Deciding on a good web host is as important as setting up other business essentials, perhaps more. Be it a small set-up or initiation of a big venture, failure is guaranteed if you make an ordinary choice.
So how do we make a smart choice for a good host?
Every individual or a business would want to go with one which provides optimum performance with maximum benefits in all respects. Pricing, ease of support, complimentary features, etc. to mention a few.
PERFORMANCE –
Uptime is a great measure of how good a hosting provider is at keeping its systems up and running. A high uptime percentage close to 100% means they are putting in substantial effort towards superior performance.
Disk space is the amount of space allotted to your website. Don’t let it be limited if you’re planning to maintain cumbersome blogs, an e-commerce site, visual content & videos for your business. If a hosting company has difficulty accommodating that, it would reflect in your conversions. You sure need pure unlimited space for your website.
Bandwidth is nothing but the amount of data your website will pass to the customer. Videos and graphics take more bandwidth than plain HTML. Ensure that you’ve got enough to support your website traffic.
Page speed makes a difference when browsing through a website. It can lead to frustration and one might lose on prospects and clients if the speed is below expectation. Ensure that your website has good speed.
You don’t have to overpay. All your essentials can easily be met at $5 per month. If you are going with a free provider, be ready for limited usage (free hosts have their own usage restrictions).
Before going in for a purchase, understand the pricing structure clearly. Down payment, recurring subscription fee and any other payment for add-ons.
There could be instances when things might go wrong, in which case, you may want to cancel the host. It’s important to know how your web hosting provider handles this. Does it offer any retention packages or has a well-defined refund policy. To get a discount on web hosting, you can visit the Shared Hosting Coupon site.
When starting a website, you need to find a good domain name that represents your brand or business. It is typically sold for a price. Now if you are deciding on a hosting provider too, you might get it for free.
SUPPORT –
The internet is always ON. Ensure that you get an excellent and preferably a 24×7 customer support. If possible, test the response of the hosting provider before you indulge in any long term contract. Online chat service provides an instant resolution, unlike emails or tickets.
Opt for a hosting provider that has a user-friendly and a functional control panel. You would need this, at least for some basic changes that you can do on your own.
Also, get your business name and address displayed on the hosting provider website for appropriate visibility.
Let’s make our choice easier by looking at the infographic below –
Lucia Patterson is the woman behind TheLegalGuides, a blog solely focused on legal guides, tips, and advice. Lucia loves essay writing and blogs at EssayWritingGuides from her college days.
In 2016, a local business in Lethbridge, Alberta, won the viral lottery when a raving Facebook post drew in customers in flocks. Whitby's Fish and Chips shop was struggling for months due to poor location and expensive marketing. Owner John McMillan, who had been unable to pay himself a salary, shared his plight with a first-time customer Colin Ross. The meeting changed Whitbie’s destiny. Ross posted a Facebook review promoting the shop and urging the close-knit Canadian community to help out McMillan by trying the sumptuous items on Whitbie’s menu. The post went viral and sent people lining up from opening to well past closing time. According to a local news report, about 400 people visited the shop the day after Ross’s post, and 500 more lined up the next day.
The power of digital marketing
The viral post about Whitbie’s is a dream come true for any business. Not only did it provide the local shop exposure in local and international news outlets, but most importantly, it brought in real customers. Whitbie’s social media success is one of the products of digital marketing.
Digital marketing is simply the promotion of products and services via digital technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones, and display advertising. One of the most popular digital marketing tools is social media where roughly a third of the global population actively interact. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques that helps businesses and publishers maximize digital marketing in reaching out to their target audience. Essentially, its main goal is to rank high in search results pages. Google uses 200 signals in ranking webpages including keywords, the freshness of content, and region. It’s the job of a digital marketing agency to apply effective and ethical SEO strategies to sustain a business’ top ranking in major search engines.
