Entries Tagged 'Net News' ↓

With thousands of web hosting providers to choose from it can be quite the headache to choose which hosting provider will best suit your needs. HostUCan attempts to solve that problem with their “hosting relevancy” tool which allows users to search hosting providers by name while checking user reviews, uptime and other information relevant to the type of framework (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc) that they plan to use.

To start using the system I simply navigated to: http://www.hostucan.com/hosting-relevant/ at which point I was able to enter the name of the hosting company I wanted to receive a hosting review and analysis about, in this case I used HostGator and then clicked on the magnifying glass.

Once a search is performed the next screen then shows the hosting company in question, as you can see from the screenshot below HostGator.com is shown with the ability to submit a review and a 100% recommendation rating (rating is based off currently available reviews and not for plan specific relevancy). To check relevancy for my framework (WordPress) I then clicked on “Relevancy Checking.”

After clicking on the “Relevancy Checking” tool I was then taken to a list of the providers hosting plans. For the purpose of my test I then chose the “Hostgator Baby Plan” and clicked on “Check” under the operator section.

Once I had drilled down to the Hostgator Baby Plan I was then asked to choose my “Application Framework” which in my case was “WordPress.” Next I chose the number of estimated daily page views I was expecting to receive, in this case “0-300″ page views.

Once I chose my framework and pageviews the host providers review page was shown, as you can see below the HostGator review was given a “Good” rating with an Average uptime of 99.98%. Ratings from the website are based off customer and editor reviews along with uptime variables and the ability for a hosting providers server setups to support the framework being users (some servers do not support certain technologies while others require “tweaking” to work properly).

Next I chose to examine the same baby hosting plan from HostGator with WordPress and 601 ~ 1000 page views. While the uptime on the site was once again 99.98% the program was listed as Not Recommended because no customer reviews were provided and the web traffic was too high for the small hosting plan. Also notice that the program recommends the HostGator VPS option because it is the highest rated option from this particular hosting provider.

Between a high number of available coupons, easy access to user reviews and the ability to check which systems offer the type of framework support a user needs HostUCan is a must have hosting provider search engine and review website for owners looking to use various technologies on their projects.

Marketing can be extremely complex, confusing and daunting all at the same time. The burden of launching a good marketing campaign doubles when you juggle this responsibility with several other tasks. This is the exact predicament which dentists find themselves in. They are not just the ones who supervise hygienists and other members of the staff, attend to patients and manage everything that happens in the clinic; they are also the brains behind any practice’s marketing strategy.

In a bid to try to simplify things, dentists should understand that there are really just four elements in any successful marketing campaign – audience, timing, offer and message.

<h5>Audience</h5>

Before you can come up with an effective campaign, you first need to know who your audience is. Since you’re marketing your services to them, you need to know what their motivations are for availing of dental services. What are your target market’s demographics? Are they young or old? Will they respond more to a marketing campaign which is traditional or online-based? The more that you know about your audience, the easier it will be for you to tailor your marketing campaign to suit their preferences.

<h5>Timing</h5>

No matter how convincing your marketing campaign is, it might not work to its full advantage just because of the timing. For instance, it’s always more convenient for kids to get their braces fitted during the summer especially since the first few days can result in general discomfort. So you might not be able to attract as many patients if you launch a campaign involving braces in the middle of the school term.

<h5>Offer</h5>

A huge factor for ensuring the success of your campaign is coming up with right offer. Of course, you’ll need to whip up an offer which pleases those in your target market. For instance, younger patients with higher salaries may be more receptive to trying cosmetic procedures so you can always use that to come up with a suitable offer. Then again, the only way for you to really know if an offer works or not is to test it.

<h5>Messaging</h5>

In theory, your campaign might be great but somehow your prospects and patients aren’t buying. So what’s wrong? It could be that you’re not creative enough in getting the offer across to your audience. You need to come up with a message which stirs the curiosity of your prospects and entices them to take up your offer.

Elliot likes writing and is interested in Dental Marketing and Dental Website Design. Please take care of your teeth.

Marketing can be extremely complex, confusing and daunting all at the same time. The burden of launching a good marketing campaign doubles when you juggle this responsibility with several other tasks. This is the exact predicament which dentists find themselves in. They are not just the ones who supervise hygienists and other members of the staff, attend to patients and manage everything that happens in the clinic; they are also the brains behind any practice’s marketing strategy.

In a bid to try to simplify things, dentists should understand that there are really just four elements in any successful marketing campaign – audience, timing, offer and message.

