About toxic links and the Google Disavow link tool

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Picture1Google, 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.

Ideas that incentivize your visitors to opt-in to your website’s email list

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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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 :

A. 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.

Google Analytics: Various ways empower your marketing efforts

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.

Insights into Selecting a WordPress Template

Reading Time: 3 minutes

wordpress-template-selectionWhen 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?

Blogging, an important search ranking factor

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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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.

YouTube: How to build and maximize a channel to market your business

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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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.

Data Privacy: The One Big Benefit of Traditional Hosting when compared to Cloud Hosting

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Cloud_Traditional_Hosting_4Goodhosting

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 stored in a public cloud. You are also depending on a second party to safeguard that data.

Help secure your business’s future by growing your business’s email list

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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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.

To Brand or Not to Brand

Reading Time: 2 minutes
Brand Branding Marketing Commercial Name Concept

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.

4Bloggers: Top-Rated WordPress Free Plug-ins

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Wordpress Various Colorful ShapesNeed some starter help sorting through over 40,000 WordPress plugins?

That’s a lot of functionality, and most of it is free. You could spend hours just learning about the basics. This article is here to help save you time.

Here are some popular ones that we thought you should consider.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics (sometimes annotated “GA”) is a valuable tool for measuring and optimizing the performance of your website. In particular the Google Analytics plugin (by Yoast) makes it quite simple to install GA on into your WordPress installation. This plugins delivers all of the benefits of GA. It is being utilized on more than 1,000,000 sites.

2. WordPress SEO

WordPress is a great content management platform for search engine optimization. The Yoast SEO plugin for SEO builds upon WordPress’s SEO features.

SEO optimization methods are always changing adapting to Google’s ranking algorithm updates, but what will ease the pain is this plugin. It is updated regularly every couple of months to stay updated with current SEO best practices.

3. Intuitive Custom Post Order

Intuitive Custom Post Order is a plugin to help you easily re-order the way WordPress displays your posts. This should really be a feature built-in to WordPress. Otherwise without a re-ordering plugin, you will not be able to easily re-arrange the ordering of your blog posts as you see fit.