SEO

ByAlexia Pamelov

SEO for Beginners

CheapWindowsHosting.com | New to SEO? Need to polish up your knowledge? read this article check out

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.

SEO isn’t just about building search engine-friendly websites. It’s about making your site better for people too.
This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO—from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that generate traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site. If you are confused about this stuff, you are not alone, and we’re here to help.

Why does my website need SEO?

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Although social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users. This is true whether your site provides content, services, products, information, or just about anything else.

Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic—people looking for what you offer. Search engines are the roadways that make this happen. If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.
Search queries—the words that users type into the search box—carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization’s success. Targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.

Why can’t the search engines figure out my site without SEO?

Search engines are smart, but they still need help. The major engines are always working to improve their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return better results to users. However, there is a limit to how search engines can operate. Where as the right SEO can net you thousands of visitors and increased attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal.
In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more readily find it. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.

Can I do SEO for myself?

The world of SEO is complex, but most people can easily understand the basics. Even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is widely available on the web, including in guides like this. Combine this with a little practice and you are well on your way to becoming a guru.
Depending on your time commitment, your willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you may decide you need an expert to handle things for you. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a broader and more general approach.
In any case, it’s good to have a firm grasp of the core concepts.

How much of this article do I need to read?

If you are serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. We’ve tried to make it as concise as possible and easy to understand. There’s a printable PDF version for those who’d prefer, and dozens of linked-to resources on other sites and pages that are also worthy of your attention.
Each section of this guide is important to understanding the most effective practices of search engine optimization.

ByAlexia Pamelov

Cheap Windows Hosting – Which One is SEO Successful WordPress, Joomla and Drupal

• WordPress is a great website platform to use that tries its best by simplifying the process of optimization for its users. However, the real SEO power of WordPress doesn’t come out the box, but is found among the countless plugins available. There are some fantastic plugins which make advanced SEO super-easy in WordPress. Consider using popular plug-ins such as Yoast or All in One Pack that really let your optimization efforts soar. To reflect it – WordPress allows to create tags for posts, something which Joomla doesn’t allow without the use of an extension. Besides, it is possible to optimize permalink structures and set all the appropriate metadata for pages and posts. The bottom line is that in WordPress it is quite possible get high rankings even if you are totally new to the whole website game.

• Joomla requires the most initial care and attention in terms of SEO, but, contrastingly, it has great potential to rank very high in case a website and pages are set up properly. The software contains basic SEO-optimization functionality that can be extended by experienced developers’ hands. In Joomla it is possible to turn on SEF URLs, take it a step further by enabling URL rewriting and also choose whether to enable URL suffixes or not. Besides, you can add global meta description and meta keywords, as well as define meta tags and title tags at a page level. However, all the process is not as user-friendly as it potentially could be. In short, if a Joomla website needs more than just a basic optimization, one should be ready to get hands dirty since Joomla proper on-site optimization is not a one-click affair at all, especially for newbies and first-time users.

• Drupal has the best SEO capability that is readily available. It provides its users with several modules available for any SEO activity and tracking of the web statistics. It can automatically produce customizable meta tags or create title based URL nodes for a website, a characteristic that is lacking with WordPress and Joomla. Additionally, it supports RDF and integrates very easily with Google Analytics and offers more advanced SEO facility settings. However, there’s one roadblock to unleashing its powerful SEO features – Drupal is extremely challenging for those without much website experience.

ByAlexia Pamelov

Cheap Windows Hosting Tutorial – Tips for Writing SEO

CheapWindowsHosting.com | In this post I will show you some tips for writing SEO friendly content. Before we delve into the tips, let us begin with what it means to have SEO friendly content. Simply put, it is producing content that is written with attention given to how search engines might view your content.  Sadly though, there are a lot of marketers as well as bloggers who put too much emphasis on their SEO and tend to forget about putting their readers front and center.  Think of your audience and write something that will be beneficial to them. You are writing for people, not for the search engines.

If you are new to blogging or you have a new website, it is only natural to want to be searchable and improve in page rank.

Here are eight tips for writing effective SEO friendly content.

Tips for Writing SEO

1. Write Useful And Engaging Content 

When asked what my formula is for writing good content my answer is always write content that is useful and/or entertaining.  Most search engines rewards sites that share relevant content with their readers.  The more original and fresh the content you share, the better visibility you will gain in search results. The more people who find your content helpful or entertaining, the more share worthy it becomes.  Remember that a well written article trumps quantity at all times. Some site owners think the more articles they churn out, the more ranking they acquire. This couldn’t be more wrong. If you just vomit words out for the sake of having new content, you will be disappointed.