<h5>Audience</h5>

Before you can come up with an effective campaign, you first need to know who your audience is. Since you’re marketing your services to them, you need to know what their motivations are for availing of dental services. What are your target market’s demographics? Are they young or old? Will they respond more to a marketing campaign which is traditional or online-based? The more that you know about your audience, the easier it will be for you to tailor your marketing campaign to suit their preferences.

<h5>Timing</h5>

No matter how convincing your marketing campaign is, it might not work to its full advantage just because of the timing. For instance, it’s always more convenient for kids to get their braces fitted during the summer especially since the first few days can result in general discomfort. So you might not be able to attract as many patients if you launch a campaign involving braces in the middle of the school term.

<h5>Offer</h5>

A huge factor for ensuring the success of your campaign is coming up with right offer. Of course, you’ll need to whip up an offer which pleases those in your target market. For instance, younger patients with higher salaries may be more receptive to trying cosmetic procedures so you can always use that to come up with a suitable offer. Then again, the only way for you to really know if an offer works or not is to test it.

<h5>Messaging</h5>

In theory, your campaign might be great but somehow your prospects and patients aren’t buying. So what’s wrong? It could be that you’re not creative enough in getting the offer across to your audience. You need to come up with a message which stirs the curiosity of your prospects and entices them to take up your offer.

Elliot likes writing and is interested in Dental Marketing and Dental Website Design. Please take care of your teeth.

Google on Wednesday announced that the Google+ social network wants to be like Twitter, more specifically the company rolled out hashtag support which provides access to Google searches. The company also announced that real-time searches can now be conducted through the Google+ platform.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social, explained in a post:

“Now when you search in Google+, you’ll see a message about new posts the instant they’re available,” while adding, “If you click on this message, or select ‘Most recent,’ then relevant posts will start appearing in real-time.”

When hashtags are used they automatically link to search results for the terms which might make “Imhavingareallybaddaytoday” seem irrelevant while popular terms such as #iPHone4S will yield the type of results people want. Thankfully Google is capable of breaking up strings of characters into search terms which means #iPhone4STroubleshooting” displays on Google.com search results as “iPhone 4S Troubleshooting” without users having to break up strings into separate words.

With the announcement of a real-time search option it’s likely that Google.com will eventually receive better search results based off Google+ semantic results, something they struggled to get right with Twitter.com feeds before eventually losing access to Twitter data when they couldn’t reach an agreement with the company in July.

Here’s a video introduction to the new features:

Even though email and IM are still the two important communication channels, social media channels are rapidly increasing for our communication and we are dedicating more and more of our time online to social media.

Infographiclabs have collected and visualised the most recent data on Social Media usage in infographic below, enjoy!

It used to be that social media and search engine optimization were mutually exclusive domains. People just did not see the connection between these two.  If you do social media campaigns, such as interacting with your customers on Twitter or maintaining a Facebook page for your business, there is really little need for SEO.  Your Facebook page and Twitter account often get marketed on different channels via different means.  Nobody really expected to get a high ranking for their social media pages, unless you or your business has a very unique name.

On the flip side, SEO practitioners know fully well that social media will not help their attempts at getting a higher ranking for their websites.  Most social media sites are no-follow, so even if they have really high page ranks, they do not really offer your site anything. Those that do offer some amount of link juice have been spammed and abused by fellow marketers that it is nearly not worth the effort to be on these sites anymore.

But the Panda update has changed all that.  Suddenly, social media is influencing search engine rankings.  Why?

First, let us be clear that social media mentions are considered only as “signals” and are not seen as an actual “factor” in ranking.    It is an indicator that you have the factors right.  What are these factors?

1.  Great content.  Having entertaining, educational or informative content is a sure way for people to share it on social media.  If you have a funny video, expect people to share it on their Facebook accounts or retweet it on Twitter.  Social media mentions, therefore, are an indicator of the quality of content you have on your site.

2.  Toolbar data.  In the ensuing discussion about the Panda update, various theories and guesses were put forward.  One of the more plausible hypotheses for getting penalized by the Panda update is low toolbar data, or getting short visits, high bounce rates and few returning visits.  This happened to sites that were more focused on SEO, getting traffic on popular keywords, but did not have the right content for these keywords, so people who searched for them leave immediately.  The idea is that if a person took time to share the page on his or her social media accounts, it is an indicator that he or she took time to read the content and would revisit it when he or she needs it.  It also signifies that the page was written for people and not for search engine spiders.

3.  Branding.  It seems that everybody who is concerned about deciphering the Panda update has been quoting Matt Cutts and other people who work for Google who emphasize that branding is essential.  In fact, most of the authoritative sites that suffered after the update were smaller companies with weak branding or that did not have any branding efforts to speak of. Social media mentions tell a lot about how people perceive your brand, and even how people feel about it.  Social media mention monitoring services can give you information on where conversations about your brand start, where your brand is being talked about, and what exactly has been said about you.  This means that social media mentions can easily manifest just how much control you have over your brand and whether you are exerting any effort at branding.

