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Domain Name Selection

It is important to choose your domain name wisely as this sets the way for your ecommerce business to pervade every area of the online landscape, including your search engine marketing, search engine optimization and social media marketing.

In order to maximize organic and paid search traffic, the following are the most important elements to consider:

Ensure Uniformity for Consistency

It is needful to have some consistency as far as your domain name and business name are concerned. Your domain name should relate to the official business name, which reinforces the weight of the brand and creates trust with everyone that encounters the business in various platforms. What’s more, your users will be able to easily integrate your brand in their memories. Therefore, choose a short, relevant and easily memorable name which fits your business’s persona.

Use Your Keywords in the Domain Name

Keyword targeting is still a useful tool for search visibility, particularly organic search. If you’re looking to influence/attract more people, you’ll need to rank highly in relevant search results. Therefore, ensure that your business name and hence domain name includes your most important keyword/service-explaining term.

Photo Credit: templatemonster.com

If for instance your business deals in dresses for plus-size women, you want this to feature in the domain name in some form. Synonyms can also be used, but ensure that your most important search term is accounted for.

Improve Local SEO for Lead Generation

You may be wondering just how a domain name factors into lead generation for your business. To put it simply, building trust in your brand through domain selection can turn visitors and users into potential leads. Users will turn to what they know and trust when they have a need you can fulfill. Our internet landscape is filled with multinational signals. The ‘.com’ is a popular domain that is desired by many. However, you should register your business with the most valued domain in your region e.g. ‘.au’ and ‘.co.uk’. This is especially important if your business can serve users in multiple countries.

Other domain selection tips:

• Ensure that your domain name is easily memorable. Experts have defined a brand as the sum total of how an organization or business is perceived by a person. Therefore, to have lasting influence on the perception of your audience and potential customers, you need something that sticks fast in their minds.

• You need an easy to spell domain. You also want to ensure that there aren’t any misspellings. If possible, avoid intentional misspells and hyphenations except where they’re related to the brand e.g. “Eazy Safaris”.

• The top domains in the world have no more than nine-characters in their name. Short domains are to be desired, limited to one or two words. If you have a longer name, see how best to shorten it to nine characters or less.

• Finally, you want a distinctive and unique domain, just like your business name should be. You don’t want to be confused for a competitor, even if they’re in a different region. Be sure to take time to research a business name before registering it.

Web Hosting

Once you have your domain name, the web hosting service and package is the next decision to name. The web host is the sole engine that determines your online availability to clients. Web hosting also has an impact on ranking, as low availability/up-times will cause a decline in your rankings.

Photo Credit: erasoft-eg.com

What’s more, your e-commerce web host will determine how fast your site will be and directly impact user experience. These are two factors that search engines take seriously in their search ranking algorithms.

Whether you’re using a dedicated host, Linux, Windows, VPS or shared hosting servers, there is a distinct set of features necessary to maintain a high performance level and good user experience. These are some of those features, in order of importance.

Server Availability

That server uptime tops this list is something that needs little explanation. The advantage that ecommerce stores have over their bricks-and-mortar counterparts is the fact that customers can visit the shop round-the-clock. The typical industry standard is to have 99.99% server uptime. If users cannot access your business, it defeats your very purpose for existing.

Content Delivery Network and Page Load Speed

Research has shown that just a second’s delay in page response can reduce the rate of conversions by up to 7 percent. More than two seconds’ delay can increase this to as much as 40 percent and even more.

Page loading speed is determined by the bandwidth and RAM of your web host. If your business can afford it, you can simply get a dedicated server and have that done with. However, most small to medium businesses cannot afford this. Instead, getting a Windows or Linux virtual server from a well-referenced provider is cheaper and quite effective.

Versatile Payment System and Security

As an online sales service, your customers’ data—credit card information, login information and purchase history among others—must be secured from unwarranted access. In addition, make shopping easier by integrating versatile payment gateways that allow as many payment options as possible. You should analyze the security of such payment gateways from time to time.

Conclusion

Web hosting is vital to certain signals that eventually impact search engine rankings. Your domain name is an important part of brand building as well as creating trust and loyalty among your potential and existing clientele. It is difficult to change your domain name once the business is established, so it’s better to ensure it is done right the first time.

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Many web experts have sought to answer this critical question in varied ways. In most of these answers, however, one aspect has consistently been ignored; web hosting. Does web hosting play an essential role in the speed of one’s site? Maybe it is high time you find out.

Web Hosting and Web Speed Connection

In browsing, you are ideally accessing remote files stored in the web servers. The faster the remote computer, the faster the user will access the requested pages. That makes your choice of web hosting company or package very important. Yet again, the web server is involved in executing thousands of interrelated codes to enable the display of a single page. Executing these codes takes time and that explains why some pages take ages to load depending on their hosts.

For content management based database websites, running the databases questions is an added task to the web browser. Retrieving the needed webpage content involves searching through multiple databases; a code-intensified process. Taking a WordPress site for instance, it can take more than 150 database queries to display a single page! What happens when you have a poor choice of web hosting services? The answers might be pretty obvious!

Photo Credit: werehumans.com

It is also worth noting that loading webpages involves the web server serving up multiple files including images, CSS and JavaScript. To load the homepage of Amazon for instance, more than 350 requests have to be sent to the web servers. The imagination that such a process is executed in seconds is mind-blowing.

How to Choose Ideal Web Hosting Packages

Having realised the connection between web hosting and web speed, you might probably be asking yourself the million-dollar question: What makes some web packages to be faster than the rest? There lies a great resemblance between the speed of your computer and the fastness of web hosting packages. They work in an almost similar way.

The very factors that affect the speed of your machine are the ones that influence the difference in web hosting packages speed. They include:

• Fast Hard Drive—for solid state drive, the loading process is faster compared to standard hard drive. That implies greater performance for packages based on the faster hard drives.

• Location of Essential Resources—it is worth noting that ensuring your databases are on the same web server can greatly enhance the speed of sites. This is opposed to the idea of such resources being on the other servers like in the case of shared web hosting.

• Dedicated Resources—it is ideal choosing a web hosting plan offering dedicated resources. Choosing a VPS or dedicated server plan saves you the stress of other websites hogging resources. The latter is mostly common with the shared web hosting plans.

• Enhanced Resources—this is yet another significant difference exhibited in the various web hosting plans. With more advanced web hosting plans come increased processing power and enhanced memory. Collectively, such enhanced resources will escalate the speed of your site because requests will be executed more quickly. Simply advancing from the shared web hosting to better packages such as VPS will do the trick.

How Will Upgrading to Better Hosing Packages Enhance Your Web Speed?

Not so many people are aware of how much the speed of their websites can increase with a simple upgrade of their web hosting plans. For websites involving several codes to be executed and like Magento websites, it becomes of greater significance.

In a recent page load speed study on the effect of upgrading from shared hosting to VPS plan for a Magento website, interesting outcomes were realised.

The importance of fast web speed might have been overstated for marketing companies before but there lies real benefits of escalating the speed of your website. Notably, the upgraded VPS hosting site recorded 62% improvement in the page load speed! Apparently, enhanced results can also be achieved for the less resource-intensive websites. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the impact might not be huge like in the case of other Magento websites. For content management system websites like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, upgrading your web hosting plans will oversee critical improvements.

What Makes Page Load Speed So Important?

As noted earlier, the essence of page load speed might have been overstated by many people. However, that doesn’t change the fact that real significance of web load speed exists. For one, faster-loading websites are easily located by search engines. Recent studies have however hinted that page complete load time has minimal effects on webpage load speeds. The correlation between webpage load speeds and search engine rankings might be small but you still need your web pages to load faster to take advantage of even the slightest possibilities.

The greater significance comes in the user experience. Who would wait for a website that takes ages to load when there is an alternative? Like everyone else, web users like saving time. They will always prefer faster loading pages that guarantee better user experience. Slower loading sites affect the subsequent conversion rates. Upgrading your web hosting plans might as well enhance your conversion rates through fastening of web speeds.

Recent studies have also indicated correlations between webpage load speeds and time to first byte. Apparently, Google might be using this as a ranking factor of webpages. That makes it important to have an ideal hosting plan, which will definitely translate to enhanced web speed.

At the end of it all, what matters is the speed of your site. With the greater connection between web speed and web hosting, there is no doubt that upgrading to a better web hosting plan guarantees better results and increase on ROI.

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How to Use Your Videos to Solve Viewer Problems and Disseminate New Information

When using video as part of your SEO strategy, it is important to ensure that the content in your videos is of good quality and solves a challenge that the viewer could be facing. The video can also provide its audience with new information about your business, product or service. You can easily produce high quality content in your videos.

A simple idea can be use when creating video marketing content. One can film a whiteboard session or even interviewing a stakeholder or consumer of your product. When you are establishing a theme or topic for your video, you should try to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Try to anticipate the problems that they could be facing and you can solve. Moreover, ask yourself how you can help your audience achieve their desired results faster. Once you figure that out, communicate the method that you have found in the video. This type of video will be recognized due to its good quality content and ranked high in the video search results.

Create Links to Individual Video Landing Pages and Make Them Easy to Find in Your Website

Ensure that your videos are easy to browse and find on the Internet. Also, when you are distributing the links to your videos on the Internet, ensure that these links lead directly to individual video playback pages.

Photo Credit: reelseo.com

If you have multiple videos, you can group them together and establish a center where people can view them all in the same location. You can consider this location as your video resource center. You can direct your viewers to this location and they will be able to view your video content. To help your viewers to locate your videos easily, you should divide this location according to categories and establish tags that can guide the viewers to the video that they want to see. This form of organization also helps them to easily navigate from one video to another. This boosts viewer satisfaction and leads to better SEO for your website.

There are some webmasters who simply create a page that has a group of video players that have been arranged all on the same page. When there is a multitude of videos arranged on one page, it is difficult to find the one that you desire. The best way to present your videos to the world is by presenting each on its own landing page. This way, search engines can find these videos and index them individually. This gives better SEO results than simply stacking all your videos on the same page.

Create Interactive Videos to Establish Relationships with Your Viewers

An interactive video is always a good idea. This is because it involves the viewer in the content. An interactive video can accomplish this by:

1. Calling the viewer to action
2. Showing them how to achieve the next step

You can add interactive elements to your video such as surveys, quizzes, fun facts and links. These elements make the video interesting, communicate quality content to the viewer and also prompt the viewer to take a given action. An example of such a video is a how-to video for your business application. You can display interactive steps in the video and also guide your viewers on how to download your application.

How to Use Video Metadata Strategically

Video contains rich metadata that you can use in your SEO efforts for your websites. Videos can contain smart data about your business. Moreover, they are ideal sources of long tail keywords. You can go ahead to grab these keywords and use them in your webpage SEO. It is also important to remember that you can post tags in the HTML code of the landing pages of your videos. Examples of such tags are the OpenGraph tags of Facebook and the Card tags in Twitter (like on the sidebar of our blog page). This is reflected in the following case study.

Case study

Jennifer Lewis, is the senior interactive marketing manager at SafeNet. She indicated how she utilizes rich metadata and smart content organization so as to collect as much content as possible from the in-house video resource library. She found that video content is a rich source of long-tail keywords.

Transcript Your Videos to Make Them Easier to Index, Use, and Present Content

You can post transcriptions for your videos in your webpages. According to established tests, a video that has been transcripted will perform better in the search rankings than one that has not. To boost the performance of your videos in this way, add the transcriptions into the HTML code of the landing pages where the videos are located.

Photo Credit: softloom.com

These are important because viewers can read a video’s content instead of watching it. This also creates an opportunity for you to add more keywords in your webpages.Video transcription is ideal for the purpose of establishing more content for your videos. A transcript can be useful as the foundation for a blog post. it can then lead the reader to your video via a link. This is a very helpful SEO strategy.

Host Your Videos in a Domain That You Fully Own

For the purpose of boosting the SEO value of your videos, ensure that you post them in your domain. Even if it is important to distribute your videos on other websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, ensure that you begin in your domain. This way, you give video credit to yourself first and then to the other sites.

Video content has grown exceptionally popular on the Internet. Thus, it has become a major medium of SEO. The above tips and tricks can help you to convert your video content into sources of valuable SEO.

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Click for full infographic!

Getting Personal

As Moz.com explains, by adding a more personal touch and having your site’s author visible and recognizable, you’ll make your brand a lot easier to be social. You’ll be able to engage in customer conversations more easily, and create a more social brand. You’ll want to focus on having your business showcase expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) with both your content and your links you build on social media, blogs, and guest blogs since these are the criteria Google uses to determine quality sites. Try to establish your writing with real tips your customers and clients would want to use.

Guest Blogging

Your company also shouldn’t overlook doing guest blog posts on other sites, especially if that site is an authority site in your niche. It’s the best chance you have at improving your SEO, and establishing quality links to get you visible and more available in the community and industry.
Guest blogging on sites that have nothing to do with your niche on the other hand, look spammy, and search engines are starting to buckle down on this practice. The best way to avoid looking and becoming spammy is to do the following in your advertising:

• Link to other authority sites in addition to yours in your blog post.
• Only guest blog on blogs that are related to your area of expertise.
• Increase your author or authority rank by posting often on Google+. There are over 800,000 new users per month which you can target.
• If you link back to your own site, avoid keyword-rich words in the link.

The last point bears repeating. When linking to another site, businesses often don’t use the exact right keywords that match the URL of the site they’re linking to. These link-posters usually say something like, “Click on this link for more information”, or “Go to [name of site] for more information.” It’s the text-rich linking that usually look strange to search engines because it’s not an organic way people usually link to a site. Ironically, even though such a post would have the keywords you’re trying to rank for in it, that practice can lower your SEO rank precisely because it doesn’t look natural. You can get more tips and techniques from an SEO marketing company as well. The options available from a firm like this can get you on the right track without you having to waste time on tedious research.

Getting Backlinks

Sharing on social media is one of the simplest and most legitimate ways to get backlinks to your site. If you’re trying to create brand awareness, social media can boost your site in a way many other SEO tactics can’t. For one thing, it organically introduces you and your company to people outside your social circle. Ideally, the link and any other booster features you have on your site will be seen by someone with a bit of social clout. Think a journalist or blogger in your niche. These professionals may not know about you personally, but if they know someone in your circle who shares your link, that could help. The blogger in this example may just wind up writing about you and linking back to your website from their blog which is the kind of natural interaction you really want.

If you’re looking for a simple way to increase your company’s SEO potential, think about adding a social media campaign. It can boost the pull of the on-page search engine optimization that you’re already doing. By cross-linking between your internal pages and using good keyword phrases you’ll be off to a good start and fortunately, it’s not too difficult. It can be as easy as having a conversation with someone!

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So what is SEO hosting and why is it/could it be helpful?

SEO Hosting is a type of web hosting that improves the SEO of a website—with the purpose of increasing the searchability of the site, thus generating more sales.

To do this, an SEO Hosting provider will host a client’s websites on unique C-blocks of IP addresses. This allows multiple websites run by the same webmaster(s) to interlink while being ranked independently by search engines. Therefore, SEO Hosting is much more beneficial to entities with a few or many websites.

Why Are Different C-Blocks Beneficial to Hosting Your Website?

On a typical web server a website is given an IP address that looks like this 192.168.1.0.

IP addresses (using the IPv4 standard) are divided into 5 classes:

• Class A
• Class B
• Class C
• Class D
• Class E

In other words: A.B.C.D.E.

Websites hosted on a web server inside a data center are generally on servers with the same Class C IP. E.g:

• 192.55.123.89

• 192.55.123.66

If you own multiple websites and would like to link between them, search engines will recognize that they are hosted on the same C-Block and therefore only the first link will be ranked.

If those websites are hosted on different C-Blocks, then all the links will be ranked independently will be much easier to search for.

When you decide on hosting with Class C IP Address, you are guaranteed that you would be provided data centers that may be found in different sections around the globe thereby allowing you to have multiple Class C IP Addresses.

To understand this a little bit better, you can read our comprehensive IP vernacular guide here.

That’s all well and good, but what good is all of this in regards to SEO Hosting?

What Are the Benefits of SEO Hosting?

Being hosted on different C-Blocks is the fundamental definition of SEO Hosting, but that’s not all it can offer.

SEO Hosting can also benefit your website in the following ways:

International SEO

Search engines, like Google, rank websites via their IP address’s geographical location. The more relevant the geographical location of your IP address is to the content on your site, the higher the website will rank in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), or the first 10 or so websites the search engine pulls up.

Since we can host your websites on multiple IPs in different locations, your websites can benefit from international search—if setup correctly.

Local SEO

Much in the same manner as International SEO, Local SEO is great for websites with local IP addresses to rank higher on local SERPs.

Avoiding Being at the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

Hosting your website in the traditional manner can make you seem guilty by association. If another website on the same C-Block has done some unsavory things, then the whole C-Block can be penalized by search engines. This causes all the websites on that C-Block to be unnecessarily punished for the actions of one website.

Since your website will be hosted on unique C-Blocks with SEO Hosting, then there’s no worry about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Colocation America has been an industry leader in hosting for over a decade, and we offer customized SEO Hosting to help meet your marketing goals. What sets our SEO plans apart from other provides is that we offer the benefits of hosting your sites on multiple C-class IP addresses in addition to our quality assurances, reliable network infrastructure and fast data transfer.  

Optimizing your hosting setup to improve your search rankings requires unique IPs, maximum uptime and quick load times. Whether you have a large network of sites or want to maximize the search rankings on a given server, Colocation America is built to be the best SEO hosting provider.

Rest easy—working with the trusted network engineers at Colocation America ensures your site is in good hands. Before you launch on a standard hosting plan, consider the vast upside provided by working with a top provider such as Colocation America. Not only are our hosting plans more affordable than you might imagine, but the search ranking benefits will deliver an impressive return on your investment over time.

How Can I Improve My Search Engine Rankings?

At the end of the day, the best way to do SEO and gain search engine rankings is to simply create a good website.

• Provide high quality and unique content that people want to read or use.
• Properly organize the website by applying proper meta-data.
• Offer a variety of content including images and video.
• Follow our blog on Wednesdays for more SEO tips and tricks

These basic factors will bring a website to the top of search engine pages but do require hard work and dedication. SEO hosting is a great way to raise your search engine rankings while significantly easing up the workload on yourself.

What are your thoughts on SEO hosting? Do you think it’s beneficial? Comment below and let’s get a discussion going!

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Because, hey, who doesn’t want their website to be more visible?

For some basics if you’re a beginner, check out this video by (former) Google SEO master, Matt Cutts:

Before we get started, it’s always best practice to review The Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors, used with permission:

What Google Algorithms Went Live in 2015?

Photo Credit: searchengineland.com

2015, SEO-wise, started out rather slowly but then a big announcement was dropped that would change the way the mobile web will look for the future. Google also refreshed its Panda algorithm (which we all love). Let’s get into a little more detail.

Unnamed Update — February 4, 2015

This update at the beginning of the year is unnamed because it was unannounced. However, SEO-heads and webmasters around the world noticed some interesting ebbs and flows in their ranking reports despite nothing really changing or coming from the mouth of Google itself. The fluctuations were rumored to headed by e-commerce related algorithms, but some also speculated that it was a slight preparation for the next big update “Mobilegeddon.”

“Mobilegeddon” — April 22, 2015

Photo Credit: searchengineland.com

On of the largest and certainly one of the most impactful SEO changes in recent memory, Google announced that mobile rankings would rely on the mobile-rendering (or mobile-friendliness) of a webpage. Therefore, if your webpage was great on a computer, but had trouble rendering or annoying characteristics (like lots of side-scrolling or large images that took forever to load) Google would penalize your site on their mobile rankings.

This was a major update that affected many websites and forced them to make the necessary changes to their mobile site. This SEO update was great from a User Experience (UX) perspective, but caused an awful lot of headaches for webmasters.

Luckily those headaches never had time to mature into full-blown migraines because Google was nice enough to pre-announce this algorithm to give webmasters the time they needed to make their sites mobile-friendly.

Google even added a nice little indicator on their Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to tell the user if a website was mobile-friendly or not:

Quality Update — May 3, 2015

This is one of those SEO algorithm updates that occur every year that polishes up the web. While no specifics were announced, Google did acknowledge that an algorithm update did take place.

Panda 4.2 (#28) — July 17, 2015

Everyone loves Panda because everyone loves great content. I’m speaking, of course, from the side of the consumer. As for SEOs and webmasters, things were a little different. Many (and I mean tons) of websites got affected by this update.

The core of this update took into consideration the quality of the content on your site. If you had thin content with the sole purpose of getting people to “click” to your site (i.e. clickbait), your site got dinged with a Panda penalty and spiraled down the SERP into oblivion.

Of course, many knew this update was coming and shored up their site in preparation, but those that didn’t saw a vast decline in traffic (and, in many cases, money). Google likes great, thoughtful content with the purpose of engagement, not clicks. That’s the reason for Panda and the reason it’s one of the largest ranking algorithms out there.

Panda is still rolling out so many more sites could potentially be affected and see a plummet in their rankings. Don’t think you’re out of the hot water just yet.

RankBrain — October 26, 2015

Photo Credit: fourdots.com

RankBrain is part of Google’s Hummingbird ranking algorithm. It’s just one of the ranking tools used to power Hummingbird.

RankBrain is the 3rd most influential ranking factor and that’s impressive because it’s a machine learning algorithm. It learns on the flow and, thus, can decipher and sort through the mess much faster than an algorithm that compiles data and then decides what to do with it. Not much is known about RankBrain as of right now, but apparently it’s been active since the Spring and will be here for the foreseeable future.

That’s it for 2015. If there’s anything more that Google announces this year we’ll update this blog and let you know!

Speaking of, what do we know, or think we know, Google is planning next?

What Is Google Planning next in the SEO World?

There is already much chatter about what Google is planning next in the SEO hemisphere. Some major changes are waiting to be released, and some smaller changes are being rumored. What’s the skinny?

Penguin — by 2016

Penguin is Google’s link algorithm designed to catch websites who link-spam or have links from disreputable websites, have spammy links on other websites, etc. Scraping around the internet for these links is a painstaking project and many SEOs and webmasters absolutely despise Penguin updates.

And apparently there’s a big one coming by the end of the year. So, clean up your links.

Optimizing for Mobile Voice Searching

“OK, Google,” and “Hey, Siri,” are phrases that are becoming more and more popular as we talk-to-text features become more accurate. It’s much easier to speak your question than it is to open your phone and type it—and then, god forbid, read the answer. It’s much easier to hear the question answered to you so you can multitask on something else.

This speculated update ties back into Hummingbird. The more Hummingbird-friendly your website is, the more likely Google will scrape it for mobile voice searching. This is an interesting update, if it comes to pass, which should yield great results.

Data, Data, Data

Engagement on your website is something that Google loves. The more social shares and comments the better, right? This leads way to discussion and people sure do love their opinions.

Well, Google is trying to take this a few steps further by asking websites to collect data and do studies.

Why? Well, that’s because the more catered your website is to a specific audience, the better.

Let’s not be shy here, Google already knows more about us than we probably know about ourselves. They already have a pretty educated guess on your age, race, religion, etc. So if they can cater their SERPs to give you information you’d be interested in based on these factors, then the internet will be a better place.

All of these algorithms and updates are intended to not only scrape the data of mankind, but to offer the user a better web-experience. If rolled out correctly and followed by webmasters, then the Internet has a real chance to be cleaned up.

There are certainly more possible updates for the end of 2015 and into 2016 and you can find those out there on the internet somewhere I’m sure. As for now stay tuned to our blog to keep up to date with the latest and best SEO practices, news, and updates.

What’s do you think of Google’s SEO practices? Do you think they help or hurt the internet as a whole? Comment below and let’s get a discussion going! (This totally isn’t because engagement is an SEO factor… ok, maybe it is).

The post What Did Google Do with SEO in 2015? – a Year in Review appeared first on Colocation America.

Introduction to SEO Web Hosting

There isn’t an exact definition for SEO web hosting; rather this term commonly refers to web hosts that are also SEO-friendly. While such hosting providers don’t per se offer anything to boost a site’s SEO, they don’t offer anything that could hinder a site’s SEO efforts either i.e. they don’t subscribe to practices which can hinder SEO.

Effect of Web Hosting on SEO

The choice of the web hosting service provider influences some of the rules relating to SEO, which is how web hosting can contribute positively or negatively to SEO. A few are as given below:

• Website speeds

Site-loading speeds are well-known SEO factors under op-page SEO techniques. Your web pages should load as fast as possible to provide better user experience leading to reduction in bounce rates and increase in conversion rates. Two things are necessary to have fast-loading website:

• A web host with sufficient resources, including fast hardware and good data center infrastructure
• Properly coded website with optimized images, text and code

You can easily control the second, but the first depends on the kind of provider you choose as a web host. If the provider’s hardware is not optimal for your performance, you have little recourse but to migrate to a different provider.

• Site availability

Site availability also directly affects rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google does not like offering its users websites that they don’t deem as being available. It temporarily de-indexes these sites until they resolve the availability issues.

It is the responsibility of the web hosting service provider to ensure that a site stays available; time spent being down can severely injure your online reputation. In the worst case, you may not be using any website monitoring tools and don’t even know that your website is down, while you continue to lose traffic and revenue.

• Site security

You can make personal effort to ensure high security of your website, but unless the web hosting service provider does the same, this still leaves you and your customers vulnerable. This means that Google is unlikely to send lots of traffic your ways, especially if you have an e-commerce site where users will need to share sensitive information.

If you have had the experience of having your website hacked into then you know the ramifications of such an event. In the absence of security from your web hosting service provider, you can get an infection from malware. If such issues are not speedily resolve, this could see your site de-indexed and the domain permanently blacklisted by search engines.

• SEO awareness

You should have a web hosting service provider who is familiar with SEO tips and their importance to websites they host. Otherwise, they might take actions that would injure your business without your knowledge, or even theirs.

For instance, a hosting provider could restrict the access of Google bots from the robots.txt file thinking they are protecting your site from some malware. This clearly shows an SEO-unfriendly provider who should not be offering any web hosting service in the first place.

Some web hosting service providers can also shut down websites because they have lots of traffic and hence are using up a lot of their resources. Others can ask webmasters to get rid of plugins such as Live Chat since their current infrastructure cannot support the added load, even though webmasters had an assurance of unlimited resources at the outset.

Who Is a Good Web Host?

At the end of the day, while the web hosting service provider may not directly contribute to improving your sites SEO, it should not do anything to hurt it either nor to damage your online reputation. Any inefficiency on the provider’s part should not have negative ramifications for you. The provider should not take any drastic moves without obtaining your express permission.

If you have been a web designer/SEO professional for a while, you may have tried many different packages for your different clients and know what to look out for. There are more good service providers than bad ones since web hosting is a highly competitive market. This means that you can get better services at reduced cost – good news for your clients.

Consider the length of time the provider has been in business, reviews from previous and current clients, online reputation, the nature of their data center and hardware/infrastructure. Weigh these against your website’s needs since that is what determines the exact web hosting package you will select.

Author bio

Michael Bentos is an experienced digital marketer and part of the team at ParadoxSEO.com – the powerful platform that makes SEO simple. He likes to provide SEO tips through his articles to make businesses excel in the online representation.

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Search Engine Optimization is the name of the game when it comes to getting your website found online. To be able to land on the first page can make or break your online business, as findings show that page one results get as much as 92 percent of traffic from the average search, while traffic from page two gets as little as five percent. And when it comes to search engines, Google is leaving competitors in the dust finishing off with 67 percent of the market share at the end of 2013.

So are we at the mercy of search engines, particularly Google Search? Yes, indeed. In fact, after Google unleashed their algorithm updates starting with Panda in early 2011, the world of SEO changed. After that, Google launched Penguin in 2012 and Hummingbird in 2013.

In short, these updates aim to bring authenticity and relevant content (high-quality sites) to users and penalize low-quality sites with low-value add. These low-quality sites often engage in black-hat, or non-Google approved, tactics to trick Google into giving them better rankings. This worked for years, but as updates improve Google’s algorithm, the efforts of the black hatters will only see their sites demoted and flagged as spam.

Whether you’re building your online presence or had your rankings take a free fall, have a quick look at these three game-changing updates so you won’t end up at the bottom of the barrel.

Panda: What It Means for Your SEO

Panda’s mantra is this: Content is King. Quality, audience, and user experience (definitely not keywords) will let your rankings soar. Keyword stuffing, buying backlinks, and article spinning won’t get you anywhere after Panda. If you want to build your links, create valuable content that searchers will find useful and offers value to them. Writing guests posts for high-traffic sites can gain you some backlinks, but always remember to put backlinks in the backseat and content as your main priority.

Penguin: It’s Like Panda but Worse

As mentioned, Google detests unnatural link building and categorizes it as spam. After Penguin’s release, spammy anchor text links found in forums, blogs, blog comments, and directories have been the update’s main target. These links need to be removed, nofollowed, or disavowed if your site has been hit. In the future, work to earn more natural links and look out for exact match anchor texts from low-quality sites.

Hummingbird: Google’s Latest Recipe

Hummingbird, named as such because they are “precise and fast”, is Google’s most recent algorithm change devised to create more “conversational search”. Did you notice the microphone icon in the Google search box? Users can now ask their question aloud instead of typing it. Google has improved on its ability to deal with complex and long-tailed searches and will give the user straight answers from its information card displayed on top or on the right side of the results page. Below shows the results if a user searches “Where is Grand Valley State?”

Grand Valley’s website may be on the top of the search result, but without clicking on it, the user can already find the answer to his query. In this case, how does Hummingbird benefit SEO? This is an important reminder by Google that it works for the search users and not websites. Although what is perceived as traditional SEO may not be affected by Hummingbird, it still helps to improve your ranking in the search engines by doing proper link building and providing quality content. But this time, you also have to think about competing with Google’s information cards that may already contain the answer that the user needs.

About the author:

Brittany Sozak is a marketing professional with rittersprinting.com, a direct mail and cross media marketing firm serving Fort Lauderdale and Miami.

The post A Quick Guide to Google’s Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird Updates appeared first on Colocation America.

SEO is incredibly important for businesses, especially in such a saturated marketplace as the Internet is today.  Heck, we do some SEO of our own (you’re reading it) and for the uninitiated, there’s good ways to do SEO and there’s bad ways to do it, and unfortunately sometimes you get caught doing the bad SEO.

And sometimes you do bad SEO, then you get an influx of cash to the tune of $15 million from venture capitalists for your business, and then Google decides to essentially deal the death blow to you.

Such is the curious story of Rap Genius, the lyrics site that just had the search engine hammer brought down on them by Google.

Rap Genius gets booted by Google

Rap Genius is a lyrics annotation site—basically if you ever wanted to know what rappers are talking about or the metaphors they’re using in their lyrics, this is the place to go.

Unfortunately, their business is run by people who can be affectionately described as “total d-bags”, and they decided they wanted to do a little bad SEO to try to get more eyes on their site.  So what did they do, you ask?  SPAM.  And spam they did.

Rap Genius has a blog affiliate program where bloggers can write articles and they will be promoted by the geniuses at Rap Genius.  That’s awesome—it gets eyes on blogs and great content.  However, Rap Genius wanted bloggers to embed HTML links at the bottom of their posts for lyrics to Justin Bieber’s new album.  That’s bad—it’s spamming/growth hacking/idiotic.  And here’s how it works:

Justin Bieber is one of the most searched names online, and so with the release of his latest album, people will be searching for the lyrics to his new songs.  Rap Genius needs to grow their business and to do it, they need to show up on the top of search results pages.  To show up at the top of search pages, they need to have links pointing to them, so they essentially asked for people to do their hard work for them.  The bloggers get their content tweeted by the folks at Rap Genius and subsequently seen by a lot of people, and that content also contains backlinks to Rap Genius and Justin Bieber’s lyrics which helps out Rap Genius.  It’s a pyramid scheme of search results.

Google found out, and brought down the fury.  If you search for Rap Genius, their site doesn’t show up on the first few pages of Google’s results.  If you look for Justin Bieber lyrics, Rap Genius doesn’t even show up until page 6.  Rap Genius has apologized and is apparently working with Google to restore their name/search ranking. I think the real lesson is that if you have a business, don’t be a douche about it.

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