A Guide To Search Engine OptimizationHow To Boost The Rankings Of Your Websites |
12. Web Hosting Services and Domain NamesWeb hosting Services and Domain names Choosing an appropriate domain name is very important. First and foremost, when it comes to domain names, try to stay away from the silly, stupid, ridiculous or clever. Keep your domain name simple and make it something your customers can remember if they lose the link to your business website. Take note that, while your domain name on Geocities or AOL may seem like the least expensive way to go, it may also get you dropped from certain search engines. Some search engines ignore domain addresses that reside on these ‘free servers’ or on the ‘cheap’ servers. Even if your site is recognized and considered by search engines, a professional domain name that uses your primary company name or associated words is likely to get more attention and be considered as a stable business by your prospective customers. Purchasing domain names are not that expensive which cost about $100 and there are many companies that can register the name for you, provided it is available and has not already been used by another company. Using one of your keywords in your domain name can increase your score on some search engines. For example, solderingirons.com could be more effective as Electric-soldering-irons.com, if that domain name was available. You might also choose to establish more than one domain name using keywords and then link your ‘doorway’ domain sites to your primary site. But you will have to pay for each of the domain name and also the monthly hosting fees. It all depends on the type and size of your business and your competition. Keep in mind that some search engines disregard ‘doorway’ sites. So put at least a page of content on the doorway site with some useful information and then link it to your primary site. But don’t design it as an empty page. The other reason being, you can have one, three, five, or even more email addresses that all contain your business name, and give your business a professional feel. When customers get emails from dominicstone@solderingirons.com they feel as if they are dealing with a stable, professional business operation. No need for customers to understand how you manage all your email boxes on your domain. They just need to feel your business is dependable and reputable. Web Hosting Companies With thousands of web hosting companies in the market it can be difficult if not impossible to know which web site hosting companies truly provide an excellent hosting solution at an excellent price. When you have an established domain name with a good web hosting company, you can get reports on your traffic and which of your pages your customers are visiting most often, as well as many other statistics. Your web host will charge you a fee for monthly service that ranges from $10 or $20 to the more expensive $50.00 per month. Plan to pay between $300 and $500 per year to your web host. Always avoid free or very inexpensive web hosting services, because you may experience bouts of server downtimes and you are likely to have significant limitations in storage, number of email addresses, FTP upload etc. Be sure your web host can accommodate e-commerce and storefronts, wireless capability, bogs, forums, chats, online interactive helps and anything else you want to add onto your site. Estimate what your growth needs are and ensure that this web host can serve you as you grow. The last thing you want to do is change host mid way unless you absolutely have to do so. Check your bandwidth capability to be sure that, if your website traffic grows rapidly, your customers will not have to wait to download or view information. Three things to look for in a web hosting company are: 1. Excellent Customer Support: Your hosting provider should be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem. Ask them how long it takes for them to typically respond to your problem. A good test is to call them in the mid night to check if you get to a live, level 3 support. 2. A Sound Infrastructure: Check whether they offer a multi-homed network powered by multiple bandwidth providers to ensure redundancy. Some offer a 100% guarantee on its network availability or network uptime. 3. Financial Stability: If you're running very critical operations, you can't afford to be with a hosting company that may not be in business in a few months. Domain Names play a huge role in search engine optimization for obtaining high search engine ranking. Type in any keyword into Google for example, and the chances are high that you will find that more than 80% of the first 10 sites contain that particular keyword in their domain names. Thus, domain name is one area that can be fully utilized (obviously taking into consideration that you are optimizing a brand new site from scratch and not an existing one). It is also a good idea to include hyphens (-) between each of the keywords within your domain name. This tells a search engine spider that each word is a separate word, not one continuous word. The search engines which use keywords in the domain name as a part of their ranking formula will not be able to recognize keywords unless they are separated by a hyphen (or a slash or underscore for sub-directories). Search Engines prefer the use of hyphens in domain names because they can produce more accurate search results by being able to recognize specified key words in your URL. Keep in mind that a domain with words separated by hyphens will be harder for users to remember (and may also decrease the value of the domain). However, if keywords are used with hyphens the keywords may be interpreted as such by search engines thereby helping rank a site higher. If at all possible, try to register both forms of the name for example, websitemarketing.com and web-site-marketing.com. To have a good web site marketing plan, you must realize alphabetical priority of domain names is still used by some search engines as a key factor in their ranking formula. Alphabetical hierarchy is even more important to web site marketing, because this method is used by directories, which strictly list sites in alphabetical order based on the results of the keyword(s) search. Your web site marketing plan must acknowledge Yahoo!. Yahoo! is the number one directory and search site with 52.7 million different visitors each month, accounting for 69.1 percent of all Internet surfers. An astounding 53.4 percent of all search-related traffic comes from Yahoo!, or as much as half the traffic received to many sites. Many prefer to use Yahoo! because each