What to do:

1. Encourage people to share your content by making it easier for them.  There are sharing buttons that you could use for your site, blogs and articles.  Say something simple such as “Share this article to your friends” or “Liked this page?  Tell your friends about it.”  Your visitors should be able to share your content with just one click!

2. Spend more time with your social media properties.  The whole point of social media is to have more engaged customers that become loyal customers and ultimately become brand advocates.  If you are not starting discussions about your website or blog post on your Facebook page, for instance, then who will?  Your customers might stumble upon your own shares on Facebook, and if they like any, they would share it with their friends.  It could be as simple as putting your latest blog entry on your Facebook page or tweeting it to your followers!

3. Create a great teaser to encourage them to read your content.  No matter how informative, funny or good your content is, if people do not open it, then it is not going to do you any good. The key to getting people to open, and eventually share your content is to entice them to read it first by baiting them with a good headline, a short description, and a thumbnail image.

In addition to helping clients improve their Social Media campaigns, Search Engine Optimization, Inc. provides innovative Search Engine Marketing Services revolving around a custom fit solution that is aligned with the client’s goals and needs.  Check out SEO Inc. on Facebook.

YouTube on Wednesday began rolling out a new video editing feature that allows users to edit their YouTube clips directly through the website.

Since the editing program allows users to maintain their video IDs they won’t lose view counts and comments, while existing links to their videos from other sources will continue to operate as meant they always have.

To use the program users simply click on the “Edit Video” option from the video’s page or through their “My Videos” page.

In an official YouTube blog post Software Engineer John Gregg explains some of the features which include the ability to stablize hand-held footage, rotate videos and boost the colors and contract for videos. Users can even use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature to try out one-click color correction.

YouTube also announces new features from their acquisition of Picknik which provides aesthetic effects which gives users access to filters that include black and white video, cartoon and others.

Users can also swap out audio tracks and cut the beginning or end of clips within the YouTube interface.

If users are not happy with their final product they can go back to the original or they can use the “save as” feature to create multiple copies of their video as they continue to make more edits.

Just one thing to watch out for, as the YouTube blog post points out, popular videos with more than 1,000 views and videos with third-party content will only be saved as new videos once they have been edited.

Here’s a video of the system in action:

If you’re planning your first SEO campaign or even starting again because your site isn’t attracting the right kind of traffic then the most important step you can take before you do anything else is to make sure you’ve done some well thought out and well managed keyword research. Get it wrong, by targeting the wrong keywords (or the expensive ones) for your niche and you’ll find yourself collecting high ranking but meaningless search terms. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing keyword research for SEO, PPC or a finely tuned combination of the two, if you choose the wrong keywords you’ll be wasting both your money and your time.

This article will show you how to both research and then choose the optimum keywords for your website and for your overall marketing strategy. There are numerous tools out there that you can find and use to help you choose those keywords, some of the paid for, some free, but before you look into those tools, take twenty minutes to do one little thing. Take a paper and pen and give yourself half an hour to sit and write down all the phrases and keywords that you would most likely use if you were searching for a site that is similar to yours. Then repeat the same step for one of your competitor’s sites. After you’ve done this, try one further thing that most people don’t do. Rather than collecting data just from your own habits or even the habits of your peers who will probably be just as tech savvy as you are, ask your parents or grandparents if they would sit down and search for a site like hers. Write down the exact phrases and terms that they use and you’ll soon have a far more exhaustive and wider set of results.  I do this all of the time on several sites I work on, including one on umbrella companies, and it always works out well.

After you’ve done that, try using one of the many keyword research tools available on the Internet. There are too many to list here, many of which are free but some popular tools include Hypertracker, Keyword Spy, Good Keywords and Google Adwords.

After you’ve compiled a full and complete list it is important to try and trim it a little. Start by taking out generic phases or words like ‘dvd’s’ or ‘books’. Words such as these are impossible to compete for and you will have no chance of sending any traffic from them to your website. Instead, focus on words that are precise, relevant and will lead to customers with an intent to buy stuff being driven to your website, such as ‘gardening books’ or ‘skiing dvd’s’. Similarly if you are trying to advertise your services as a lawyer, don’t even bother trying to achieve rankings for law or lawyer. Rather, concentrate on terms that focus in on the specific products or services that you are offering, such as ‘divorce law’ or ‘criminal lawyer in Manchester.’

