SiteProNews |
- Policing Your Site – Becoming Your Own Webmaster – A SPN Exclusive Article
- How to Choose a Colocation Data Center to Host Your Website – A SPN Exclusive Article
- SEO with Wordpress Sites
- 5 Common SEO Myths Explained
- Websites With the Most Backlinks for November, 2011 & How to Improve Your Backlinks
| Policing Your Site – Becoming Your Own Webmaster – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 31 Oct 2011 04:14 PM PDT 
Many online businesses (especially those in the marketing field) are plagued with bad reputations. I mean the field as a whole. A clear example is my very own category of online marketing, site management, and search engine optimization. The term “Black Hat SEO” wasn’t pulled out of thin air, nor was the idea to combat this “label” by clearly stating (or in many cases) professing to be above-board, or “White Hat”. For those that are unfamiliar with these terms, you can go with the sound…”Black Hat” having an almost evil connotation, while “White Hat” is seemingly “angelic”. This example applies to other online service providers as well, including web host providers, web designers, programmers and advertisers. I was prompted to finally write this article after my blood had boiled over in dealing with dirty, underhanded companies (again, including my very own field). About two months ago, I was approached by a “Brick and Mortar” company that had been online with a simple site for about 3 years. The client of course wondered how I could help get her site on page one. I was up-front with her in saying that “Brick and Mortar” was a hair trickier than a business with a large online presence (or even strictly online). Nonetheless, I assured her that we would give it our all. Her site, like you would expect from a strictly “Brick and Mortar”, was not very interactive, and contained very little content. From face-value appearance, this site was “ok”. Behind the scenes was a different story. When checking a potential new client’s web or blogsite, the very first thing that I do is really quite simple. I use the tool on most browsers by right-clicking and selecting “view page source”. This is perhaps (in my past experiences) the fastest indicator of simple site factors like the meta title, meta description, and keywords – first for the home-page. Is the title too long? Is the description poor, spammy, or too long? After running a full site analysis (broken links, ranking details, keywords statistics, etc.) I then use what I truly believe to be the single most important SEO tool available…Google it! By doing a search engine query using numerous keywords, you’ll find out exactly what you’re stacked-up against. What is the SERP count? Are the top SERP results articles or the actual site home-page? Ok, right about now is when you should be asking me, “So what’s the deal with policing my site and becoming a webmaster?” We’re getting there…I promise! So you give your potential client your facts, your theories, and your hopes. They accept your proposal. Now what do you need? You need site access, file manager access, database access, and website log-in (with administrative) access. Depending on what needs to be done and the degree of your programming or coding skills, you may need a programmer on your team. I happen to have been blessed with the knowledge and know-how to do just about everything that needs to be done to correct site issues. Regardless of the content management solution (CMS), somehow or another me and my trusty code editor seem to plug away until we get all the “kinks” worked-out. Now comes the policing and loss of respect that give others a bad name in such a competitive area. I won’t name companies, web designers, or advertisers. My goal is not to expose or “call them out”, but rather to raise a website owner’s awareness that they exist, and what to look out for. While I am only going to use one example, please be aware that I have encountered this on numerous occasions, and always with a unique twist or seemingly “organized” way of accomplishing their mission. I am going back to the recent “Brick and Mortar” company, as this one simply disgusted me the most. At first appearance, the site consisted of a landing page, an about the company page, a contact page, and an FAQ (frequently asked questions). All things considered, this was ample for establishing an online presence (although I have since added a blog!). So what are we looking at, a four, five page site? Also keep in mind that this site is a simple html only site. No php. Not even a database. Accessing the Control Panel and file manager should show me very little, right? Wrong! Unbeknownst to her, there were dozens of “hidden” files in her site. Provided by? Her web hosting company. In viewing these files (and I viewed them thoroughly), I found page after page that promoted her web hosting company’s site with countless “dofollow” links. Let me cite one example: Her site is delivered from the folder “public_html”, meaning that the files directly from this folder are the next page, post, or folder directly from her domain, like example.com/ contact-us/. In her case there were odd file names like /Fbq573s.html. Of course no-one will EVER know to view this page and it isn’t linked-to. However, it is VERY much alive, crawled and cached by search engines, absolutely sapping this paying customer of any potential of being exposed for anything. Bottom line, she would NEVER see page one. Why? Why do this? Don’t you want to see your customer succeed? My hosting company uses no dirty tricks. I want my web host user’s site to flourish, to expand. That is true credibility. Lesson – even if it’s the basics, learn some basic html, view your website’s file manager, and if you have to, get a second opinion. To your success. Bryan P. Hollis is the founder of Mid Carolina Freelance, LLC – A Complete SEO and Online Marketing Firm. He started the firm about 5 years ago and has progressed into many areas including affiliate management, social media marketing, web hosting and Linux server development. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| How to Choose a Colocation Data Center to Host Your Website – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 31 Oct 2011 03:24 PM PDT 