2. Keep It Short And To The Point

You need to be considerate your reader’s time. Keep it short and make your point right away. Some articles longer articles can be boring. In my experience, if a person can read your article and benefit from it in under 5 to 10 minutes, you’ll get more people engaging with your content.  I also like using lists. Try to break up your copy for easy reading.

3. Choose Your Keywords And Use Them Wisely 

Even before you start writing an article, you should have already chosen which keywords to use. Include them in your title, in your meta-tags and within the body of your post. Be careful not to over use them. Most readers are wise enough to see what you are doing and will get turned off and never go back to your site again.  Don’t be lazy. Tag your content. This will help search engines categorize your content more accurately and that will help your search positioning. Don’t know which keywords or tags to use, try WordTracker or Google Trends.

4. Have A Point Of View

What will set your work apart from others is your point of view. Everyone can write an article on the same topics as yours but adding your own story and experience will make your content unique. Offering your own spin or twist will make your content much more interesting to your readers. If they can better relate to you, the more shareable and engaging your article will be.

5. Make Links Part Of Your Copy

When you add links to your article, it is important to make it part of your copy instead of just saying “check it here”.  Adding back links from credible websites that you used as a source is important as it builds trust and credibility with your readers about the information you are sharing.

6. Optimize Your Images For Better Search Engine Ranking 

Use relevant images not just all text. Not only does it makes your article more interesting, but you’re able to optimize your images with relevant keywords to name your image files or graphics. Make sure to name the image properly and to optimize the size of the image as load time can have an impact on your SEO. Make the image as small as possible without sacrificing quality. You can try the Image Optimizer tool for this task.

7. Proof Read Your Material Before You Publish 

This is a must for all writers. Proof read your work. Make sure you check your spelling. Imagine if you are relying on keywords to help you be more searchable and you misspell those keywords, then all your hard work becomes futile. Besides, you also don’t want to annoy your readers with misspelled words and bad grammar.

8. Make Your Content Easily Shareable

Okay, you have followed all the tips above. You wrote a killer article and have published it. The next important step is to make it shaerable. Make sure you have all the leading social share buttons on your website.  All the popular social networking sites offer plugins readily available for anyone to install and most are free. Search ranking tends to increase when content is shared frequently. Don’t under-estimate the power of social media.

There you go, the eight tips that I use as a checklist before publishing any article.  Did I miss any? Please share your tips by leaving a comment. We would love to hear from you.

ByAlexia Pamelov

How To Improve Your E-commerce Website’s SEO

CheapWindowsHosting.com | Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complicated process, especially for e-commerce sites. But getting the basics in place, if you don’t already have them, will provide a big boost right off the bat. And on-page SEO is often much easier and has faster results than off-page tasks such as link building. If you’re just launching or you’ve not yet applied any SEO best practices to your store, the following list will help you get started.

1. Google Webmaster Tools

Get a Google Webmaster Tools account, add and verify your site. This free set of tools from Google provides a ton of information about your website, and we’ll use some of this in the next steps. To get started, go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and click the Add Your Site button. Follow the steps to add your site and then verify it.

2. Page Titles

Make sure each page has a useful, unique title. The title tag is not only one of ways a site ranks for a given term, but it is also displayed in Google’s search results (aka SERPs, for “search engine results pages”) and helps a searcher determine whether they want to click through to your website. The title tag should contain the keywords that you want the site to rank for, but it should be written for a human. Don’t just stuff it full of keywords; use the main keyword/phrase in a readable way that entices people to click through.

You also want to make sure the page titles are unique, so that no two pages on your site have the same title. Google Webmaster Tools has an easy way to do this: Just log into your GWT account and go to Search Appearance > HTML Improvements. You should see “Duplicate Title Tags” on the right side of the page. If you have duplicate title tags, this will be a link that you can click to see a report of pages that have the same title tag. Additionally, in GWT you can see any title tags that Google reports as either too short or too long.

3. Meta Descriptions

Write great meta descriptions. Just like the title tag, the description tag often (but not always) appears in the SERPs, and searchers use it as an indicator for whether to click through to your site from Google. The meta description should be 156 characters or less, but long enough to fully describe the page. Again, include the keyword phrase if possible, but make it sound natural. The HTML Improvements section in GWT (as mentioned above) will also show you pages with duplicate, too-short, and too-long meta tags.

4. Product Descriptions

Write unique product descriptions. It’s oh-so-easy to use the descriptions provided by your vendors; the problem is, that’s what every other retailer who sells the same item is doing. If, instead, you write unique product descriptions, using your keywords, and making sure the length is a minimum of 300 words, you’ll get an instant boost in value for your product pages. The descriptions should be scan-able, because when reading online, people tend to steer clear of long, dense paragraphs. Use bullet points to identify key features and benefits, headings to separate sections, and bold or italics to highlight short key phrases.