Local SEO and citation consistency
If SEO is macro, local SEO is micro. Local SEO “allows local businesses to promote their services to local customers at exactly the time they’re looking for your type of business.” This set of processes aims to target real customers in a geographical location. Aside from search engines, local SEO uses online directories such as Yelp, Qype, and TouchLocal.
The core of local SEO is information. Your citation or NAP (name, address and phone number) must be updated and consistent in all webpages and online directories. Inconsistency can adversely affect your ranking in organic search results. Try searching for your business in search engines. You’ll see which webpages still reflect your previous address or old phones. “The citation consistency of your business across the web helps search engines decide where you are geographically relevant for various local search queries,” wrote Sinclaire Dickinson, content strategist at Wired SEO.
Read also: Methods Of Optimizing Local SEO That Is Essential For Small Business
The 3-pack challenge
Recently, SEO experts received news that would make their jobs a little more challenging. Google updated its search results to show three local businesses instead of seven. The business listings were also redesigned to suit the mobile user interface. According to Google, the update “provides people with more than relevant information, including photos, review, and prices, for searches that have multiple results for a given location.” The challenge lies in how to make into the first three results in the world’s most powerful search engine.
Read also: Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO
Content strategies for your business
Google’s ranking factors serve as a compass leading the best digital marketing tactics. Ross’ viral Facebook on Whitbie’s Fish and Chips shop has the formula every digital marketer aims to master: a unique content too appealing to influence action. Ross’ own reputation as an influencer within his own circle was also key. Content is one of the most important signals Google use in ranking webpages. In creating an article or video for your business, use Google’s content-related ranking signals as your guide.
Your content must not only be original, but it should also provide value and unique insights. This increases demand for journalistic materials supported by data and written by experts. Create useful content for your target audience. Food brands are making 30-second cooking videos sharing how their products can be incorporated in easy-to-make meals. Regularly update your webpages and social media pages as Google takes note of the recency of content updates especially for time-sensitive searches.
Read also: Social Media Marketing Role In Technology
Don’ts in content marketing
Do you need to hire an SEO expert or a digital marketing agency? Google warns that choosing an SEO expert partner is critical for your business as it can either improve your site or risk damage to your site and reputation. “Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.”
Some of the techniques that you or your SEO expert should avoid is producing duplicate materials on the same site, spinning words to create “new” content, and posting misleading information. Google advises to watch out for rogue SEOs that own shadow domains, place links to their other clients on doorway pages, and offer to sell keywords in the address bar. Shadow domains direct users to the website through deceptive redirects. Attaining a number 1 ranking on Google is not guaranteed. If your SEO promises a top spot, it’s likely that it’s a scam.
Some content marketing tips from experts
Today, consumers would check online reviews, blogs, and other online information before making a purchase. One tip to boost your local SEO is to submit guest posts on local websites. This will expose your business and offerings, and earn you valuable backlinks. Backlinks are ranking factors. You should also make use of relevant local keywords. An SEO expert can help you determine the right keywords that will attract local searchers.
Produce content relevant to your local audience. One of the most popular blog posts is how-to’s or “Top 10” lists related to a certain industry. Adding high-quality photos can also help.
A viral post can only come once in a lifetime. Instead of aspiring for something that will be shared everywhere, work for content that will place you on top of search engines and attract real customers within your region of operation. Maximize local SEO. Create useful and appealing content. Reach out to people who will bring value to your business.
No online business can survive without having a grip on search engine optimization and its services. If you are new to the field and have no idea about what to do, SEO can do a lot for your cause. Learn and be adept at this one aspect of online trading and you don’t need anything else.
But first, it is important to get to its roots. Because if you don’t understand what essentially SEO is, you cannot learn to manipulate it thoroughly and generate maximum revenue. This article is, hence, just what you need to understand the basics of SEO and how an SEO agency can help you get to the top.
SEO by definition
It is initialized for search engine optimization. It is a code of conduct upon which stands a website's ranking in any search engine. SEO services strengthen the website by improving its quality and providing it with an easy, user-friendly interface.
