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...

August 31, 2015

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The above diagram shows you the architectural difference between cloud hosting solution and traditional hosting solutions. Cloud service partitioning of the overall system stack, as outlined above, only started to become generally promoted in 2008-2009. Traditional dedicated servers, shared server hosting accounts, and VPS hosting were offered all over the internet more than full decade before the word ‘cloud’ became the latest buzzword. This article is a bit different than most every other ‘cloud hosting’ article published so far. How? Well, there has been alot of hype over the past several years about the cloud approach to web hosting. Although cloud hosting is becoming an increasingly popular method of web hosting, there are some disadvantages to that arrangement. As with each kind of hosting, there are pros and usually at least one drawback associated with each type; and each has a significantly different cost. Hosting a website in a public cloud offers some benefits that we will review below, but there is one very significant drawback - which is an inherent lack of control over security/privacy of a company’s business data. This means that your information could be vulnerable to hackers and unauthorized users. After all you would be storing your ‘private’ business information out there in some unknown rather geographical location in ‘the cloud’. Would you simply trust that? If you just have a small website, that showcases your company with some simple functionality such a contact form, then a traditional shared hosting account or VPS (Virtual Private Server) is completely adequate; as it has been for a long time. Shared hosting has been the status-quo since the late 1990s’. Regarding software applications and databases that deal with your actual business data: such as your customer lists, their ordering information, your customer’s personal information or credit-card/banking information, you would logically want that information to be kept ‘in-house’ or internal. Your company’s most important data is usually the proprietary software that your company has developed (usually at great expense), or your company’s entire customer database (which is usually tied together with your customer’s personal credit card or banking details). This is something that you would not normally want to have...

August 24, 2015

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

You may already have an established list of current and former clients for your business. Your website gets traffic, your phone rings, and over time your business grows. If you have a physical storefront as well, with floor traffic coming in the doors each day, best to try and not let any seeds of current or future opportunity just slip in an out. At the very least, try to get their email address. Before they leave, ask them to sign your guestbook or let them know that you would like to email them any future special offers. We’ll go over some techniques in the article to help you grow your email list for your business. However, if you are not providing your audience with a way for you to stay connected with them when they are at a distance from your business, then you are missing out on a valuable opportunity to maintain relationships with these customers or prospects. Ignoring them could dampen the growth that your business could otherwise achieve by continuing to inform or influence them concerning new promotions or things your business is doing. read_more Adding more than Social Media offers Facebook can really be a waste of time and effort in more ways than one. Twitter is less of a waste of time, but it can be difficult to get results from. Setting up a FB page or building up followers on Twitter is a struggle and at the end of the day/month many of those contacts can come and go - as you are really just borrowing them. Uncountable people have put days, weeks, and months into building their fan bases, but if one day Facebook decides to censor or limit your ability to deliver your message(s), you will be no better place than when you started. On the upside, by growing an email list, you will be able to direct your message like a laser beam and communicate with your audience exactly when you want and on your own terms. You will be contacting a fertile list people who might be interested in buying your products, signing up for services, or returning to your...

August 17, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Brand Branding Marketing Commercial Name Concept Branding is an important concept in marketing. It is a persistent form of advertisement and valuable for the continued success of your business. In this article we are going to explore it in depth. Most every company has a brand whether the owners or operators of it are aware of it or not. However, not every business has a brand that matters significantly. So what makes a brand “matter”? What qualities make a brand appear boring, and what makes some brands appear outstanding? Let’s examine what makes brands matter and how to possibly transform your brand from boring to brilliant. Understanding“Brand” Your company’s brand extends beyond a logo and what the colors and design of your website. Branding is what kind of feelings are invoked in the minds of people, the known reputation of your company; their positive, neutral, or negative thoughts are the backbone of your brand. So branding is a complex and difficult thing to measure. Apple Computer is of the best example of brand, so we’ll use it here again. When you think of Apple, you mostly like thing about modern, sleek, thin, elegant, and generally beautiful design. What does the Apple brand make you feel? In other words, think of your brand as the experience you deliver to your users. Brand is built on every aspect from looks to customer service to reliability. Increase your Branding How do you develop a brand that grabs people’s interest? It does take more than a fancy website and fancy logo. It takes asking the right questions. read_more A. Why is your business different? People have more choices than ever. Differentiating your brand is good idea. By catering to every type of customer you wind up strongly appealing to no one. But by taking a unique stand about what you believe is best, you can create a brand that others believe in as well. Think about it: Why would a customer choose you over the competition? B. Additional Value Statement(s) Your personal values likely are the core reasons for doing business in the first place. Why are you doing what...