Cheap Windows Hosting – Why Yoast SEO is Great for Drupal
CheapWindowsHosting.com | Hello everyone today I will show you my post about Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO, known for its powerful features as a must-have WordPress plugin. Here are a few others reasons why this is such good news for Drupal users:
Yoast is Very Good at Simplifying SEO
Yoast earned a reputation for analyzing the tediously complex tasks of SEO and reducing them into simple steps for the website owner. It made life easier for everyone.
The Yoast SEO project page on Drupal.org sums up the new Yoast SEO module this way:
This module checks simple things you’re bound to forget. It checks, for instance, whether your posts are long enough, if you’ve written a meta description and if that meta description contains your focus keyword, if you’ve used any subheadings within your post, etc. etc.
It ensures you’ve actually chosen a focus keyword for each article and ensures you’re using it.
(Side-note: in the Drupal announcement linked above, it says Yoast makes sure you’re “using [your focus keyword] everywhere.” That shouldn’t mean, however, that you should engage in keyword stuffing. That doesn’t work anymore. The new Google algorithm knows when you’re trying to stuff keywords and penalizes you for it. Remember, the name of the game is now Search Experience Optimization, not Search Engine Optimization. Write for the experience of the reader, not for the search engine robots. Don’t make your posts awkward and hard to read by over-filling them with keywords.)
It’s Coming Just in Time for Drupal 8
After the DrupalCon 2015 conference in Barcelona, Spain, the Yoast SEO module became available for Drupal 7.x. Hopefully this means that Yoast is already working on or at least planning its Drupal 8 version. That would be perfect timing for Drupal users: not only would they be getting a new Drupal version soon, but they would have a new world class SEO module to go with it.
A Few Final Thoughts on the Benefits of Yoast SEO
If Yoast SEO for Drupal turns out as good as its WordPress version, we can expect it to work similar feats of magic, such as these features:
- Handles pinging for you by sending up-to-date sitemaps to the search engines. This enables search engines to add your content more quickly.
- Allows you to write two headlines, one for search engines and one for your visitors, thus ensuring your articles are optimized for the user’s search experience while also feeding search engines great keywords in the headline.
- Reminds you if you need to fix a post url, slug, or other element that’s hurting your SEO.
- Allows you to add page redirects when old posts are getting a ton of traffic but you’d prefer the traffic goes to a newer, updated post.
- Fixes incorrect links from other sites. If someone mangles the URL for your page, Yoast has a way of fixing it and getting the visitor to clean permalinks.
- Hopefully the features listed above, and the many other perks of the popular WordPress plugin, will find its way into Drupal.
Cheap Windows Hosting – How to Make Your YouTube Videos SEO Friendly
CheapWindowsHosting.com | 4 Simple tips for making your YouTube videos SEO friendly and how these videos can improve your website’s rankings & brand awareness.
Videos are an increasingly prolific means of sharing information on the Web and YouTube offers a great platform to present them. After all, YouTube is the second largest search engine (ironically owned by Google, which is the first) and it has users that share thousands of videos every minute of every day. And those numbers keep on growing. So posting Youtube videos is yet another way to make your brand’s name grow on the Web. But you’ll need to optimize your Youtube videos properly for the search engines. Search engines cannot “read” the content of videos the way they can read text. You’re going to have to help them out by adding text on the pages where your videos are embedded. Apply these SEO best practices to get the most mileage out of your YouTube videos.
Select Relevant Keywords
Add keywords to the video title and descriptions that you want to be used for your site’s rankings. The best keywords for a video are those that represent its content and are simple enough that most users would think of those terms on their own. Tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool (you’ll need an account) are designed to help businesses identify the best keywords for their content. You can also do your own research by searching Google and YouTube for similar types of content with keywords you think people would use.
Optimize Titles, Descriptions, and Tags
Make all of the text related to your video SEO-friendly, including the title, description, and metadata tags. YouTube titles have a 100-word limit, so you want to choose very wisely here. Use the most important keywords near the beginning of your title. Video descriptions can have up to 5,000 characters, so this is going to be the bulk of where your SEO text goes. Include a summary of the video and any pertinent links (like your business website) in the description. Tags are additional keywords that you select when you upload your video to YouTube. These can have up to 120 characters, so make sure they are relevant and represent your video content.
Create Playlists of Your Videos
When you create a playlist for related videos on your YouTube account, you increase their visibility on YouTube and the Web. Video playlists will appear in YouTube search results. When a user is watching one of the videos in the playlist, the other videos will show in the Related Videos sidebar. Playlists also play continuously, so when one video in the playlist finishes, the next plays automatically. This helps increase your views and exposes potential clients to more of your content.