One way to judge whether search terms are worth using is by utilizing research tools to see how many of your competitors and other sites are competing for that phrase or word and look at how strong those sites are in the rankings. Compare the word or phrase against the sites using it and judge whether you should use it. In addition, compare your list of search terms and phrases with those of your competitors. Check if there are any terms that you might have missed or any niches where they are not so strong and you know you could be. Lastly, using both your list and your competitor’s list, make a final selection of words that consists of both targeted keywords and wider and more general search phrases. These more general or broad terms might not do too much when it comes to rankings but they give some good natural descriptive terms to the search engines and may help to raise you visitor numbers. On the other hand your targeted terms should serve to bring you that quality traffic which leads to conversions.

One last thing. Keyword research is an evolving art and what works for you one year might not work the next. Try and repeat the whole process every few months in order to keep up with the latest search phrases and the phrases that your competitors are using.

Guest Bio: Alex is a blogger and seo consultant. He currently writes a blog for the Bedouin Group on finance and the contracting sector, covering mortgages and other topics.

In the beginning, blogging is like giving a presentation in front of an audience, and you feel a little anxious about hitting the publish button.

Here are some suggestions to help settle your fears and hopefully change your perception of blogging whether you have already started or might be considering it.

When I explain the benefits of blogging I can’t help but talk about my own experiences and success.  The person listening usually responds with something like, I wouldn’t know what to blog about or I wish I had time to do that.

That’s code for, I think my posts will be boring and I’d rather not risk my time doing something I might not be good at.

Blogs Are Mini Adventures

It doesn’t matter what your topic is, just be yourself, and don’t be too critical.  If it’s authentic, and stuff you have interest in, then you’ll see good results.

Don’t try and define blogging, it isn’t something you can predict with certainty.  A blog can be very effective in ways you’d never thought possible.

Just start and you’ll learn your own style.

My Boss Wants Me To Start Blogging

A blog doesn’t have to be an online diary, like the first ones were.  Blogging can attract the most valuable kinds of customers, influencers.

Use a blog to reach your ideal customer.  Perhaps your blog offers some templates for managing customers by industry.  You’d be surprised at how powerful templates are, here’s an SEO excel template I made for tracking keywords.

How Will I Ever Find Time To Blog

How can businesses find time for a blog?  Think of a blog as an easier way for customers to access the information they would call you for anyway, so it can reduce time spent answering customer service phone calls.

Perhaps you can get some monthly reports on customer service time spent over the phone.  Then find out the most commonly asked questions and organize a very thorough blog post with the solutions.  See if it reduces the time spent on phone calls by directing the caller to the blog.

How Can I Find Good Topics For A Business Blog

If you own a vacuum cleaner store, you could have a blog that outlines steps to replace a belt.  If you are a general contractor, you could blog about the differences between the types of hardwood floors available.  A car dealership could blog about how to get their mobile phone synced to the vehicle via bluetooth.

There is no limit to the ways businesses can utilize blogging to stand out to their target market.  The most important thing is to get started sooner rather than later, and learn as you go.  Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, that actually shows you’re human, and willing to take chances for the sake of giving your customers something helpful.

It takes a long time to attract an audience to your blog.  I once heard someone say that you should “blog as if nobody reads  what you write.”  This is exactly what you do in the beginning.  The results are a much more natural flow, the kind people like to read because it’s easier to scan.

People don’t read blogs they scan them.

They are in a hurry, so don’t be too critical of yourself.

Write about something you know, show your passion.

The more you write, the more natural it becomes.

Don’t hold back from hitting publish.  The more you do the faster you will become very comfortable with your style and others will start anticipating your next post so don’t make them wait.

If you fear blogging then blog about that.  This is what makes blogging unique.  It dives right to the center of things, and exposes the issue so you can move forward.

I used my blog to vent my frustrations to the world in the beginning, and it felt great.  I did this because I was exploring the limits of what a blog could do.  Honestly, I have yet to find that limit.

Let your blog take you into new territories.

As I started seeing more examples like this, my blogging fear and any skepticism for whether it produced value were gone and I became very confident that this was going to be a good direction.

Guest Bio: Scott Golembiewski of TheDealerBlog provides blog consulting services to car dealers, small business owners and aspiring bloggers who want to increase their efficiency in creating high quality content on their blog.

The upper echelons of the Google search results are being invaded by a newcomer; the search engine optimized video.

But search engine optimization is all about coding and writing text, surely? Real SEO is stuff like keywords, language, semantically structured information, well-aged domains with buckets of trusted incoming links and well-written authoritative content?