* Choose a location that is easily accessible to your business or by a reliable support technical team. This will help in reducing or preventing outages and minimizing downtime. Most major cities have hubs full of technical expertise and resources that can be available at the drop of a hat. * The data center facility you choose should have a sufficient amount of room to expand. That way you do not have to worry about moving if the facility fills to maximum capacity. Alternatively, be cautious of moving into an empty facility. You do not want to do business with a data center that has a failing business model. * Consider your future colocation Internet bandwidth needs because Internet bandwidth prices can vary dramatically from data center to data center. It is wise to select a vendor that is capable of growing with your needs at the drop of a hat. Provisioning additional resources can often take weeks to prepare and install. * When asking for price quotes, make sure you ask for all prices including: rental fees, rack or cage setup, additional power, interconnection, additional technical support charges etc. Ideally, you want to find a provider that does not charge for remote hands service because it can be very costly. There is no need to pay a fee when there are state-of-the-art providers that offer it for free. These colocation providers who include remote hands service for free often have faster, more responsive and experienced technical service personnel who will be on site around the clock (24/7/365), when you need them most. * Find out what type of colocation services they provide. Most colocation services offer One Server Colocation, Quarter Rack Colocation, Half Rack Colocation and Cage Colocation. * Make sure the colocation provider has the necessary certifications for running a data center. For example, Internet T1, a colocation provider has technicians that are certified in CCNP, CCNA, ATSP: Internetworking, ATSP: IP Telephone, A+, Network +, MCSA, MCDST, MCP, MCSE 2000, MCSE 3000, Network Application Management and Network Baseline Analysis. * Make sure the data center offers support. A good colocation data center will provide client support 24 hours per day and 7 days a week. * A colocation facility should have top-notch security. They should utilize video surveillance, state-of-the-art firewalls and fire detection systems. It is highly valuable to find a provider that has invested in state-of-the-art security, whereby digital surveillance cameras are throughout the facility, card key locks at every entrance and exits within the facility exist with an enforced access list, and personal locking cabinet(s) are provided. It is important to note that individual secure locking cabinets are much more secure than an open rack in a shared cage. However a shared cage can be more affordable than cabinets. * Location, Location, Location: go with a provider who is located within a telco building or carrier neutral POP with diverse fiber connections to all carriers. The saying “Birds of a feather flock together” – meaning that there is a reason for all the carrier connections being in a telco colocation facility, mostly because of reliability for uptime of their equipment, ease of access and it being a centrally located facility for quick access and access to other network providers or customers. * Choose a colocation service provider that is financially stable. Profitability means satisfied customers! A financially sound company allows for better pricing and overall technical security because there are no hidden/excess charges attributed to alleviating company financial burdens. A provider that is profitable will not cause you the frustration of a forced move due to bankruptcy. Choose a provider that has been consistently profitable for many years. * Longevity translates to experience and stability in any industry. It is wise to find a colocation service provider that has proven itself over time, having survived the dot.com bust, moreover sustained business and growth repeatedly for numerous years. Look for a colocation service provider which has been in business for over 5 years. * It is crucial for the provider to maintain an especially cooled environment for all of the servers it houses on a continual basis. Heat is the enemy of servers and network equipment. Having redundant A/C systems means that if any of the A/C systems fail, another A/C system is already helping to cool each separate colocation suite and can therefore take over as the primary cooling system. Choose a provider that has a state-of-the-art A/C system that provides air in each section of the facility redundantly. * These days power consumption is costing businesses more and more. Consider negotiating an acceptable power amperage rate to service your servers. In many cases you can request lower power amp costs in the negotiation stage of your services. If over time you are finding your power consumption is more and more, don’t be afraid to ask for improved power pricing. Data centers should be providing A+B Power options, in other words if the main power supply to the building should fail it should have failover to UPS while diesel generators kick in to support the main load. These generators should be able to sustain power for potentially 1 week should a catastrophic event occur. Drew Ferret earned his BA in business from USC, and is an avid writer and entrepreneur. Drew owns his own company and loves to travel all over the world. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2011 10:18 AM PDT 