Include Captions and Transcripts
The last bit of text you can use for SEO purposes are the captions and transcripts for your YouTube videos. Search engines can crawl these texts for information used to index and rank your site. They also help make your video content more accessible, particularly for those who are hearing impaired. It’s worth putting some time into creating captions and transcripts to provide search engines with more data for your rankings.
Conclusion
Videos are part of your marketing strategy, just like your ads, social media, and website. It’s important to give attention to optimizing your videos as you would any of your other content. Engage your audience with informative and entertaining videos, and make sure they can find them by applying SEO best practices.
Cheap Windows Hosting – Tips to take Advantage of Google Plus for SEO
CheapWindowsHosting.com | Google Plus sets itself apart from other social media networks like Facebook and Twitter by having a heavy emphasis on Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). Many search results that belong to Google Plus appear higher on Google’s search rankings, just because they are a part of Google’s massive network. Here are five top tips to take advantage of this unique situation.
- Stay on top of your Profile and Post Links
- By embedding links directly to your profile page, you can raise the visibility of your own website once more people click and engage with your link. Profile links are similar, except you can post as many links as you want directly into your posts. The more people who click, share, and +1 your link, the higher that link will rank in Google search rankings. Thus, you can use your Google Plus profile and posts to expose links to more people, which can tangible increase the validity and trustworthiness of the links themselves!
- Control your Posts After You Post them
- With Google Plus, you have the power to edit all your posts even after you have posted them. This is in stark contrast to Facebook and Twitter, where you have much more constrained control over your posts. This is important if the post appears to be becoming more popular and you want to make some updates or add media to it before it becomes fully viral.
- Make sure the First Word of your Post is Important!
- The first sentence of your Google Plus posts are a part of the title tag, which has a much higher weight when it comes to rankings. As such, it is an incredibly important keyword for your post and must be chosen with care for proper Google search engine optimization.
- Post your Content on Google Plus to Increase Visibility
- Content that is shared on Google Plus is added to Google searches (or indexed) much quicker than on other sites. As such, all new content that you create should be spread on Google Plus or other social media sites in order to ensure it is optimized as soon as possible.
- Don’t Give up on Google Plus
- Google Plus isn’t the most popular social media site right now, but it is still growing. Take this opportunity to be an early adopter and get well established before everyone else clogs up the system. It is a small investment of time and effort that could have significant payoffs for your business.
Cheap Windows Hosting – How to Choosing The Right CMS for Your Business
CheapWindowsHosting.com | Hello today I will share the tips about how to choosing the right cms for your business. Lets start it. Content Management Systems have come, and changed the entire Internet landscape. They have not only made designing and maintaining websites easy but also the sites more engaging and interesting. The biggest USP of this technology is the fact that it offers site owners complete control over the website unlike in the past. Once a CMS development company has built the site, you can easily manage the design and content in a code-free ecosystem. Before doing so you need to choose a CMS platform that suits your business needs and here is a short and crisp guide into making the perfect choice.
Know What You Need
As someone said, finding the right CMS is equivalent to finding the right spouse in life. Every individual is good, but you don’t share the same wavelength with everyone! So it’s important for you to know what you need and for that you must start by making a checklist of what all features & functionalities you expect from a CMS and what are your priorities. For instance, if ease-of-use is your top priority, you need to go with WordPress, but if you are looking to manage multiple internet properties Drupal and Joomla would be better choices. Also, there are little-known CMS tools that cater to niche business demands. If the popular ones don’t offer what your business needs, you need to go deep down into the market and opt for such solutions.
Core Functionality
What is the core functionality of the CMS? If you want to haul goods you should buy a truck not a luxury car. While most Content Management Systems are multi-functional you need to always look at their core functionality. Every CMS tool has evolved from its core functionality and to be honest it best where its roots are. For instance if you want to merely create a blog, WordPress would fit your bill perfectly as it emerged as a blogging platform, while for an e-commerce site Magento or PrestaShop would be a better pick. These are dedicated e-commerce platforms and would help you get the best out of the platform. Joomla on the other hand is a go-between which can be used to manage blogs and also offers you awesome e-commerce integration features.