Well, it is true that the vast majority of currently indexed web content is text-based, and that those trillions of web pages contain an equally mind-boggling number of images. This huge amount of ‘traditional’ web content has been growing exponentially since the early days of the internet, and the challenge of ranking highly amongst it is directly proportional to that growth. Any new or even temporary way to rise to the top of the pile is therefore more than welcome. Right now, optimizing your video files –VSEO -can be a shortcut to page one.

Here we can see how optimized videos can even beat a celebrity’s homepage to the top spot; Apologies for picking Paris, but she does sooo much for the feminist movement… well, maybe not but this illustrates my point perfectly!

Why search optimised video is a quick route to page 1

This shortcut is mainly due to one simple fact; indexed video assets are still relatively rare, so the competition is thin. For now, video SEO allows you to neatly side-step some of the factors that may be holding your traditional SEO methods back. Currently, some of the crucial factors of ‘normal’ SEO do not apply to indexed video content. The age of your domain, number of pages, amount of on-topic content, number and quality of back-links, and countless other regular factors simply don’t come into it.

Why videos are exempt from many search result ranking factors

This makes sense if you think about it; if you registered as a YouTube user today and uploaded the definitive guide to SEO for videos, Google would not hide your content on the basis of its ‘new’ origins. Being a new user would not define you and negatively impact the video itself; after all, you could be Matt Cutts using a pseudonym. When a music artist releases their latest offering on the internet, users obviously want to find the right clip immediately – not to wait for it to gain a PR score and thousands of back-links. When someone uploads an important bit of mobile phone footage of something in the news, we want to be able to find it straight away. If your cat just did the funniest thing ever… we don’t want to wait. For these reasons and plenty more, Google quite rightly recognised that Video search needed a different approach to ranking.

Video SEO the YouTube way

By definition, a video clip uploaded on YouTube or the like is a stand-alone object, not necessarily associated with a particular website, company or individual. On YouTube, your videos will have the advantage of being indexed immediately and showing up in search results with almost no delay. But beware – when a user clicks on the video link they will go straight to YouTube to watch it, not to your website. This is still an effective strategy for brand placement, but relies on viewer memory, your user profile or comment links to guide the video’s audience back to you.

‘Real’ Video SEO

If increasing website traffic is your aim, then ‘real’ video SEO is the way forward. For starters, you need to host and embed the video on your own website. Remember that the only defining feature of ‘video’ is the fact that it is in a recognized video format such as .avi, .mov, .mp4 etc  – so don’t assume you need talent, technology and a budget!

Your ‘video’ could be a screen capture, a series of stills with a voiceover, an animation, or you could simply record yourself with a webcam. For now, Google can’t actually see how good your acting is – it relies on metadata, titles and the text contained in headers and subtitle files.

Getting your SEO video indexed

Submitting your SEO video to Google is the next step, as it won’t be crawled and indexed like a regular page. You need to actively submit video information using a media RSS feed or video sitemap.

Video sitemaps work just like regular sitemaps, but only contain information about your video files. As with Google’s product feed specification, there are many ‘non-essential’ attributes in the video sitemap specification. But as with Google Products, we can’t really be sure which ones factor in search positions, or when that will change – so use as many as possible. Here’s a cheeky idea; submit multiple copies of your SEO video in different formats, or with different titles. No existing algorithm can detect duplicate content inside your video files – yet.

Don’t forget to also include a robots.txt file on all your video pages to ensure Google is not blocked, and can quickly verify your embedded video content!

Keywords, Description, Title and Title Tags for VSEO

Optimise the title of your video much the same way as you would any other kind of content – give it a good name that gets to the point, references the subject clearly and doesn’t waste space. Be specific and use long-tail search terms to your advantage; a video titled ‘Video SEO – How to Search Engine Optimize your Videos’ has far less keyword competition than one simply titled ‘SEO’.

To conclude, here’s a great real world example of everything we’ve been talking about.

As you can see, reelseo.com has beaten us all to it with a nicely optimised video at the top of the organic results and is listed alongside videos from Google’s own YouTube site. As jealous as we may be – the video and its placement illustrate great use of video search optimization techniques; getting a small SEO firm’s website link on position 2.

So that’s it all you SEO Spielbergs – go make a movie, apply some VSEO to your specific key terms, and hopefully we’ll be seeing you on page one in no time at all.

Guest Bio: Gez Hebburn is an SEO blogger, copywriter, musician and general Geek. Immersed in the world of SEO/social/insight/SEM/design and content creation, Gez works at the Fresh Egg agency in Worthing UK. When he isn’t worrying about a clients’ copy or search engine optimisation, he can normally be found feeding his kids or playing an acoustic guitar.