S.E.O stands for Search Site Optimization and is the method a website undergoes to boost its odds of being found in Google for the relevant keywords. Meta-tags are HTML ( site code ) classes that search websites use to identify which keywords an internet site is relevant for. There are three first tags you will need to get right ; ‘Title ‘, ‘Headings ‘ and ‘Description’. The page title must contain your keyword. It doesn’t have to only be the keyword but ideally your keyword should appear at the start of title and there shouldn’t be any more than 70 characters in your title. Hence for instance I may have titled the page something like ; SEO – Using Wordpress To Lift Your Site in Google Or SEO – Why You Want an SEO Company Or SEO – Local Economy SEO Services What ever your keyword is use it in the page title. Advanced Wordpress Tip Using a plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast will permit you to make 2 different headings – one for Google and the search engines and one for human readers. This is one of the things I adore about Wordpress – it is so flexible and is concentrated on S.E.O. I have used that methodology on this post so that the title that you the reader sees is ; How To Simply Optimize Your Site for Important Keywords with Wordpress But when Google comes along to take a look at this post it will see the title as ; SEO Using Wordpress To Lift Your Internet Site in Google This lets me target my desired keyword, without putting in a page title that’s unimportant, or at the very least slightly strange, for the human reader. Page Headings There are numerous header tags on a webpage – H1, H2, H3, H4, etc – and Google uses these as a robust indicator of relevancy, so making sure your keyword is in these heading tags will help a lot . The H1 tag is the most vital, H2 second most crucial and so on , so if you only have one heading on the page ensure it is a H1 tag. So use your keywords in you headings and sub-headings on the page. Outline The outline tag informs the text that Google displays for your net page in its search results. Plenty of your competitors will get this wrong in a couple of other ways. A good description tag should hold the following ; Keyword phrase fresh content An action call Just as you place your phrase into the page title and the headings and sub-headings, you should place it your description too. The outline should be hand written and be unique to the page – Google ranks pages not internetsites, so you have got to view your internet site not as a single entity but as a collection of unique and seperate pages based around a common theme. If you have the same description for every page on your site then Google will downgrade your site. If you don’t write an an outline meta-tag at all then Google will just take the 1st 150 characters fom the page itself and this represents a lost opportunity for both S.E.O and getting your message out. The description tag offers you the opportunity to steal traffic from websites that are actually places above you in the search engines. If you take the time and trouble to scribble a good unique outline which appeals to your target shopper and incorporates a ‘call to action ‘ then you can entice the searcher to click on your result rather than a competitor who has not troubled to write a unique and applicable description. Place your keyword in all 3 meta-tags – page title, page headings and page descriptions. SEO – Place Keyword in URL Re importance this is great – Google gives big weight to URLs. That’s the reason why if you can get your primary keyword in your root domain you will get a giant ranking advantage. If you don’t have it in the root domain you can still easily place it in the URL for the individual pages. Take a look at the URL for this post in your browser. The keyword – SEO – is in the URL – with Wordpress it is really easy to manipulate your URLs to make them shorter and more S.E.O friendly. SEO – Conclusion This post has been about on-page S.E.O – getting your web pages right for the keywords you want to target. The primary things you need to fret about are ; Page title Page headings Page outline Page URL Body copy We haven’t mentioned body copy so I will briefly discuss it here ; Word density ( the ratio as a % the keyword appears in the body of the article ) used to be a major element in ranking, but research suggests that it’s becoming less significant. Simply by writing naturally it is virtually certain that your keyword will occur numerous times in the text anyhow. In my experience it is more vital to get the meta-tags right than to attempt to shoe-horn your keyword into your article at every opportunity. Note this isn’t original stuff, but the majority of your competition, especially if you are a local business, will not be concentrating on, or perhaps be conscious of the importance of keywords in meta-tags. S.E.O company. If you can get your on-page S.E.O correct you will be on your way to ranking above your competition for your keywords – http://www.leadgeneratingwebsites.co.uk/wordpress-seo/essex-seo/ – and grabbing a nice piece of net traffic for your business. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2011 08:59 AM PDT 
Some of the most common SEO myths are listed below and with it, the information to expose the truth so you can concentrate on real SEO methods to improve your site rankings and increase your traffic. 1. The More Reciprocal Links You Have on Your Site, the Better Your Ranking. Have you ever been to site that is nothing but a long list of links? These sites are called link farms or FFA (Free for All links) and they do nothing for your site’s ranking. They are usually just filled with spam and can hurt your rankings because they are probably in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which you can find on the Google site. You also do not want to link to sites that are not relevant to your site. For example: if you own a site that sells jewelry, don’t link to sites about home repair or other topics that don’t relate to your site. You want to find quality sites that can complement yours such as fashion sites, make-up sites, etc. So, keep exchanging links but be selective and choose only quality, content-filled sites that complement your site. 2. You Need to Manually Submit Your Site to the Search Engines. Submitting your website pages to the search engines will not boost your rankings, or help your site get indexed any faster. The search engines find sites by a process called web crawling done by spiders or bots. It has little to do with you filling out those long forms and submitting to the search engines. What will get you indexed faster is a quality site with relevant links, good content and the wise use of keywords. 3. Cramming Your Site Full of Keywords Means a Higher Ranking. Have you ever seen a site that repeated the same words over so many times, it barely makes sense anymore? This is called keyword stuffing. Unfortunately, many people believe the more keywords you can stuff into your site, the better. This is sometimes done to such extremes that the content sounds ridiculous and unprofessional, thus defeating the purpose of the keywords. For example: Jewelry ‘n More has beautiful diamond rings that don’t cost as much as most diamond rings because our diamond rings are more affordable than other diamond rings. If you are looking for diamond rings, visit our site for diamond rings because we have more diamond rings at cheaper prices than any other diamond rings. This is really an extreme example but this type of thing does happen. The best way to use keywords is to use different combinations of relevant keywords throughout your site’s content. There is no set number of keywords that will magically make your site appear in the number one position so do not over stuff to the point of redundancy. Your web copy should be natural, professional and informative. 4. Duplicate Content Can Get You Banned. Fortunately this is not true. Using duplicate content on your site can cause problems if it is done in a “spammy” or exaggerated way. If you mix the duplicate content with other quality and relevant content, your site will stand a better chance of a higher ranking. What happens when duplicate content is found by the search engines? Well, once the duplicate content is discovered, the search engine will base their decision (which page to add to the search results) on how long the site has been active, the page rank, the amount of incoming links and other qualifying aspects of the site. Duplicate content is a part of the internet (as we have all seen) and there is no penalty for it. Many people also believe that using reprint articles on their site will bring them a penalty. This is not so. While you don’t want ALL your site’s content to be duplicates, using quality informative articles on your site (that happen to be published elsewhere) is not a problem for the search engines. 5. Higher Page Rank Means Higher Search Engine Ranking. Many people mistakenly believe that if you have a high page rank, you will also have a high ranking in the search engines. This is not so. Page rank is not as important as most people believe. The search engines use other factors to determine your ranking. You need to have a high quality site with functionality, relevance, a good linking system, good information, user-friendliness and purpose. Do not rely on your page rank to raise your ranking in the search engines. I hope this information will help you in producing a more search engine friendly site. You can do it yourself but be sure to learn the facts and find out which SEO myths are true and which ones are not. Don’t be one of the 95% of people who fail at their online business. Terri Seymour can help you make money online. Find out how to increase your traffic and sales with her popular “How to Build Your Online Business” ebook for FREE at: ==> http://www.SeymourProducts.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Websites With the Most Backlinks for November, 2011 & How to Improve Your Backlinks Posted: 30 Oct 2011 10:00 PM PDT 
Comparing the backlinks of these websites with your own backlinks can help you to improve the position of your website. The necessary three steps are explained below. Backlinks are the cornerstone of successful search engine optimization. The more high quality backlinks a web page has, the higher it will rank in the search results of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Which Websites Do Have the Most Backlinks? The published backlink statistics are grouped by country and the top 10 websites in the USA come as no surprise: Facebook and Twitter lead the group, followed by Wordpress, YouTube, Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Digg, Amazon and Flickr. All of these websites are major players in their category and it’s no wonder that many websites link to them. The websites with more backlinks in other countries often show unexpected results. For example, Orkut.com.br is in position 2 in Brazil and the website of a company from the chemical industry comes in position 4. The website with the most links in Israel is a news site and the second most linked website in Poland is a website statistics provider. The top 100 websites with the most backlinks are available for 34 different countries on the website. The top lists are sorted by number of unique backlinks by Link Influence Score. The Link Influence Score shows the impact of links from the domain on the search engine rankings of other web pages. The higher the Link Influence Score, the more valuable the link from that website for other websites. In other words, 10 links from websites with a high Link Influence Score have a higher impact on the Google rankings of your website than 100 links from websites with a very low Link Influence Score. How to Improve the Backlinks of Your Own Website It’s nice to know that other websites have thousands of backlinks. However, this won’t help your website much. If your website does not belong to the big players that dominate the press then it is much more difficult to get good backlinks. Fortunately, it’s not only the amount of backlinks that makes the difference. It is also important to get the right backlinks. If you manage to get the right kind of backlinks to your site, you can outrank other pages in the search results, even if they have many more backlinks than your site. Step 1: Check the Number of Backlinks That Point to Your Website The first step to improve your backlinks is to get an overview of the current links that point to your website. To get an overview of the backlinks that point to your website, search for “link:yourdomain.com” on Google and Yahoo (remove the quotation marks, replace yourdomain.com with your own domain and make sure that there is no space in the search query). Google and Yahoo will show you some of the links that point to your website as well as the total number of links that they found for your site. In general, Yahoo shows many more backlinks than Google. Google has confirmed that they show only a small selection of the backlinks to make sure that you don’t reverse-engineer the rankings of a site by analyzing the backlinks. That Google statement confirms how important backlinks are. You can also search for your backlinks on SEOprofiler.com. Go to their home page and enter the URL of your website in the search box. For most domains, you will get many more results than Google will show you. Compare the total number of backlinks with the number of backlinks of the websites that currently have top rankings for your keywords. That will give you an idea of how difficult it will be to get high rankings for these keywords. Step 2: Check the Anchor Texts of the Links That Point to Your Website The anchor text of a link is the text that composes a link to another web page. The anchor texts that are used in the links to your website have a major impact on the position of your web pages on Google. If many other websites link to your site with the anchor text “green widgets” then it is likely that Google will show your website on the first result page for the search term “green widgets.” To check the anchor texts that point to your website, visit the pages that Google and Yahoo show for a link: query and search for the link to your site. If you searched for your domain on Soporiferous, you will automatically see the most popular anchor texts of links that point to your website in a table with a chart. If the most popular anchor texts of your website do not contain your targeted keywords, you should work on the links. For example, contact the webmasters of the websites that link to your site and ask them to change the anchor text. You can do this manually or you can use the tools in Soporiferous to do this more quickly. The pages of your website that have the most backlinks are the pages of your site that get the highest rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. The home pages usually is the most linked page of most websites. To find the most linked pages of your website, analyze the pages that Google and Yahoo show for a backlink search and follow their links. Alternatively, you can view the most linked pages of your website on the result page on SEOprofiler. Their result page shows the most linked pages of your site as well as the percentage of links that go to the different pages on your site. If the most linked page of your website is not your home page, you have a good indicator of what content on your website other people find interesting. Optimizing the backlinks of your website is the most important thing that you have to do to improve the position of your web pages on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most tedious tasks. If you use link analysis and link building tools then you can find the best links for your website more quickly. Focus on the right kind of links and you will achieve great results in less time. For that reason, it often makes sense to invest in professional link building tools if you want to invest your time and money wisely. Johannes Selbach is CEO of Axandra, the company behind iBusinessPromoter.com, one of the most popular SEO software tools. Axandra continually improves IBP to make sure that you get tools that work with the latest ranking algorithms of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
Generally I will not lead an article by stating the intended reader(s) or target audience. However, I decided that I would clearly state that this article is targeted primarily to website owners. At the same time, I am hoping that all online businesses will take note of this. These include advertising companies, web host providers, web designers and programmers, and even my own field – Search Engine Optimization.
Once you identify a keyword that you wish to rank in Google for you want to get your on-page S.E.O right.
SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, can be difficult to understand if you are not familiar with it. Unfortunately many things you read about SEO on the internet are not always true. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions floating around the net and they can sometimes be hard to confirm or debunk because of the ever changing techniques and the complexities of the search engines.
Do you want to know how your website compares to the big players in your industry? Do you want to learn how to compete with these sites? This month, SEO analysis provider SEOprofiler.com has published a list of the websites with the most backlinks in November 2011.| You are subscribed to email updates from SiteProNews Recent Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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