Mobile Responsive
Chances are that you are reading this article on a mobile like more that 50% of the users who have switched to smartphones and tablets for Internet browsing. In less than 5 years, mobile traffic has increased from below 10% to over 50% of total traffic. A mobile responsive website has become the basic necessity these days. While all CMS platforms allow you to build mobile-responsive websites WordPress surely holds the edge over others. If you are planning to use free or premium themes, you would find the largest choice of responsive themes for WordPress. This really makes the task just a shade easy for you.
Scalability
Web development isn’t a project; it’s a process where you build a website brick by brick. To attract users and avoid your web property from appearing stale, you would need to regularly make design changes and add new security features and functionality to the site. This is where Drupal wins over WordPress and Joomla as it is enterprise-ready and can be scaled up more easily. This is the reason some of the most complex business websites in the world are powered by Drupal. Talking on the same lines Magento would be a better platform than PrestaShop for an online store if you are considering scalability.
Security
This is something that you can’t take lightly as the attacks on digital assets have increased with more and more businesses digitizing their work process and relying on websites to interact with the customers. Every new version of CMS tool comes with stronger security features, but if we are to come to a verdict Drupal surely holds the edge over WordPress. This is the reason mega businesses around the world rely on this CMS for their website. This however isn’t to suggest that WordPress and Joomla lack security features.
User Interaction
Gone are the days when businesses would create a website and users would consume what was served to them. Today it’s a two-way traffic where the users exercise enough power to be choosy about the sites and services they use. Chat Tools, Social Media, VoIP etc. have allowed users to communicate and interact with businesses in real-time. While you choose a CMS always keep user-interaction as one of your top priorities. Take look at the tools and plugins available in different ecosystems that improve customer interaction and choose one that offers you and your customers the best interactive platform.
The choice of the Content Management System is just the first step to creating a strong presence on the Internet. You need to choose an agency for CMS customization service that helps you derive the best out of the CMS solutions. At Semaphore Software, we have handled hundreds of projects across industries and specialize in all the leading CMS tools.
Cheap Windows Hosting – Tips to Protect your Ecommerce Site from Cyber Criminals
CheapWindowsHosting.com | With the festive season fast approaching, online retailers everywhere will be busily preparing themselves to meet the bulk demands of customers but another community is also waiting in the wings. The festive season is a primetime for nefarious cyber criminals or hackers looking to steal important data of your customers. With passage of time, hackers are improving their skills and are founding quite innovative ways to trace online behavior and steal credentials of the customers.
From stealing debit/credit card information to attacking privacy and poaching ecommerce data, this online nuisance has many shapes and names. But, with the right security approach you can save your e-commerce website from these cyber criminals. In this article, you can read some effective ways to protect your Ecommerce site from these cyber criminals. Let’s start.
1. Choose ecommerce web hosting service provider wisely
People often think that the e-commerce site security is mainly based on the software they write. Although the web application itself must also be secure, the other chief factor is the Web Hosting being used. Between shared and dedicated hosting, dedicated is more secure and ideal for ecommerce business. Shared hosting has multiple users all are accessing the same server: running under the same operating system, using the same resources, etc. Dedicated hosting plan, whether it be a co-located server, a dedicated server, or a VPS, only a single user is using the server (or in the VPS case, the virtual server).
Having multiple users on the same server (shared hosting) is dangerous in two ways. First, if any of the shared users has wrong intentions, he could exploit what your site has to offer. For example, if your site has a world-writeable directory, that directory is writable by some other users on the server (unless extra steps are taken). Second, if any of the shared users has right intentions, but is running a website or software that has security flaws, your website is also vulnerable to the threats. Therefore, it is recommended to choose dedicated VPS hosting providers. In addition to this, you must know how to secure virtual private server so that no hacker can break into it.
While selecting good web hosting service providers, you should also check out the type of software and hardware that they use. Those hosting service providers which use advanced and updated software should be your prime choice because this software is not easy to hack and comprise all essential security features. Similarly, you should be well aware of your web host’s hardware. Web hosting hardware requirements include storage and it is imperative to know what kind of storage hardware your service provider is offering. If you are planning for e-commerce website, then hardware plays a crucial role in it.
2. Keep Data Encrypted
All the data that flows between the web server of company and the website of customers should have encryption in order to stay away from eavesdropping or a phishing attack. SSL authentication is a must-have for e-commerce sites from small as well as large retailers. SSL effectively protects sensitive data that travels across the web and encrypts sensitive information such as credit card details and passwords. The SSL certificate makes these important data unreadable to everyone apart from the intended recipient, protecting it from cyber criminals and hackers.
