be paying a premium for labor. How particular you are about a precise look and feel and function; a custom theme can be quite costly. You can cut some corners and cost by by buying a premium theme and then having your hired helper fine tune it and put some finishing touches on it. Corporate sites are generally clean, minimalist, conservative and stick to an overall color scheme that promotes trust and tranquility. Templates centered around design design are usually more artistic, colorful, and eccentric. Responsivity “Responsively designed” websites are those that render attractively across various screen sizes, regardless of screen size (and without mobile redirects). This is critical in this day and age of mobile devices. Make sure your template is designed for responsivity. Functionality Here we arrive at the really important stuff. What do you absolutelyneed...

September 14, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Blogging is the best way to regularly create new content on your website. But as it looks, most people set-up their website, and leave it as it is for years. A big percentage of people procrastinate content creation, not really having an understanding or care about the benefits of blogging to promote their business. Google has published the following stats: * About 50% of consumers who search on a mobile device visited that type store or business that same day *About 20% of consumers who perform a search for a local business make a purchase within a day So, business owners should be doing everything it takes to rank higher in internet search results. Some of the most important other strategies include being active on social media and getting listed on local review sites. The most important strategy it turns out is blogging for your business. People are looking for business that appear to be currently active, and who provide informative content concerning what they are interested in. Plus Google and perhaps other search engines too will likely give your web ranking results a boost due to providing fresh, relevant content. This article will go into details about the various blogging techniques used to rank higher in search results. read_more A. Host your article blog on your business’ main domain For optimal SEO benefits place your blog on your business’ domain. (such as “www.mywebsite.com/blog” or “blog.mywebsite.com”). Then if you are lucky enough to acquire inbound links to your blog, you gain links to your business’s main site. Since inbound links are a high ranking factor for websites, increasing the potential for inbound link activity is a good thing indeed. As your blog’s ranking increases, so does the overall net visibility of your website. B. Use keywords, topics targeting your target audience Keyword phrases have been, and will likely always be important for use, for each of your different website pages. But given the rise in usage of mobile phones, tablets and voice recognition technology, this type of technique is increasingly losing its touch. Consumers are likely going to be using natural language via their smart-phones more and more (think Cortana...

September 8, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Connecting with your target audience has always been important. Consumers have come to expect to see businesses on social media platforms... and if you are not e-socializing, then you are already trailing behind. However YouTube has not been the ”go-to” platform to boost business visibility, but trends have changed. YouTube has become increasingly popular for marketers focusing their social media energy. About 70% of business are using You Tube for informational, instructional, or basically marketing purposes. A. Starting a YouTube channel Before creating your channel, first think about your goals and what the purpose of your channel will be. Will it be for promoting your products? Help videos and tutorials? Entertainment or all of the above? Once you determine the best angle to take, then you are ready to start to create a You Tube account and set-up your channel. B. Create a YouTube Account To set up a YouTube channel, you will need to sign up for a Google Account. On Google click “Sign in” then “Create an account”. After that, you are good to go, time to start building your channel. C. The Name of Your Channel The name of your channel can determine whether your channel soars or barely gets aloft. It is usually a good idea to keep it simple and self-title it. Then, you can choose to add suffixes such as -TV and -vision to your name to ensure it stands out as a content-producing channel, for example Vancouver Landscaping TV. read_more D. Channel Description You will want to tell viewers what your channel is all about. The key is to create compelling content is to help your channel stand out from the million other channels. The first 100 characters or so of your description will be displayed on your YouTube, and in search engine results. Create a simplified description that highlights your key content first. F. Add Your Website Links In order for people to find your business, include web links. To link a website on your account, you will need to verify your account first. To do this, you’ll need to go to your Channel Settings and click on the “Verify” button. A...