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.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Part II, as continued from our previous week’s article:
http://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

Reading Time: 4 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 hairs. Don’t be a victim, rather invest in invest in proper, yet still economical, hosting.

B. Start with a solid framework/theme

The Twenty Fifteen theme { the default WordPress theme } is lightweight and quite speedy framework.. They keep the programming efficient & simple; compare that to some random bloated themes, which usually have lots of features that you will never use, but also slowing your site to a crawl.

C. Automatic image compression

Yahoo! Produced an image optimizer called “Smush”. It automatically and drastically reduces the file size of an image; without reducing quality.

Fortunately somebody coverted that into called WP-SmushIt which will process you images automatically – as you are upload them. This one should come standard with WordPress. There is no side-effect to installing this this plugin.

D. Install an effective caching plugin

WP-plugins, some of the best, fall under the caching category – as they drastically improve page loads times. All of them on WordPress.org are free & easy to use.

But our favorite, bar no others so far, is W3 Total Cache; it has all of the features you’ll need – and is extremely easy to install & use.

Simply install & activate, *and watch your page load faster*, as elements are cached.

E. Add LazyLoad to your images

LazyLoad is only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window are downloaded. Subsequently when reader scrolls down, the other images are then fetched; just before they scroll into view.
This will not only increase the speed of your page loads, it will also save bandwidth through loading less data for those who don’t scroll all the way down page.
To enable LazyLoad, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.

F. Optimize your homepage to load quickly

Your homepage is the most important part of your site, because people will be loading that page the most often.

Various things that you can do include:
· Reduce the number of posts on the page, such has showing between 5-7
· Showing excerpts instead of full posts
· Showing excerpts instead of full posts using the <p>read_more</p> tag.

Reading Time: 2 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.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

It has just turned Fall 2015, 3/4 of the year has passed, and we have seen many new developments in modern website design emerge.

The era of cluttered pages, information overloaded and packed with information are generally passing. The new focus has been on greater User Interface (UI) simplicity. Below is an overview of a handful of new hot trends we anticipate that we’ll be seeing more of as we enter 2016.

Since 2005, a decade or so ago, it was typical for various websites to basically have the same sort of general experience. There has always been diversity in color logos, images and typography, but aside from that most usually have the same menu across the top and/or down the side, and sub-menus contained in rectangles so that we can easily navigate the site structure.

Progressively, over time, UI web designers and layout artists have experimented and evolved designs. Each year new trends have emerged that have taken layouts and designs to new levels. Over the past year, we have seen some new trends emerge, which create dynamic & compelling user experiences.

The best web designers are now combining tried & tested elements with new creative techniques. The following trends and concepts, shown with screenshots, are presented individually, but these ideas can be combined in interesting & intriguing ways – and be the new layout methods for 2016.

A. Full Screen Video Splashes

While minimalistic designs are the new vogue, full screen videos and dynamic backgrounds are more often filling the void; a quick look from the visitor can be worth a hundreds of words, and quickly sets the intended mode of the website experience.

Advances in HTML5 are enabling brands to use videos in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Here is how Apple has used this to market its new Apple Watch.

Reading Time: 4 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: