Web Hosting Fan » SEO

SERPs and Backlinks – The Keys to SEO

gracechen — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:07:37 +0000

Google rates or judges and shows a websites overall likability and this is called page ranking. The more traffic received is a sign of a higher ranked pages, which move your site closer to the top of Google. SERP is an abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page which is where you page rank is displayed. All of the effort put in to the building and optimization of your sight all goes toward the rank of it on the SERP. One of the more used techniques for increasing ones rank on the SERP is a backlink. The backlinks are what makes the website what it is. A backlink’s job in basic is to get more people to come to your website. The more links your site has the more the popularity will increase.

Short and Simple Compared To Long and Drawn Out

There is not just one way to build a backlink for a sight. The majority of website owners do it the easy way and just spam other sites to draw attention to their own sight. While this is always a possibility, most people would refrain from going to a website that is spamming, though it works on occasion. Google also disagrees with spamming as do other competitors so usually its used for last resort. The chances of an illegitimate spam based website having success are very slim and nearly impossible. The smarter thing to do would to be building your website by the rules, instead of the easy way.

Structure and Composition

The best way to bring popularity to your website besides legitimacy is giving interesting information that a user would want to look at. If they like what information you are using the could link it to your blog. The more popularity accumulated the more links you will have on different types of websites and blogs. With the social bookmarking feature it makes it easier to get visitors to recommend your sight to others and different social networks such as Myspace and Facebook.

Promoting and Advertising

Advertising and promoting are other common ways to attract people to your site. There are many different types of ads that can be used and sites that allow advertising to be used on it. Once a good keyword is found or settled upon efforts need to be increased to create more websites. One of the great thing about owning so many different websites is that they can all be linked together, which in the end drives up your SERP rankings and general popularity.

Conclusion

Backlinks are very important issues when it comes to running your own website, especially the quantity of them. Having a fewer number is not as good for the website as a larger number would be. The end result is that the more backlinks and advertising increases your sites popularity which directly affects you SERP.

Automated Directory Submissions: Good or Bad?

gracechen — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:55:29 +0000

There is a large debate in the search engine optimization (SEO) community whether utilizing automated directory submissions to distribute articles and web pages across the internet is beneficial. While this debate is continuing, more automated submitter software is being developed and released.

How Do These Work?

Automated directory submission software takes your login information on many (sometimes into the thousands) social bookmarking or article directory sites and logs you in. It directly routes to the submission page and submits an article, blog post or whole web page to that site.

Is This Advantageous

Although most of these websites frown upon their use, they are quite handy and beneficial. It saves hours of time from having to manually input these articles and web pages into another website. It saves further time by signing you up to the site all at once. With thousands of social bookmarking and article directory sites, it can literally take days to submit one article to each.

The articles and web page submissions give you more exposure across the internet through backlinks as well as users simply reading what you have to say. This will entice more individuals to visit your site which could lead to higher sales and conversions (if you have advertisements).

The Consequences of its Use

Since most bookmarking and article directory sites frown upon its use, they will terminate your account with them if they discover this is submission method is being used. Some even employ bots to verify this wasn’t added by an automated article submitter. Also the Google indexing bots could get suspicious if an article or web page is suddenly submitted to hundreds of sites at once. This could affect your PageRank and in turn, traffic.

The SEO Community

The SEO community is torn on the use of this type of software. On the one hand, users believe it gives them more time to improve on their articles and focus on high-quality content. Others believe that manual submissions provide higher-quality backlinks which can improve your Google PageRank score.

While there is a major debate as to the benefit of utilizing these sites, the wheel continues to turn. New contributors to the internet find it difficult to manually submit to so many directories so they turn to these automated programs, thus creating a market. As technology helps everything become more automated, perhaps these directory submitters will be built into websites.

Using Reseller Hosting for Ecommerce

gracechen — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:34:52 +0000

One of the most beneficial hosting accounts you can purchase is a reseller hosting plan. Reseller hosting is perfect for the expanding online business, as it lets you create separate hosting accounts that can be spread out amongst your clientele. You can use these hosting accounts to generate residual income on a monthly basis, or you can use them to acquire separate IP addresses for each of your websites, which can help you interlink your sites for a greater search engine ranking. Many people don’t realize all of the various uses for reseller hosting, as they see it as simply an opportunity to become a hosting provider, rather than an opportunity to have access to more flexible server resources.

SEO and Reseller Hosting

One of the most important aspects of running an online storefront is search engine optimization. After all what good is having an online store if no one can find your products or services. The best way to build up your search engine ranking is to build links. Building links means building up a large number of backlinks on the web that point back to your site, and these links give your page a higher PR. The more links you have coming form high PR pages, the higher your PR is going to be. Unfortunately, you can’t just set up a plethoraof web pages on the same IP address and link them back to each other, as Google will see this as spam. Instead you need multiple IP addresses, which a reseller hosting account can provide.

Reselling vs Hording

With reseller hosting you have two options. You can split up the server resources into segments and sell them, or you can horde these resources for yourself. Reseller hosting plans generally offer a good value in comparison to other hosting plans, however there are some hidden advantages that are specifically designed to help you sell your hosting plans. For example, there are tools that help you customize your CMS or control panel, which gives your hosting brand a professional and independent appearance. Selling reseller hosting plans is all about making your site and hosting company look as self-sufficient and professional as possible.

The Advantages of Reseller Hosting With eCommerce

As mentioned, you can use reseller hosting to improve your search engine rankings and you can also use it to generate a substantial residual monthly income. However you can also use reseller hosting to host your eCommerce sites, which is especially beneficial if you’re selling web-based services such as web design. You can add the fact that you are hosting your own sites on your own hosting accounts as an added selling point for your hosting customer. You can even offer free trials of your hosting service through your eCommerce site, by letting people set up blogs on your site with platforms like WordPress MU. Anything that you can do to boost sales, and represent your web hosting reselling company professionally will help you generate residual income in the long run.

Using Free Hosting to Boost Your Link Building Efforts

gracechen — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:16:09 +0000

Many people don’t understand the impact their web hosting account has on their search engine optimization efforts. While a web hosting account may seem as if it does nothing more than broadcast your site to the world, the internal workings of the hosting account actually have a great affect on your link building efforts. Link building is perhaps the most important aspect of search engine optimization, as it directly defines your website’s online presence. The more links that point back to your site, the more popular your site will appear to be to the search engines.

Self Link Building

Instead of waiting for others to give you backlinks, you have the option of building your own online link empire. While there are many tools that can help you accomplish this, there are only a few ways that will actually let you do this legitimately without significant repercussions from the search engines. Search engines understand the link building game better than anyone, and the only kind of links that really give your site a boost in the SERPs are links that are hosted on established and relevant sites in your niche. This means that building a link empire by yourself is somewhat difficult because you must have access to a lot of relevant domains. However it can be done by using free web hosting accounts.

Free Web Hosting and Web 2.0 Properties

When I say “Free Web Hosting” I am not referring to the type of web hosting accounts that give you a tiny amount of resources and a shared IP address. These web hosting accounts are practically useless for search engine optimization. Instead, I am referring to sites that will let you create free blogs and min-sites without paying for their hosting services, such as Blogger or Blogspot. With these mini-sites, you can build a backlinking empire within 6 months to a year, by filling each mini-site with relevant and useful content in your niche.

Diversification and SEO

Link building is all about diversification. You need to have your site’s link posted on as many websites as possible, to establish solid web presence. Fortunately, there are hundreds of free blogging sites that you can use to link back to your main site and create a substantial link network for free. These sites are already highly ranked in the search engines, and there a hundreds of them to choose from. You could easily outsource the creation and content creation of these blogs, and within a few months you would have a massive network of blogs that you could use to link to your main websites within a niche.

Conclusion

While the cliche saying is “You get what you pay for” this does not hold true for every concept. In this case free web hosting could prove to be very beneficial, especially if you have access to hundreds of blogs that are under your control within a particular niche. Imagine having all of this power for free, with only the cost of the content creation being necessary.

The Basics of Keyword Meta Tags

gracechen — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:40:30 +0000

Keyword meta tags are an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). Within the SEO community, there are varying opinions on how to actually use the keyword meta tag.

Keyword Meta Tags Defined

Keyword meta tags are HTML tags that store information about a web page but are not visible within the browser. Search engines use this information when they index web pages. The meta tags are located at the head of a web page or blog post. The source code would be presented as:

Meta Tag Abuse

Meta tags can be abused by internet marketers by utilizing the practice known as “keyword stuffing.” This is the procedure of placing as many keyword meta tags onto a page as possible, many which do not relate to the actual content of the web page. This was an effort to manipulate search engine results.

Current Practices

Most search engines became aware of this unethical practice and consequently changed their algorithms to compensate for this method. If there are enough unrelated keyword meta tags on a web page, the search engine simply won’t index the page or even the whole site.

Google’s Response to Meta Tags

Google officially stated in 2009 that it does not recognize keyword meta tags when indexing pages and determining web search ranking. They’ve taken this stance in response to keyword stuffing and created an indexing algorithm that takes into account many different aspects of a web page.

Google also stated that they could utilize this information in the future in case they find a useful method for meta tags. They haven’t used this feature for years so it’s unlikely they will change their policy.

Meta Tags and Other Companies

Although Google is the largest search engine, there are other search engines that continue to utilize meta tags in their indexing. For instance, Yahoo uses a distinct list of keywords related to a specific page. There are also software applications that utilize keyword meta tags such as, Site Search software.

Are Keyword Meta Tags Beneficial?

Although Google states there is no affect of meta tags on search results, it cannot hurt to put them in if planning on submitting the site to other search engines. Since meta tags have a large affect on many search engines, it may be beneficial to include them during a website build.

Meta tags can be a useful resource on other sites besides Google. Since they don’t affect Google, it’s a good idea to include them. Additionally, Google stated that meta tags may be used in the future so it’s better to be prepared than not.