3. Be PCI Compliant
In addition to using SSL protection, it is recommended to ensure that your ecommerce website is PCI compliant. Any merchant who accepts debit/credit cards, both offline and online, must be compliant with the PCI Security Standards Council and meet all the regulations in order to ensure they are keeping the payment data of customers secure. Merchants who are not in compliance with PCI Security Standards Council face tough penalties.
4. No Need to Store Sensitive Data
It is quite risky to keep confidential information, such as credit and debit card details,of your customer on your server because it can possibly entice an attacker to steal such sensitive information. Further, in accordance to PCI Standards it is forbidden to store such sensitive data. You should keep only the minimal amount of data to complete refunds and charge backs, and clear out stores regularly so as to comply with the PCI Standards and to give identity thieves nothing to steal. You can also prevent online fraud by verifying addresses and CVV2 codes for all the online transactions.
5. Insist on Strong Passwords
Many people fail to create a strong password that is designed to protect. As an online retailer it is your responsibility to insist on strong passwords when your customers set up accounts on your site. It’ll not only protect all the sensitive information retained at the back end of your ecommerce website, but also minimize site breaches. A strong password has a minimum amount of characters and contains a mixture of symbols, letters and numbers.
6. Penetration testing
Penetration testing or ethical hacking is a necessary step in ensuring your ecommerce site is inaccessible to the hackers and fraudsters. There are many penetration testing companies out there offering the services you need to put protection and customer privacy at the top of your agenda as a retailer. The ethical hackers will attack on your server with the intention of finding security weaknesses. After the penetration testing, they will make a report to enlist all the weakness in your security threats. This report helps to make your website completely secure and keep your web assets safe.
Cheap Windows Hosting – Tips to make ASP.NET MVC application SEO friendly
CheapWindowsHosting.com |One of the big benefits of using an existing system such as WordPress or Magento, is many things simply come out of the box. One of these things is being “SEO – friendly”: being optimized for the search engines.
Note: While not all WordPress installations are perfect for SEO, it’s usually really good compared to custom installations.
When you’re working in ASP.NET MVC, chances are you’re dealing with a custom solution. That is great; it just means we have to do a lot of things on our own. In this post I will go through the most important elements. However, SEO changes all the time and we don’t really know what triggers Google – so it’s worth continuing your research afterwards to find out if there are things that are forgotten.
I decided to split the changes into “Required”, “Important” and “Nice to have”. What category I placed them in is a bit random and based on my own experiences and what I’ve read – but use it more as a general guideline.
Required on-site SEO optimisations for ASP.NET sites
Make site is indexable
This has less to do with ASP.NET MVC than it has to do with JavaScript frameworks such as Angular. While there is a lot of discussion about whether Google reads these JavaScript MVC sites correctly or not, there is an important point to make:
All your content should be served from the server at the point of load. Yes, it’s nice to load it dynamically using a JavaScript framework or jQuery call, but that can and will hurt SEO. Make sure to always load it when you serve the view from the controller.
Note: If you Google “Angular SEO friendly” you will get plenty of methods on how to do this in practice.
Unique title tags for each view
One of the most important ranking factors is the <title> tag in the header. Make sure to set a unique one for each view in your application – also small pages such as contact and about.
For dynamic pages this is the most important, as you would often have your main content there.
Important on-site SEO optimisations for ASP.NET sites
Sitemap in ASP.NET MVC
Sitemaps are important to tell the search engines exactly what pages you have. Unfortunately you have to make them yourself.
- For smaller sites, it’s quite simple. Either you do it manually (which works if you don’t have any dynamic content) or automatically (more on that in a second). You simply make a controller called Sitemap, and makes sure your site responds to calls such as /sitemap and /sitemap.xml .
- For bigger sites it’s challenge. If you have a million pages which a previous customer of ours did, you need to run an underlying console job that generates the sitemap.
- To help you build it there are a couple of Github projects to help you, and here is an example:
https://github.com/maartenba/MvcSiteMapProvider
Only one <h1> on each page
Each page, when fully rendered, should only have a <h1> tag. The <h1> tag is what the page is about, and should be the main headline.
Canonical URL on pages
It’s in general a very good idea to put a canonical URL on most views. The idea is you tell Google what the real version of the URL is.
A typical example is you have the same page that gets indexed with unique query strings:
- ?tracking=qwerty
- ?ref=query
The idea is you then make a canonical URL and refer to itself. So if your view is placed on http://domain.com/page, and you have a version such as http://domain.com/page?ref=query, you should have a canonical URL that is http://domain.com/page.
