Hosting Upgrade Considerations

4GHadmin | 24 May 2016
Reading Time: 2 minutes


4GoodHosting_upgradeIs your website becoming much more popular?



If you are searching for reliable yet inexpensive, and fast loading website hosting, “shared web hosting” or “V.P.S.” (Virtual Private Server hosting) service are two good, but not identical, options. The most common choice, to do it at rock bottom costs, shared hosting, but for many businesses the limitations of shared hosting eventually becomes outgrown.

Migrating from a shared server plan to a VPS (or an entirely “Dedicated” or “Standalone Server) is typically the next step.

4GoodHosintg provides free upgrade migration services; to solve any nervousness when you may decide to upgrade your website to its own server.

Some signs you have outgrown Shared Web Hosting:

Skyrocketting Traffic



For low traffic websites shared hosting is ideal. If you are noticing your traffic increase consistently, or if you are offering high-bandwidth content such as video(s); you may need to upgrade to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) for dedicated bandwidth, and for a lower-latency (faster) less congested network connections.

When your business/website grows in size: your email, disk space, CPU & RAM (Random access memory) requirements will also eventually surpass your existing shared hosting plan. The growth of your business will often dictate the need for upgrades.

Choosing between VPS and dedicated server



Perhaps you would feel best serving your website by renting your own private server (standalone web server with it’s own dual power supply). However, first consider the differences between VPS and Dedicated servers – to find out which one is best for your application; including cost, as VPS are less expensive than leasing dedicated equipment in our data center.

In either case, 4GoodHosting offers numerous advantages: such as 24/7 customer support, “RAID” hard drive and SSD redundancy, dual-coast back-ups, disaster recovery servers, plus the flexibility of upgrading or downgrading your server hosting package whenever you need with free migrations.

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JavaScript content isn’t indexed by Google; a recent Google admission

4GHadmin | 23 November 2015
Reading Time: 2 minutes

image70A 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:

gary-illyes-javascript
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.

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Google Analytics: Various ways empower your marketing efforts

4GHadmin | 28 September 2015
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Google-Analytics

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.

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Keep in mind search engines when changing your site

4GHadmin | 08 June 2015
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Dollarphotoclub_74648742Being mobile friendly is the current ‘big thing’ going on in terms of search engine ranking for websites. If you are not just doing simple updates to your website, but rather replacing large portions of it in full, there are considerations to keep in mind. Maybe you are just handing your site redevelopment to a third party?

There are several other things at play than what can be visually seen, replacing your site structure could bring down your site’s rankings causing it to drop in terms of SERPs (which are “search engine results pages”)

So the following are some tips and guidelines to follow in order to keep your site safe from new Google penalties and to get your site maximum visibility in Google. Unfortunately, we all have to become Google conformists. Our society, our global culture as a whole, unfortunately believes in continuous centralization of power. Resistance is apparently futile.

1. Create a website map of your site

The first step is understanding where everything is placed on your website. If you have implemented SEO methodology in the past, then most likely at least a few pages rank well SERPs, and you don’t want to lose those gains when your website structure changes.

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The benefit of socially enabling your website content

4GHadmin | 02 June 2015
Reading Time: < 1 minute

SocialIcons

 

Dear 4GoodHosting customers ,

As you probably are already aware of social media (ie. twitter, facebook, etc. ) is an extremely valuable tool for promoting your website content.

Other associated services, like ‘addthis’ and ‘sharaholic, make it 1-click simple to share content whether it be images, articles, comments, or other activities from websites to facebook, twitter, linkedin, pinterest and many more social media outlets as well. (as pictured above)

You have probably seen this in action already in many places on the internet. If you haven’t done so already, in this blog we are going to show you how to easily set up social media sharing buttons and tools on your website. By doing so you will be extending your website’s visibility and leveraging what is known as “inbound marketing”, or increasing your visibility from the inside-out (free) rather than the outside-in (paid). You already have great content on your site, so you want to leverage that fact. The following social media buttons/tools will help you fully enable that.

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The Often Untapped Power of “Inbound Marketing”

4GHadmin | 19 May 2015
Reading Time: 4 minutes

In this week’s blog we wish to describe some marketing techniques to help you market your website for free. For free? Yes. The advent of the internet has given birth to marketing techniques now known as “inbound marketing” – that doesn’t rely on funding traditional, often expensive, marketing campaigns.

Inbound marketing is an overall technique that a company, or perhaps just your personal website as well, can use to market itself through blog posts, seo optimization, press releases, electronic newsletters, whitepapers, social media, article writing and other similar creative methods that you might come up with. That is a list of marketing tools that don’t really require money upfront if you are willing to do the work to assemble and publish the materials. Inbound marketing is also commonly referred to as “content marketing” as well. Inbound marketing retains the benefit creating value from the very start of the interaction with prospective customers.