5. HTML Headings

Use HTML heading tags such as <h1>, <h2>, etc. in meaningful ways, including keywords in them whenever possible. Any given page should have exactly one H1 tag, but can have multiple H2, and H3 tags. You can use CSS to style these to fit with your site’s design and aesthetics.

6. Product Images

Images are an often-overlooked area for SEO. The alt text for the image should contain your keyword phrase, but the actual image filename should include keywords as well. If you want to rank well in Google Image search, which can be a great source of traffic, it helps to have unique images not used by other sites. For this purpose, consider taking your own product photos. Finally, optimize the images for as small a file size as possible without visibly reducing the quality. I like to use Photoshop’s “Save for web and devices” option for this. For more information on optimizing images, read this post by Dave Davies over on Search Engine Watch.

7. Only One Homepage

Typically, the URL for your homepage is going to be the domain itself, such as http://www.domain.com. However, depending on your content and e-commerce platforms, you may also be able to reach the homepage through other URLs, such as :

• http://www.domain.com/index.php or
• http://www.domain.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=SFNT.

If possible, use just the domain name, but whatever you use, make sure it’s consistent. Don’t use one URL to link your logo and another URL to link the word “home” in your navigation bar! You can also learn about canonical URLs to tell Google that all versions of the homepage are really the same.

8. Improve navigation

Just like humans, Googlebot (and other search engine spiders) need to easily be able to reach your pages. They also consider how far (in numbers of clicks or links) a page is from your homepage in determining its relative importance. So navigation is quite important for these purposes. Optimize navigation areas such as your menu (and submenus, if applicable), your list of categories, and breadcrumbs, to make sure you’re not introducing roadblocks to getting your content crawled. And while search engines have gotten better about following JavaScript links, it’s still good practice to have plain HTML menus.

9. Link Between Pages

It can be useful to link between products, especially when there is some relation between them – such as similar items or a main item and its accessories. Most e-commerce software offers internal linking features such as related products. But, when it makes sense, you may also want to link contextually from one product to another, typically within the description. For example, if you’re selling a 120-piece art kit but you also offer a 175-piece kit, you may wish to add that information to each product’s descriptions, and link between the two product’s pages. The context of the link – in other words, the text that surrounds it – can give your site a boost.

10. Improve Page Load Times

It’s been long known that one of Google’s ranking factors is how long it takes a page to load. So improving your load times not only makes for a better user experience, it helps your SEO efforts too. The time a page takes to load can be divided into back-end items such as how long it takes to load information from the database; and front-end items like how long it takes to transmit the images on the page to the visitor’s browser. The back-end processing greatly affects something called TTFB, or time to first byte – the amount of time it takes before the first byte is received by the browser. Lowering your TTFB is one of the most important aspects of page load as it relates to SEO. We use WebpageTest.org to get data on load times, including TTFB.

11. Add Site Maps

There are two types of site maps to cover in this section. The first is for the human visitor, and is an overall view of your website and links to all pages or at least to key sections, depending on the size of your site. The second is an XML sitemap that is used to send a list of URLs and their relative importance to Google and other search engines to help them better crawl your website. There are a number of tools, free and paid, that help you build either kind of sitemap.

12. Encourage Customer Reviews

Customer reviews help convert other buyers because they are considered an unbiased opinion about the product you’re selling. But they have significant SEO value, too. First of all, the content of each review is likely unique and will only appear on your site. Pages with higher word count rank better than shorter pages, generally, so the increased number of words is helpful. And, if you get reviews often enough, Google will see that your page content changes regularly, a factor that increases the likelihood of the page being crawled more often.

13. Encourage link sharing

It has been long thought that social signals, like Twitter tweets and Facebook likes, are a ranking factor when it comes to Google. Matt Cutt’s recently stated otherwise. But getting customers to share products has a less direct SEO benefit, too. The more ways someone has to find your site and your products, the more likely they are to spread the word – and that includes writing about you and linking to your site. Natural, unsolicited links to your website are still one of the most important factors Google uses to rank a website. (Note, “natural” and “unsolicited”; those are important words!)

Make it easy for customers to share your pages on their favorite social networks, by adding a services like AddThis, or by implementing share/like/tweet buttons right individually on your website.

There are many other ways to improve your chance of ranking well on Google. SEO is a science and an art, and a field of study all to itself. But these basics will help you get started. You may not have the time or capability to address them all at once, but pick a couple and get started, and see how it improves your website’s placement on Google.

ByAlexia Pamelov

Several Reason Why Drupal is The Best CMS For SEO

CheapWindowsHosting.com | Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS) that runs WhiteHouse.gov, MTV Europe, and The Economist, is a very powerful system that can be used for large, complex sites, and it’s the best platform that exists today for SEO. I’ve seen clients triple their traffic within a few weeks of switching from a lesser platform. Drupal’s built-in tools for automating SEO on massive amounts of content, along with granular control that gives you absolute power over every single site element, put it head and shoulders above the rest, including Joomla and WordPress. Additionally, Drupal is the most scalable, configurable system, and major improvements in usability will soon shorten the learning curve for new users and developers.

Here’s why Drupal is the best CMS for SEO:

1. Search engine optimized URLs. Drupal gives you complete control over URL structure. Each item of content created in Drupal (called a node) can be given a custom URL, called a URL alias. You can even set it to automatically generate user- and search engine-friendly URLs based on content type (blog post, page, user), title of the post, keyword, date, time, or any other information related to the node. In WordPress, you are generally limited to one type of permalink URL for all posts. You can override it, but it’s much less specific than Drupal’s URL aliases. For years, Joomla was lacking in search engine-friendly URLs and the ability to fix them. It now offers a built-in “search engine-friendly” functionality, but it lacks the functionality and control over the URL’s parameters.
2. Custom content types and views. Without having to write any code, you can use the content construction kit (CCK) and view modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for those types. Common examples include news stories, blog posts, albums, books, and tutorials, all of which can be created and displayed in a variety of ways. While most content management systems require additional written code for creating these types, no programming knowledge is required to do them in Drupal. To make it even more search engine-friendly, it’s simple to create content silos using a free add-on called Views Attach. Create an automated query to create a list of relevant content and attach it to any other piece of content – all with a point-and-click interface.
3. Ease of editing and revisions. Even the most professional companies make mistakes. Recently I found two spelling errors on CNN.com’s home page, including the word “errors” (it was spelled “erros” for about an hour before the mistake was corrected). Drupal’s built-in version control allows you to save new versions of your Web pages every time they are edited. This gives you the ability to revert back to old versions at any time. Want to try a new marketing message on your site? Type it in. Didn’t work? Revert to the previous page. Snap.
4. The organizational wizardry of taxonomy. Drupal has a very powerful, built-in taxonomy (categorization) system that allows you to organize and tag content with keyword-rich terms. While care should be taken that each Drupal “vocabulary” be limited to certain content types, it is an infinitely flexible system. For example, you can use free tagging for types of content like blogs or products, while your news or tutorial sections might have a list of categories that can only be selected from a dropdown that is defined by the webmaster. You can also have hierarchical categories, with single or multiple parent categories. But don’t get crazy and deep with it. It’s a good rule of thumb that no page of content is more than three clicks from the home page. The closer the node is to the home page, the more important Google thinks it is, and the higher that individual page will rank. Drupal’s advanced taxonomy features, combined with CCK and views, also allow you to rank for long-tailed keywords that make up a thorough SEO campaign.
5. Multiple user management. Drupal is almost as well-known for its community as it is for being easily optimized. That’s because Drupal was designed for community-based websites, and has a strong user role and access control functionality. There are no limits to the user roles and access levels you can create and customize – for example, “anonymous visitor,” “authenticated user,” “editor,” “webmaster,” “admin,” and “moderator.” You can also keep the advanced user management features turned off – like if you have multiple blogs – and enable them later when your site grows.
6. Page titles. The page title is the single most important on-page thing you can do to improve the SEO of your website. Page titles, the line of text in the HTML of a Web page that summarizes what that page is about, act as the welcome mat for your website. Page titles:
   • Tell visitors that they are in the right place
   • Display in the browser title bar
   • Hold important keywords so that your page can be properly categorized by Google and other search engines
   • Display whenever someone bookmarks your site
   • Are often used by search engines as the heading of the search result

   Drupal can generate a page title automatically by using the site name and site slogan of the front page and the node title for individual nodes, but for more complex content, you may want to rearrange the automated page title for SEO purposes. Drupal’s page title module gives you full control over your page titles throughout your site. You can define a pattern that will create search engine-optimized titles automatically as you create new content, or take control by writing your own page titles anywhere you can create content.

7. Better integration with Google Analytics. Have you ever wondered how much your own clicking around and working on your website skews your analytics data? Not if you have a properly configured Drupal site. Using the free Google Analytics module for Drupal, you can dynamically show and hide analytics code based on several factors, including if the user is logged in as an admin. You can even not track certain sections of your site, not track certain user types (like people logged in as company employees), and cache the Google Analytics code locally, which will speed up your page load times. All within Drupal. No programming required. For free.
8. Passionate and active community. Drupal has a large community of users and developers who are very active and passionate about the CMS. More than 650,000 user accounts have been created on Drupal.org, and more than 2,000 people have registered developer accounts. You can find hundreds of community-contributed modules that help make Drupal a better experience. Drupal forums offer support and you can find other Drupal users in Drupal Groups.
9. Free as in beer. Unlike other platforms, Drupal modules (what we call plug-ins, add-ins, or widgets – modular pieces of code that you can easily add to your site) are free. That’s right. You don’t need a license or even a credit card to install any of the functionality that I’ve mentioned in this article. Just go to Drupal.org, click on the “download” tab, and grab anything you need.
10. Getting started with Drupal SEO is easy. Just download the Drupal SEO checklist module, drop it into your sites/all/modules folder on your server, and turn it on from the modules admin page. Go through the simple, step-by-step instructions, and you’re well on your way to the best SEO experience you’ve ever had on a CMS.

Simpan

ByAlexia Pamelov

Cheap WordPress Hosting Tutorial – 15 Easy Ways To Speed Up your WordPress

WordPress is a great platform. One weakness that it suffers from, however, is it can be quite slow.

CheapWindowsHosting.com | In this quick post, I’ll cover all of the best ways that I’ve found to consistently speed up WordPress.

Why Site Speed Is Important

When a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around.

Get ready to lose sleep at night: according to a report by the Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and a reduced clicks by 4.3%.

If your site takes too long to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had a chance.

Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed effects SEO, so if your site is slow, you’re now losing visitors from impatience and reduced rankings in search engines. Yikes.

Let’s fix that.

How To Speed Up WordPress

As a side note, these are not ordered by importance or any criteria, I’ve just gathered everything I’ve learned about speeding up page loads on WordPress and compiled them here.

I guarantee that using even a few will help speed up your site.

1. Choose a good host

When starting out, a shared host might seem like a bargain (“Unlimited page views!”). It comes at another cost: incredibly slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods.

If you plan on publishing popular stuff, you’re killing yourself by running your WordPress site on shared hosting.

The stress of your site going down after getting a big feature is enough to create a few early gray hairs: don’t be a victim, invest in proper hosting.

The only WordPress host I continually recommend is…

ASPHostPortal.com

ASPHostPortal is a rising star in ASP.NET hosting field. Since its establishment, the company has gained more and more attention from users and authorities in hosting industry because of its cost-effectiveness, high-performance and excellent technical support.

The company has four cheap and reliable WordPress hosting plans. Host One, Host Two, Host Three and Host Four, in total The original prices of the plans are $1.00/mo , $5.00/mo, $9.00/mo and $14.00/mo severally. It is clear that ASPHostPortal does provide competitive pricing.

2. Start with a solid framework/theme

You might be surprised to here this, but the Twenty Fifteen “framework” (aka the default WP theme) is lightweight and quite speedy.

That’s because they keep the “guts” simple; compare that to bloated frameworks which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl.

From my experience, the fastest loading premium framework is definitely the Thesis Theme Framework. It surpasses the basic WordPress themes by being far easier to customize.

It’s an incredibly solid framework that won’t slow you down with excess plugins or custom edits. Make the changes right from the theme and avoid bloat, hoorah!

3. Use an effective caching plugin

WordPress plugins are obviously quite useful, but some of the best fall under the caching category, as they drastically improve page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WP.org are free and easy to use.

By far my favorite, bar none, is W3 Total Cache, I wouldn’t recommend or use any other caching plugin, it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use.

Simply install and activate, and what your page load faster as elements are cached.

4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

All of your favorite big blogs are making use of this, and if you are into online marketing using WordPress (as I’m sure many of my readers are) you won’t be surprised to here that some of your favorite blogs like Copyblogger are making use of CDN’s.

Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

I personally use the Max CDN Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I’ve found that they have the most reasonable prices and their dashboard is very simple to use (and comes with video tutorials for setting it up, takes only a few minutes).

There is a plugin called Free-CDN that promises to do the same, although I haven’t tested it.

5. Optimize images (automatically)

Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.

However, if you are like me, doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time consuming.

Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one.

6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly

This isn’t one thing but really a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most important part of your site because people will be landing there the most often.

Things that you can do include:

• Show excerpts instead of full posts
• Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)
• Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
• Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
• Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage

7. Optimize your WordPress database

I’m certainly getting a lot of use out of the word “optimize” in this post!

This can be done the very tedious, extremly boring manual fashion, or…

You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites.

This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.

I would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.

8. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content

Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.

This can add up as more and more people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create custom images for your site on a regular basis.

Place this code in your root .htaccess file:

disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/sparringmind [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

You’ll notice I included my feed (from FeedBurner), you’ll need to replace it with your feed’s name, otherwise your images won’t appear correctly there.

9. Add an expires header to static resources

An Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content (such as css file, javascript, images etc).

This way can cut your load time significantly for your regular users.

You need to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A259200

The above numbers are set for a month (in seconds), you can change them as you wish.

10. Adjust Gravatar images

You’ll notice on this site that the default Gravatar image is set to… well, nothing.

This is not an aesthetic choice, I did it because it improves page loads by simply having nothing where there would normally be a goofy looking Gravatar logo or some other nonsense.

Some blogs go as far to disable them throughout the site, and for everyone.

You can do either, just know that it will at least benefit your site speed if you set the default image (found in “Discussion”, under the settings tab in the WordPress dashboard) to a blank space rather than a default image.

11. Add LazyLoad to your images

LazyLoad is the process of having only only the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window), then, when reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view.

This will not only speed you page loads, it can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down on your pages.

To do this automatically, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.

12. Control the amount of post revisions stored

I saved this post to draft about 8 times.

WordPress, left to its own devices, would store every single one of these drafts, indefinitely.

Now, when this post is done and published, why would I need all of those drafts stored?

That’s why I use the Revision Control plugin to make sure I keep post revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you clutter your backend with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.

13. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks

By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.

Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.

For more detail, read this explanation of WordPress Pingbacks, Trackbacks and Linkbacks.

14. Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary

This one is a little bit advanced, but can drastically cut down your load time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, so I included it.

I’d be doing this great post injustice if I didn’t link to it for this topic, as it taught me how to easily do this myself, in a few minutes.

So go there and check it out, it wrote it out in plainer terms than I ever could!

15. Use CloudFlare

This is similar to the section above on using CDN’s, but I’ve become so fond of CloudFlare since I discussed it in my best web analytics post that I’ve decided to include it separately here.

To put it bluntly, CloudFlare, along with the W3 Total Cache plugin discussed above, are a really potent combination (they integrate with each other) that will greatly improve not only the speed, but the security of your site.

Both are free!

Thanks for reading 🙂 I hope this article helpful for you

ByAlexia Pamelov

ASPHostPortal.com Proudly Announces ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 Hosting Solution

ASPHostPortal.com is Microsoft No #1 Recommended Windows and ASP.NET Spotlight Hosting Partner in United States. Microsoft presents this award to ASPHostPortal.com for the ability to support the latest Microsoft and ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 Hosting.

ASPHostPortal.com Announces ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 Hosting

ASPHostPortal.com is a well-known Windows hosting company and even one of the most famous, though it is one of the oldest Windows hosting companies. Their packages have gone through major changes recently, and all of them goes for the goodness of every customers. Today, they launch ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 hosting with interested hosting packages.

The ASP.NET team announce the availability of ASP.NET Core RC2.  This release succeeds the ASP.NET 5 RC1 release and features a number of updates to enhance compatibility with other .NET frameworks and an improved runtime.The release contains the RC2 of the .NET Core runtime and libraries.  These libraries are everything that ends up in your ‘bin’ folder when you deploy an application

.NET Core is a modular, streamlined subset of the .NET Framework and CLR. It is fully open-source and provides a common set of libraries that can be targeted across numerous platforms. Its factored approach allows applications to take dependencies only on those portions of the CoreFX that they use, and the smaller runtime is ideal for deployment to both small devices (though it doesn’t yet support some) as well as cloud-optimized environments that need to be able to run many small applications side-by-side. Support for targeting .NET Core is built into the ASP.NET 5 project templates that ship with Visual Studio 2015.

ASPHostPortal.com offers ASP.NET Core RC2 Hosting with an interested hosting plan. They support this new technology with affordable price, a lot of ASP.NET features, 99.99% uptime guarantee, 24/7 support, and 30 days money back guarantee. They strive to make sure that all customers have the finest web-hosting experience as possible. To learn more about their ASP.NET Core RC2 Hosting, please visit http://asphostportal.com

About ASPHostPortal.com:

ByAlexia Pamelov

Cheap Windows ASP.NET Tutorial – Growth Hack Tips for Startup Business

CheapWindowsHosting.com | Growth Hacking is seen by some as the marketing part of Lean Startup. More precisely, growth hacking is about experimenting to find creative, data-driven ways of growing your business. either by users or by profits. Those two are not the same by the way. That’s one of the things I learned very quickly from watching Growth Hacker TV.

There are some growth hack tips for startup business.

Use Built-In Sharing

One of the most important ways to use growth hacks to grow your small startup is by incorporating sharing into its functionality. Sharing means that your content can be directly linked to on social media platforms, allowing your users to do the work of marketing for you.

Incentivize Distribution

Since you want people to share your site, it may encourage people to share if you offer them some incentive. You can give your users something nice if they do something extra for you, like a discount if they choose to e-mail friends or additional services if they post about you on a social media platform.

Encourage Sharing on Your Actual Product

If your company makes a product, one great way to help spread its popularity is to incorporate a mechanism into the product to encourage sharing it or to create a companion product that spurs distribution.

Tap into Places Where Potential Customers Might Congregate

One of the most important ways to discover new users is by finding the right audience and where they hang out online. Do some research about what places your target audience frequents online, then spend your time, resources and energy spreading the word there.

Offer Free Products that Go Well with Paid Products

One of the best ways to convert a potential customer to a paying customer is to offer free services or products, as well as products for purchase. Moz does this well with their SEO services. You can sign up on Moz to receive a ton of free SEO tools, advice and information. However, you have to pay for their premium SEO service. The free offer is a great way to bring more people in, and the paid offer is an excellent way to bump people up to paying customers.

Piggyback

One of the best ways to grow your startup quickly and easily is to piggyback on a company that already exists and has tons of users. Perhaps the most famous example of this technique is PayPal and eBay. eBay was already in existence when PayPal started up, and the way that the online payment company grew so quickly is that it appealed to eBay buyers who were looking for a safe, fast and easy way to send money to vendors. As eBay grew, so did PayPal because they were able to reach users of one service who needed the service of the other.

Get Endorsed

If you want your company to grow virally, a great way to do it is to get endorsed by someone whom the public loves and trusts. Endorsements are a paid relationship between your company and a celebrity or well-known expert who endorses your product, writes about it on a blog or social media platform, or even makes ads for it.

Celebrities and thought-leaders tend to have other important friends, so when they share and talk about your product, chances are other influential people will be attracted to it and talk about it, resulting in multiple celebrity endorsements and a huge amount of encouragement for everyday people to check out your company.

Reward Power Users

The best sales people for a company are the people who love, support, and use it. So, if you have longtime or frequent users, reward them with deals, meetups or special offers. Retaining your best customers is important, and the happier they remain with the site or service, the more likely they are to continue to preach its goodness to the world.

ByAlexia Pamelov

Cheap Windows Tutorial – SEO Tips For YouTube Videos To Rank Higher in Search

CheapWindowsHosting.com | Nowday we know that youtube is second biggest search engine on the planet after google, it generates an estimate 92 billion page view each month which also provides huge traffic to different websites and blogs, and about  35 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Youtube also offers you to monetize your videos content, if you are getting enough view you can make good money from your youtube videos.

But uploading a video is not enough to get views on Youtube until you are a big brand or company like a music company or celebrity, we normally create video like entertaining video, tutorials, tips and other niche videos, and upload it to youtube, these videos also need to be great in quality and should have unique content into it to get fair views.

Your video is uploaded on Youtube and your are not getting views? Think that why any one is going to watch your videos or your video will be found into search result. Youtube videos also need to be seo optimized in order to get ranking into search result, I assume that you have nice content and you will share and promote your video to get inorganic views.

Here I will talk about how you can get organic traffic to your YouTube videos and how to do smart SEO for better search results.

Tips for making your Youtube Videos Search friendly

 1.  Title of the video – Use Keywords

Video title is the name of your video by which one can know that what is inside your video, having title which perfectly match to your video content will be very friendly to viewer and also to the youtube algorithm for seo, give the suitable title to your video here is the ways by which you can get seo optimizes title for video

• Take advantage of search engine auto complete feature, if your video is about something which you think people will search on google like tech tutorials , then use auto complete feature of google
• If your video content is about something which you think people can search it on youtube like music video or live tutorials  then take advantage of youtube auto complete feature .

2. Description of video.

Write description about your video content, first 2-3 lines matters a lot to rank your video high in search engine, give a short description in 2-3 line which cover the theme of your video and what is going to be inside the video. you can also use search engine auto complete keyword phrases as your description. If the searched keyword is matching in  first 2 line of your video description then video will get higher ranking.

3. Naming your video file before upload.

You have created and edited your video and it is ready to upload on youtbe, but you rendered your video file  as mov001.avi or random_name.mp4, make sure you rename your video as your_keyword.mp4, naming your video file as your focused keyword actually tells the search engine that what can be inside your video, Search engines cannot look inside video content this is the file name which tells search algorithm that what  your video is about to.

Having video file name as your video title helps search engine to easily index video and it gets higher ranking. So put your targeted keyword into video file name.

4. Use closed caption (CC)  feature in your video on youtube.

Use closed caption feature of youtube, this will shows your text over the video which helps viewer to understand your video narration and can be translated into different languages, upload transcript of video,  actually transcript contain the text of what was said into video, youtube’s new algorithm automatically convert your voice into transcript which makes easier to activate it or you can also write closed caption if your video doesn’t contain voice.

5.  Tagging & Keyword research for YouTube video.

Tags are another important way to get ranking in youtube search, here are few tips to put tags in your video-

• List specific tags first : Write your main keyword first, doing this will put weight in algorithms.
• List general tags : Write general and matching keyword (Example-  If your main keyword is “Shoutmeloud” then general tags can be “Blogging tips” , “Harsh Agrawal” ,” WordPress help”, like something ).

Keyword Research for Youtube Videos.

Getting keyword idea is one of the important part of SEO, you cannot think all possible keywords to include in your video, here I’m using Google Display Planner tool to get keyword ideas, basically google has two such tool Keyword Planner and Display Planner, I recommend you to use Display Planner in order to get relevant keywords.

By the end, it’s up to you on creating compelling and interesting Youtube videos. Specially when you are working on tutorial videos, you should focus on a target audience, and prepare your script targeting those audience. Do ensure that you ask your viewers to like and share your videos on favourite social-networking sites. Another good Youtube SEO tip for bloggers is to, embed your videos within blog post, as it will help you to get more views.

I religiously follow all the above SEO tips for my uploaded Youtube videos, and I recommend you to do the same. If you know of any other SEO trick for Youtube, feel free to share with us via comments. Don’t forget to share this useful resources with other Youtubers on your Facebook and Google plus profile.

ByAlexia Pamelov

Cheap Windows Hosting – Why SEO is Important for Your Online Business ?

CheapWindowsHosting.com | As the web grows across the world, more and more people are getting websites, making it ever more difficult to make yourwebsite shine through the crowd. Prospective customers may not remember your web address or even your company name even if you tell them. Additionally, the whole purpose of havinga website is to bring your product or service to a wider audience than you can otherwise market.

Your Prospects

Those that purchase online are “skimmers” –that is, they simply go to their favorite search engine and type in a word or phrase related to their desired product or service, and usually only look as far as the first few items on the list. If you’re really lucky, they’ll look all the way to the bottom of the first page. So where do you want to be? That’s right –way up there near the top. The closer to the top of that search engine list you get, the more people will see your website. Getting you to the top of that list is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about.

The realities of modern lifestyles and economics have lent themselves to an ever-increasing number of people seeking the convenience, variety and consumer-friendly environment that is provided by making purchases online from the comfort of their own homes, as opposed to the drive time, long lines and other hassles associated with traditional shopping approaches. As more people become internet consumers every day, the importance of creating a solid web presence is vital for your business to thrive in the 21st Century.

SEO vs. IT

A common misconception is that IT (information technology) training equates to the ability to create successful websites. This is not necessarily the case. SEO training must be undertaken as a subject in and of itself, as the I.T. field is far too generalized and geared toward the technicalities of the internet to provide the kinds of marketing tricks and skills needed to create a truly successful web presence. I.T. is definitely useful, but without the necessary marketing skills, many end up working with a half-empty toolbox when it comes to the internet.

For these reasons, those proficient in the SEO field are in an ever-increasing demand. Think about it –if you can make a website make more money, what website owner in their right mind wouldn’t search you out? A competent SEO expert is one of the hottest commodities in the online world of commerce, and always has opportunities to succeed. If you can make a customer’s website climb through to the high end of the Google rankings, you will have more opportunities than you can handle!

SEO vs. Pay Per Click

If you want to increase the traffic to your website, there are basically two ways to go; you can utilize search engine optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click (PPC). PPC can yield results, but you have to find a way to get people to the advertisements on your site in order for them to click them in the first place. If you load your page down with a ton of advertisements due to a lack of traffic, it will take longer to load, be less attractive to visitors, and you will actually lose traffic (and revenue) in the long run. It is much better to focus your strategies around SEO to get high-volume “organic” traffic so that you can have the freedom to employ tasteful use of PPC ads that compliment your web content.

Why Do SEO Strategies Fail?

SEO is as much art as science. There are many factors involved in an effective SEO strategy. However, there are three major reasons why SEO strategies fall short.

• Poorly-Defined Target Audience –Often, the most well-laid SEO plans crash and burn because no effort was made to determine what kinds of people would most likely search for the content on the website.
• Lack of Proper Benchmarking –How well does your site compare with similar sites across the web? Is traffic increasing relative to them? Any proper maintenance of a successful website involves constant review of its place on the World Wide Web in relation to the competition, so that any downward trends can be caught before they’re out of control and you’re at the bottom of the heap.
• Neglected Content Development –If you aren’t providing new, fresh information on your site, there is no reason why anyone would continue to visit. Your website should have new, original content that is engaging and targeted to the specific audience(s) you are cultivating through your SEO strategy.

Conclusion

The emerging importance of effective SEO strategy is self-evident, and its importance simply can’t be over-stressed. Effective almost by itself SEO equates to an successful website, while ineffective (or absent) strategies equally ensures almost certain failure. For this reason Article Search, the SEO field is a permanent and ever-growing aspect of the IT industry.