site submitted to Yahoo! is human-reviewed, delivering more accurate search results for their visitors. To include alphabetical hierarchy in your web site marketing strategy, realize that alphabetical priority does not only consist of letters, it includes numbers that can rank higher than an "A". This is the order: - 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z This means that the domain "www.1-800-ABC-NEWS.com" will rank higher with the search sites that use alphabetical priority in their ranking formula, than just "www.ABC.com" We discussed about Link Popularity. Another factor influencing search engine placement in some search engines is Click Popularity. The number of users clicking on links to your page from the search results is counted. Pages that are frequently clicked will get a popularity boost. Your site is awarded a certain number of points each time someone clicks your link from the search results. If your Web site already has a high ranking you will get fewer points compared to a low ranking site. This way all sites have an equal chance to get click through points awarded. Don't be tempted to click your own link over and over again. Repeated clicks from the same IP will be detected. Clicking on your link and quickly returning to the search engine again might actually hurt your rank. The search engines will believe you did not find anything interesting at the page. That is not a good search engine optimization strategy. How can you influence click popularity then? By putting some work into your page title and description Meta tag. These are the main factors influencing people's decision to click your link. High quality content will make visitors stay at your search engine optimized web site, and will stop them from quickly returning to the search engine. Domain name registration is one of the most important things to consider when you are designing a site for high search engine placement. Here are some dos and don’ts of domain name registration. Some Webmasters use shared domains or sub-domains available for free from popular Web hosting services, or some kind of free domain name redirect service. This might be cheap, but if you want a good search engine placement, it's not an option. ? Some search engines do ban free Web hosts because search engine spammers frequently use them for hosting duplicate sites (mirrors) and doorway pages. ? Sharing domains or IP addresses with spammers can get your search engine position penalized or your entire site banned. Note this statement from AltaVista: "You could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes." ? Most search engines limit the number of submissions or number of listings for each domain. This will make it very hard to get your site indexed. Other sites on the same domain might already take all the available spots. ? If you do manage to get your site indexed, the search engine will have a hard time finding the “theme” for your site if you are sharing a domain with other sites on many different subjects. Pages are no longer ranked one by one, all content within the domain is considered. ? Without your own domain, you will be forced to start working from scratch again if the host goes out of business or if he decides to change your URL. Many Webmasters have lost their search engine positions, link popularity and Web traffic because of this. Keywords in the domain name are crucial. It makes sense to put your primary keywords into your domain name. ? Separate multiple keywords like my-keywords-phrase.com instead of typing it all in one word: mykeywordphrase.com. This will make it possible for the search engines to understand your keyword phrases correctly. ? Keep in mind that Yahoo and some other search engines reject domain submissions with URL's in excess of 54 characters. You would be wise to stay under the 55 character limit when choosing a domain name. ? Directories like Yahoo, LookSmart and ODP will not look for keywords in the text of your page, and editors will often edit keywords out of your title and description. This leaves your internet domain name as the single most important place to put keywords for your site. ? Too many dashes in a domain name might trigger the spam filters of some search engines. ? Yet another benefit of keyword rich domain names is in reciprocal linking. If the domain name keywords appear within the text of incoming links, you will get a major boost in ranking, especially in Google. Choosing a Web host provider for your site is no small decision. When you make a choice of a Web page host, you are actually placing your Internet business in the hands of your Web host provider. Choosing the wrong Web page hosting plan can cause permanent damage to your search engine placement. Selecting a Web page host is like renting an office. You want to get it right the first time. It is always possible to move somewhere else, but it's no easy task to move your entire business - not to mention the damage that already could be caused by then. We are going to look at some little known facts about Web page hosting and how it can effect your search engine placement. Did you submit your site over and over again without ever getting it indexed in the search engines? Or was your site indexed, but is nowhere to be found when you type your search terms into the engines? Your Web host provider might be the cause of that. As AltaVista states: "If being found via search engines is important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded." AltaVista is not the only search engine enforcing this policy against certain Web Hosting services. This is a common practice causing many sites to lose their rank. Choosing the right host for your Web hosting needs is of great importance if you really care about your search engine position. Here is a short list of things to watch out for Shared IP hosting Many Web hosting services do not give out unique IP addresses to customers. The name-based system of virtual Web hosting allows multiple domains to be hosted by a single IP. This means several hundred domain names could all be using the same IP address. Are you sharing an IP address with people you don't even know? If someone else, who is hosted on the same server as your site, gets banned on a search engine, then your Web site will be caught and banned as well. This happens on a regular basis causing serious problems for those who are affected. Downtime If your Web host provider cannot keep servers up and running 24/7, people will not be able to find your site. The search engine spiders won't find it either. They will assume your site is gone and remove it from the