Certain fundamentals, controls, and functions are crucially integrated and result in a complex of multiple segments. These are cumbersome to apprehend at first, but once you break them in chunks SEO is quite easy to crack and the webmasters have it on their fingertips.
Search engine optimization has multiple stages and professionals of an SEO agency are experts in these stages and utilize each when required for optimized marketing. These stages are:
Types of Search Engine Optimization:
Technical SEO
What do you understand by the term technical? It directs you back to the framework or skeleton of a website. That is exactly what Technical SEO stands for. It configures the settings and working of a website without manipulating the content or links. This part of the SEO services is the foremost process and must be accurate for an ideal output.
A webpage is configured once and it is good to go. No maintenance is required in the future. Therefore, if technical search engine optimization services are not impeccable, your website won't run smoothly. Conclusively, the interface and quality of the website are determined through the technical services.
On-site SEO
These services are restricted to the morphological appearance of the website and its content. All the elements of a page that are visible to the user come under on-page SEO. This, hence, indirectly incorporates user experience. The important elements include the structure, keyword placement, headings, subheadings, graphics, and other such things.
One thing to note is that these things are read by the user but the server interprets it all as signals. Therefore, the signals generated must not be complex and smooth enough to deliver properly.
Off-site SEO
The one thing off-site SEO is concerned about is enough backlinking. When the users enter a keyword in a search engine, it checks through millions of related webpages and brings forward the best among these. So, what are the criteria for selecting the best? It is the number of backlinks a webpage has.
Backlinks are the indirect connections that lead the user to your webpage. For example, if a blog on one page leads you to another page that means the former is a backlink to the latter page. SEO agencies provide services to maximize organic backlinking and hence, improve website ranking in search engines.
Read Also:
Avoid these 5 Mistakes before Starting an SEO
Improve Your Domain Using These SEO tips
With hundreds of factors affecting Google's search engine results, SEO is no longer a simple science. Gone are the days when you could stuff keywords in an ordinary piece of work and help your site rank high.
With ever-changing rules, it is hard to master the art, unless you're working with someone like Scott Keever SEO expert. What you should understand is that the search engines are striving hard to provide their audience with the best search results, and to achieve it, they have eliminated certain ranking factors and introduced some new ones out of nowhere. It means you need to know what has stopped working and what has replaced it. You need to educate yourself about the latest trends, and two of them are mentioned below.
The Evolution Of Google Serps
Even a few years ago, you wouldn't see more than a few "blue links" after searching. Things have certainly changed recently, and the Google SERPs have evolved lately to the extent that they are quickly grabbing searchers' attention. This, in turn, has helped businesses get more clicks from organic listings.
With this latest trend, it is more important than ever to track your rankings in these features and keep a close eye on all those features that appear for your primary keywords. Many SEO tools are now available to help you in this regard. Many tools can help track several SERP features along with their results, which in turn will help you check the features that your keywords have triggered. Another benefit of these tools is that they help you measure the volatility of different SERP features on a regular basis, so you can easily change your strategy.
Using Structured Data To Inform Search Engines
What it means is that you will have to use structured data in a way that it makes it easier for Google and other search engines to interpret content. It is basically a new and more improved way to format HTML.
Interestingly, Google has not confirmed that structured data can affect ranking, but the truth is that you can use it to improve your search listings, especially when you're willing to take advantage of features such as rich snippets and knowledge graph panels. Some statistics show that using the structured data correctly can help improve your CTR by 30% in most cases, and with an increase in clicks, you can see an improvement in your rankings.
The fact of the matter is that changing trends in SEO has made it tricky for anyone to rank their business high, but the latest trends show that you should pounce on any opportunity that would help you stand out. That is when you can take advantage of structured data and Google SERPs changing features. If you are still not sure how to proceed, do not take chances and end up making a costly mistake. Instead, let an SEO specialist help you with everything and ensure that you keep getting the juice your website needs to rank high.
Read Also :
5 Ways To Improve Mobile SEO
Know Why Content Marketing Is Important For SEO
How To Monitor The SEO Health Of Your Website