Remove /home/ from URL in ASP.NET MVC
In a lot of ASP.NET MVC projects, many pages end up having a /home/ url. An example could be /home/contact. The shorter and more clear URLs, the better. And this is just a quick small thing to update inside the route file.
Prev and next on paginated listings
When you have a paginated result, it’s worth implementing the “prev” and “next”. It’s a way of telling the search engines you are on a paginated result, and what the next and previous pages are.
Cheap Windows Hosting – Tips to Manage Your Social Media Marketing
CheapWindowsHosting.com | Today I will share my article about how to manage your social media marketing. The number of recommended actions and suggested tasks that social media managers must engage in can seem downright overwhelming. Not only are you supposed to update dozens of different profiles every day, you have to connect with potential new followers and monitor your company’s branded keywords in order to manage any negative mentions you encounter. And more.
To prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed and unable to get anything done at all, refocus your efforts on the following daily social media habits made up of tasks you know you can complete. Doing so should help you to form positive brand recognition and responsive follower bases — without driving yourself crazy over everything you could be doing.
Tips to Manage Your Social Media Marketing
Create Your Plan
If you have no execution strategy, your content is likely going to fall through the cracks. Set a limit on how many tweets you have to publish per day. This number can be adjusted as needed, but having a number you have to hit, even something as small as four tweets per day, gives you a benchmark and a goal at the very least.
TIP: Investigate how often your competitors are posting and conduct industry research to see the ideal amount of content to publish per day on each channel. You want to be active, but not overly active.
Knowing Your Customer’s Social Media
Each social channel needs to be treated as a separate entity. There can be content that is spread across all channels – for example if your business was recently acquired by a global company, this is likely news you want to share across the board, but you should adjust your strategy depending on the audience for that channel.
For example, LinkedIn tends to have a more business-focused audience looking for in-depth, educational content, compared to Instagram, which is likely to have an audience looking for engaging visual content. Pay attention to your follower demographic on each channel to publish content that appeals to them.
Be Active in Customer Service
If a visitor tweets at your handle or posts on your Facebook page and never receives a response, trust is lost. Due to your lack of communication, the dissatisfied potential lead is now turning to your competitors to seek answers to their questions. On the other hand, when you deliver a thoughtful response in a timely manner that visitor is flattered and intrigued by your brand. It’s humanizing to take the time respond to a personal inquiry, and it builds your authority.
Don’t Forget Google+
Many of you may be raising an eyebrow, but Google+, often viewed as the Facebook wannabe, is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it’s only becoming more and more important for businesses to actively engage and grow their circles on this platform. When you search on Google you will notice that Google+ is everywhere. If your business is actively posting on Google+, you will receive essentially free ad space when users search for you on Google.
According to a Moz.com survey, leading marketers believe the number of Google +1’s plays the second largest part in determining search engine rankings. This isn’t proven to be true, but clearly marketers are seeing that Google+ is affecting the visibility of their content on Google.
Google+ is also integrated with YouTube, so users are unable to comment on the platform without being opted into Google+. Essentially Google is making having a Google+ account pretty much essential.
Cheap Windows Hosting – Tips to Boost SEO with Social Media Twitter
CheapWindowsHosting.com | Hello guys today I will share some tips to boost seo with twitter, lets stared it. Twitter has a long history with Google, leading to a lot of confusion about whether signals from Twitter influence Google’s search results. Today I’m going to sort that out (spoiler alert: it doesn’t). Then I’m going to look at current best practices for upping your influence in search using Twitter.
Google Loves Twitter: Yes, No, Maybe So?
A few years ago, there was a lot of buzz about search engines using social signals to impact SERs. For a little while, Google did index tweets. Starting in 2009, Google had access to the full “fire hose” of Twitter’s data stream. A year later, Matt Cutts told us t 
hat these signals would officially be picked up by Google’s algorithm.
But the partnership was over a couple years later. In 2011, Google’s fire hose agreement with Twitter ended and Google rolled out its own proprietary social network, Google+.
Fast forward to this year, when Cutts went on record saying that “signals” from Twitter (and Facebook) are not part of the Google algo. The breakup between Google and Twitter would seem to be official.
But even now, a lot of SEOs insist that Twitter and Facebook activity weighs into Google’s search results. Most of the arguments point to observations that there’s a high correlation between activity on certain Twitter (or Facebook) accounts and their rankings in search engines. But, come on, folks … dust off your high school stats: correlation is not the same thing as causation.