In short, Inbound marketing is pretty much all about creating, publishing, and sharing content (also posted in a discoverable way typically through search engines) around the internet.

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The easiest way to boost your google ranking and mobile user experience

4GHadmin | 04 May 2015
Reading Time: 5 minutes

 

device 4

Small Smartphone screens count bigtime too!

We could have entitled this article “The need for pleasing your website visitors who are using mobile device”, and perhaps that would be a better title. In any case the message of this article is to persuade you that it is basically critical to your business not only to have a website – but to also have a mobile website. So we urge you to consider the little investment in time and the little bit extra per month to develop a mobile friendly website.

Would this mean that your website could require two domains? The answer to that is no. It is actually a better practice to use a single domain and then use an intelligent piece of javascript code on your website to determine if the viewing device is a smartphone or a larger device such as a laptop or a desktop PC or Mac.

For example, if you go to Amazon.com on your mobile device, you will see a different layout than the larger pages you would see on a desktop monitor. If people were required to “pinch and zoom” on their small screens ( to read very small font, or to have to scroll left and right and up and down to read the site content ) – then Amazon would be losing out on many of their sales that come through iphones, and androids, windows phones, and other such devices.

See for yourself if Google considers your website to be mobile friendly:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Go ahead and try your website in the google tool above. Did your website pass the test?

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April 21st – Another Big Google Ranking Change (for mobile equipped sites)

4GHadmin | 09 March 2015
Reading Time: 2 minutes

mobile in hands, mouse and keyboardApril 21st is another ‘big SEO day’ around the world from a google ranking index perspective. Why a month and two weeks from the date of this article? Well, that is when Google will be changing the technique that they use to rank websites (with a higher high ranking factor given to websites that are also mobile friendly).

Google started highlighting ‘mobile friendly sites’ in results last year. Google states that their April 21st update will have ”significant impact” on all mobile-based searches from all around the world. Google justifies the change in saying that searchers will see better search results.

Details on how ranking will effect desktop searches is yet to be seen; but it is anticipated that websites that are also mobile friendly will be given extra elevation by Google’s new algorithm.

These changes are good news for mobile webmasters. Also, it should help motivate webmasters and designers that still don’t have a mobile website deployed to create one.

Since the middle of this past year – mobile internet users started outnumbering those who surf the web with a desktop computer (or laptop). Today’s mobile users certainly expect that websites will display most effectively on their choice of device. Webmasters who want to test their website’s ‘mobile compatibility’ can use Google’s tools for detailed information.

Overall the change means that owners of websites that are not ‘mobile-friendly’ as of April 21st, 2015 can now expect to see their search rankings and traffic take a significant downward hit.

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SEO, the past, the present, and your website’s future…

4GHadmin | 16 February 2015
Reading Time: 4 minutes

The-Future-of-SEO

This is a primer for most of you who are interested in but maybe still unfamiliar of what is meant by the the three letter acronym, SEO, which is short for “Search Engine Optimization”; its history and current day evolution.

Over the past 25 years, the way we live and work has been utterly transformed by the creation and evolution of the world wide web or “internet”. As the volume of online content has soared, search engines have become central and essential and critical to an infinite number of our online “web surfing” searches & experiences.

SEO is an Internet marketing strategy, and takes into account how search engines are programmed (and updated) to function, what people are most likely to search for, the actual search phrases or keywords entered into search engines – and specific for each target audience.

So let’s quickly travel back a quarter-of-a-century to a time before tags, keywords, “backlinks”. clickthrus, and content optimization – to explore how SEO has changed and developed over time -> and what those changes now appear to tell us about the future!

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Canadian VPS Hosting: What’s It All About?

4GHadmin | 13 January 2015
Reading Time: 6 minutes

4goodhosting_canadianvps

If you’ve been on the hunt for a web hosting company, you’ve probably heard the term “virtual private server.” A VPS is similar to a dedicated server in look and feel as a web host customer, but essentially they are a different service.

Canadian web hosts offer fast broadband speeds, good technical support, and friendly service. Canada’s infrastructure and Internet backbone are among the world’s top 10 services. You won’t find better service in North America, but what type of service should you get?

Why Move On from Shared Hosting?

If you currently use shared hosting, these plans are great for simple blogs or websites that don’t get much traffic, but there are some disadvantages with shared hosting. First, you share the same servers with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of other customers and their sites. Shared hosting is inherently slower, because you have hundreds of other sites using the server’s resources. If one site gets hacked, your site could be vulnerable if the site left a security hole on the server as a whole. Basically, you are at the mercy of several other site owners, and you have no options.

Next, you can’t customize your server’s settings. Maybe you have a custom API, maybe you have specific site settings, or maybe you just want to set up multiple sites on one account. All of these aren’t possible with shared hosting. VPS gives you these options.

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