The correlation is almost certainly about this: If you publish great content and it gets a lot of social shares, chances are it will also get links. Links, not shares, are influencing the search engine results.
The most damning evidence against Google using Twitter data currently comes from Stone Temple Consulting’s recent analysis of how and when Google indexes tweets. Those guys found that only a few tweets are being indexed and those that are coming mainly from superhero accounts of more than a million followers. And … the indexing is slow.
Conclusion: Google is almost certainly not indexing tweets in any way that brings SEO benefits to most of us. So let’s take our eggs out of that basket—at least for now.
Twitter Still Helps With Google SEO. Here’s How.
Assuming you agree with my arguments above, here are some key ways you can use Twitter to help improve your resultss with Google. It’s not a comprehensive list, but these will give you the most bang for your buck.
Encourage Natural Backlinks.
Links are still the foundation of the Web and the Google algo. They’re our best way of telling Google that our websites and content are valuable and trustworthy. And Twitter’s one of the best social avenues for building organic connections that lead to natural, “honest” links. So-the best way Twitter can boost your SEO is for building natural links.
You have to start with great, useful content. Wherever you publish this—your own website/blog, Google+, LinkedIn or guest blogs, etc.,—you can use Twitter to attract readers who will want to share and link to it.
To encourage this, you’re going to need to focus on Twitter habits that will:
- Build genuine community and connections
- Make your tweets more shareable
Best Practices in the Twitterverse
To build genuine community on Twitter, focus on these actions:
- Engage. Be as social as you would at a party. Be friendly, follow others, retweet, and link to content of people you’d like to do the same for you. Especially try to do this with influencers in your industry or field.
- Share useful content. Spread your tweets out through the day and know when to post. There’s lots of data out there about optimal times and quantities for tweeting, like this advice from Buffer.
To make your tweets more shareable, try these things:
- Use Twitter cards. These are bits of code that enable you to improve the user experience by adding photos, videos, product descriptions, and more to your tweets.
- Use keywords from traditional SEO. This is a way your search and social teams can work synergistically together. Chances are Twitter users will also use some of the same keywords you’ve researched for your SEO campaign. Experiment with using them in tweets and as hashtags.
Optimize Your Personal Information
One of the easiest tricks is to optimize your identity on Twitter. Have a complete profile that includes some keywords for your industry, and a username that’s the same as your company name, individual name, or product. Twitter bios are highly rankable in Google when people search for your name or company.
Use Twitter to Understand Your Customers.
Lastly, as a corollary to the point above about using SEO keywords in tweets, you can use Twitter as a rich source of trending keywords for SEO and/or topics for content creation. The search/social synergy goes both ways.
Key Take aways
To wrap up, the key SEO benefit from Twitter right now is link building. Bing is using signals from Twitter to influence its results, but the preponderance of evidence is that Google is not. This could definitely change. In the meantime, the ideas outlined here will help you maximize Twitter for Google SEO benefits.
The only constant at the intersection of search and social is fast and constant evolution. So stay on top of the trends. Use these best practices now, but keep your eye on the future.
Cheap Windows Hosting Tutorial – Tips to Improving Your Alexa Rank
CheapWindowsHosting.com | Hello today I would like to share my post about how to improve your alexa rank? Many people ask us: How can I improve my Alexa Rank? We understand how important this metric is for you and your business. As a public metric, potential advertisers, investors, and partners will look up your Alexa Rank and use it as a way to evaluate the value of your business. For this reason, improvements in your rank can make a real dollars and cents impact on your bottom line.
For those of you who are new to Alexa or unfamiliar with the Alexa Rank – it is a single metric that provides a quick summary of a site’s performance (yours or your competitor’s) relative to all other sites on the web. If you aren’t focused on it, you may not be doing everything you can to maximize the value and visibility of your business. In all, the authority of your site on the web is translated as your Alexa Rank.
But before we dive into how you can improve your site’s Alexa Rank, we should take a step back. It’s important to understand the makeup of the Alexa Rank so you understand how you can make it better.
Let’s get started.
What is the Alexa Rank?
Your Alexa Rank is an estimate of how popular your site is relative to all other sites. The Alexa Rank answers the question: Compared to all other sites, how is my site doing? Note that since rank is a relative measure, your site’s rank is not only dependent on that site’s traffic, but also on changes to traffic on other sites.
How does Alexa get its data?
Alexa has a large traffic data panel consisting of millions of people all over the world. Based on the data from this sample, Alexa estimates the number of visitors to all sites on the Internet. It’s a complicated calculation that involves correcting for biases as well as identifying and discarding fake or spam traffic. Our data scientists are the best in the business and they make sure the data we present is free of noise and non-human data, so you can make the best decisions for your business.
How is the Alexa Rank calculated?
Every day, Alexa estimates the average daily visitors and pageviews to every site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months is ranked #1. The site with the least is ranked somewhere around 30 million. If no one in our measurement panel visited a site over the past 3 months there is no rank at all for that site.
How does the number of visitors to a site affect the Alexa Rank?
If you plot the number of visitors to a site versus the rank it looks something like this:
At the head of the graph is Google.com, which gets a huge number of visitors and is ranked #1. The sites at the “head” end of the plot, like Google.com, get a huge amount of traffic compared to the sites on the “long tail” at the other end. The important thing to notice is that because of the shape of the distribution, a very small change in the number of visitors to a site on the long tail results in a large change in rank.
However, the closer you get to the head of the graph, the more visitors it takes to move up a rank. There’s a huge difference in traffic to a site ranked 10 versus a site ranked 200.
Getting a more accurate Alexa rank
To get a more accurate Alexa Rank you can certify your site’s metrics on Alexa. Sites with certified metrics have their metrics directly measured by Alexa instead of being estimated based on information from our data panel. Certifying your site’s metrics provides a more accurate rank, but not necessarily a better rank! There are several other benefits of Certified Site Metrics, but a more accurate Alexa Rank is just one of them.
So, how do you get a better Alexa rank?
There are several tactics that will help improve your Alexa Rank:
- Produce engaging, original content, updated frequently that provides real value to your audience. Content that strays from this motivation fails to build loyal audiences. When readers find resources valuable and informative, they engage with future content and share among their networks (link building), introducing new visitors that potentially turn into customers. Quality content is also being rewarded by search engines like Google, which is taking steps to get better answers faster for the end user.
- Get more related sites to link to your website. Otherwise known as inbound links, this tactic helps search engines clearly define your niche and also increases the trust and quality of your site. In other words, authoritative inbound links (from sites that are performing well) give your own site credibility. This tactic must be supported by producing engaging, original content, because why lead targeted visitors to your site if they don’t want to stay?
- Internal links, on the other hand, are links that lead from one page or post on your site to another. These are beneficial because they guide visitors through your website (i.e. website navigation), keeping them engaged with relevant and related content. They also contribute to site links, which are the sub-links that appear in a search engine below your main page link. But again, creating top-notch content goes hand in hand with any internal linking strategy so make sure the content you produce is relevant and of value to your visitors.
In all, both inbound and internal links help search engines understand the content of your site(s) and determine how valuable it is to visitors. But while an important part of your online strategy, you should use linking appropriately. Excessive linking can reduce the credibility or readability of your site and may be penalized by search engines.
- Find keywords that are driving traffic to your competitors and optimize your site for them, or buy PPC campaigns for those keywords. By doing a little keyword research you can understand what your audiences are searching for and how. In a way, keyword research is learning to speak your customers’ language in the context of their needs and desires. Inbound Marketing Agents shared a great infographic on the 5 fingers of a keyword placement strategy that will help you pick the right areas on your site to place your target keywords.
- Understand your competitors’ marketing strategy and learn what works. There are several reasons why analyzing your competition matters, but in a nutshell competitive analytics puts your own site analytics into context. Thus, giving you a clearer understanding of what metrics are important, what strategies are working (for you and your competitors), and allows you to identify and anticipate industry trends. All of these angles help inform your overall strategy and allow you to make more knowledgeable business decisions that will positively affect your position in the market.
- Follow SEO best practices on your website. SEO is a very important strategy that deserves a significant amount of your time and attention. But SEO is not just about improving the promotion and visibility of your website. It’s also about making your site better for your customers who use it to interface with your brand. Without a good user experience you have little hope of keeping or converting your customers.
There are countless resources for learning about SEO, but Alexa offers both SEO and Full Site Audits generated automatically as part of our Insight and Advanced plans. You’ll get specific instructions on how to improve search engine rankings, usability, page performance, back linking, and more.
Cheap Windows Hosting – Tips Why Your Web Hosting Business Needs a YouTube Channel
CheapWindowsHosting.com | Running a small business – regardless of whether it is a web hosting business or not – is hard work.You have enough on your plate. You are doing the marketing, setting up the products, getting in touch with customers… Your ‘to do’ list keeps growing, and growing, AND GROWING! Why on earth would you contemplate setting up a YouTube channel for your business and spending all that time messing around with video camera.
Well, there are a number of reasons, and some of them are quite compelling. Of course, the main reason is the number of users. YouTube is popular – very popular indeed.
Let’s look at some facts:
- 4 Billion YouTube videos viewed daily
- YouTube receives 800 MILLION unique visitors monthly
- 60 hours of video are uploaded every MINUTE
According to Alexia the most popular websites globally are:
- Google.com,
- Facebook.com and
- YouTube.com!
Those stats alone mean you simply can’t miss out on YouTube as a marketing avenue. But beyond numbers here are some other reasons why having a YouTube channel for your business is a compelling idea:
1. Global accessibility
There are only 23 countries that have ever censored YouTube, and aside from countries like North Korea or Iran, the level of censorship it has received has been limited.
That means YouTube is available in the vast majority of countries and for companies with global aspirations – or, like in web hosting, a company in a business that is global in nature – it offers substantial opportunities.
2. A compelling medium
Nobody forces you to watch YouTube.
The only reasons people visit YouTube are entertainment and enlightenment.
Think of what YOU use YouTube for…
If you are in a business like web hosting that relies on technology, what better way would there be to show people how to do something.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jvPSTd4TEQ[/youtube]
3. YouTube offers excellent advertising opportunities
- When you watch a video that is of interest to you, you can click on a link and visit the website of the company that made the video.
- Depending on which statistics you look at, upwards of 80% of video viewers do just that – compared to other advertising medium such as pay-per-click advertising, this is a phenomenal return.
- Despite such effectiveness and the enormous numbers of people who use YouTube, the advertising opportunities available through YouTube are curiously inexpensive.
If you have YouTube channel, it’s fairly cost-effective to generate a reasonable following.
4. Demographics: EVERYONE uses YouTube
Your target audience probably uses YouTube.
Whereas in the past its demographic was firmly the young, these days YouTube is the domain of every age group – grandparents uploading videos of their grandchildren, kids uploading videos of their scout camps – everyone is there, without exception.
One of the reasons for this is YouTube is no longer bound to the PC.
It’s accessible through mobile devices and these days people are just as likely to be watching YouTube on the move or on their living room’s smart TV.
5. YouTube directs users to the content they need or want
Regardless of advertising, by its nature, YouTube directs users to the content they want or need.
Google’s algorithms are particularly good at determining what type of advertising you might click on, and likewise with YouTube – use YouTube for a couple a weeks and the “Suggested for you” videos you receive really are the type of videos you might be interested in viewing.
Chances are if there is something specific in your channel that a certain group needs or wants, they will be directed to it by YouTube.
6. YouTube is designed for business
YouTube also has a clear focus on business – for instance, why does it need analytics?
How many people log in to their YouTube analytics to see how many people saw that video of a mouse frightening a cat?
Probably very few.
As with Google Analytics, YouTube’s analytics functions can let you know where you customers are and what they are interested in – invaluable data.
7. YouTube is designed for browsing
As I implied earlier, the chances are if someone hits your YouTube channel, they are going to shift through some of the other videos you have uploaded.
That might lead to them visiting your website… and that might lead to a sale!
It’s worth the risk!
8. YouTube makes an impact
A picture paints a thousand words, but a moving picture?
Just what sort of impact does watching a video have on a consumer?
The answer is fairly obvious. Would you prefer to buy a mobile phone after reading a description or viewing a videoed demonstration?
Yes, of course, quality matters and many videos produced for branded YouTube channels are often extremely well produced and have good visual quality – and cost a pretty penny.
9. YouTube offers a human touch
Informing people how to do something via video also shows the people that work for your company.
It gives them names and offers visitors background.
In a world of auto-responses and waiting in queues for calls to be transferred, a YouTube channel can show the real people that make up your organization.
10. Your competitors don’t have a YouTube channel
Simply put, if your website has a link to a YouTube channel and your competitor’s website doesn’t, that kudos to you!
11.Instant customer feedback
As with Facebook, YouTube allows you to ‘like’ something, but unlike Facebook, you can also ‘dislike’ something as well.
Put your products in videos and count up the ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ and you have a pretty good idea of what’s going to be popular and what’s not.
View comments and you can find out why people like or don’t like a certain product.
Final comments…
Of course, nothing is ever that simple, and a YouTube channel takes some maintenance.
For example, you have to optimise your channel so it stays on top of certain keywords, but generally, a YouTube channel is a cost-effective and fun way to engage customers.