search engine index. You will have to resubmit and wait weeks or months for the spider to re-index your site. If your site already is indexed and ranking well, it might lose its position altogether. No matter what web host provider you use, it is highly recommended that you sign up for a free site monitoring service like EasyMonitor. This guarantees that you're alerted within minutes when your site goes down. This enables you to get to work immediately to solve the problem and dramatically increase the time your site is up and running. The speed and reliability of your Web host provider will depend on several factors. Look for a web page host with ? A T3 connection (or better) close to a primary Internet backbone ? Safeguards against systems, network or power failure ? Several connections to the Internet (in case one goes down) ? Backup power supplies and ? "Uptime guarantee" with at least 95% uptime No logs Access to raw web log files is one feature often missing with low quality Web hosting services. Some Web host providers provide logs, but do not include referrer information. Others delete logs frequently, making it impossible to use them effectively. Make sure your Web hosting service gives you access to raw server logs, preferably in "Extended Common Log File Format", a standard that can be understood by most log analyzers. The server logs will give you some valuable information for your search engine optimization work, including what search engines people are using to find your site, exactly which keywords do they type into the search box, and when the search engine spiders visit your site. This is crucial information. You cannot properly optimize your site without it. Other features include daily back up of your data, high bandwidth and, of course, the quality of their support services. In addition, you must consider the features offered by the Web page host. Some features to consider are ? The space available for your site ? Monthly transfer limits ? POP mail server availability ? Support for CGI, SSI, Perl, databases and FrontPage 2000 extensions ? Secure server access (SSL) ? Anonymous FTP and ? Shopping Cart Software. Some Search Engines are case sensitive. This gives rise to a new dilemma for webmasters. Should they include keywords in both lower case as well as upper case, especially in Meta tags? Most webmasters actually do so. For instance, they would list the keywords as a set of all possible combinations of upper and lower case. Webmasters may feel that this is the safest technique to avoid losing potential visitors. However, such repetition may be considered by the Search Engine to be Spam! After all, higher the number of words, higher the combinations. The best way to get around this problem is to list keywords in lower case only. Most surfers always search in lower case. There are very few cases where surfers use capitals even if the word is a proper name. Of course, you may run a very small risk of losing a few visitors who use upper case, but this risk is minimal. Besides, you do not want to be banned for Spam. There is an abundance of search engine information available on the web- some of it valuable, much of it contradictory. Throughout the years some prevailing search engine myths have developed. Some of these myths are still encouraged. Others are based upon techniques that were effective years ago but no longer work. Still others come from simple misunderstandings that inevitably come with a relatively new medium. Here is a discussion on some of the most common myths around Myth: Meta tags are the most important factor in search engine rankings. Fact: Many search engines (most notably Google) ignore meta tags completely due to constant abuse by webmasters. The only importance placed on meta tags these days is actually the meta description tag, which will appear as the description for the corresponding page on engines that use inktomi data (such as MSN). Meta tags are virtually irrelevant in the ranking algorithms of the top engines- but many people continue to believe that they are the only optimization strategy that they need. Myth: It's impossible to do search engine optimization in-house. Fact: It often is done in house, and done effectively. This is typically when a large corporation hires in-house talent that is largely devoted exclusively to promoting the website. However, it is unrealistic to expect someone with many other job functions to do a credible job of SEO. Much of the skills are acquired through experience- and it isn't usually desirable to have someone "experimenting" with the company website (especially considering that certain techniques can get sites penalized on engines or banned outright). SEO isn't rocket science, but it also isn't something that can be learned overnight. When deciding whether to outsource SEO or do it in house, it is important to consider the actual costs involved. Often, when the necessary hours it takes to pay someone to learn on the job are taken into account, it is cheaper to outsource (and the results are almost always better). Only a careful evaluation of your goals and resources can determine the best course of action for your company. Myth: Sites must be constantly resubmitted to retain rankings. Fact: This is a scare tactic popularized by various submission services and software companies. In fact, it is a waste of money to pay to have your site resubmitted once it is already listed in an engine's database. It will not hurt your rankings to constantly submit (or else people would submit their competitor's sites to get them penalized), but it will not help, either. Myth: Search engine optimization is not as effective as "traditional" marketing. Fact: In many ways, it is more effective. Companies often spend countless dollars on direct mail, television and radio advertising, and bulk email without a second thought. The common thread with each of these strategies is that the prospect is "approached" by the company, and that the company must reach a great number of people to find a few motivated prospects. On the other hand, search engines can deliver highly motivated prospects directly to your website- people who have already demonstrated, through their use of particular key phrases, an interest in your products or services. Doorway or Gateway pages Doorway pages are pages that have been designed for one purpose only, to rank high in the search engines for a particular keyword and then direct the arriving visitors further into the site. Usually their design is relatively simplistic and includes a lot of text, but contains very little graphics or other fancy effects. Doorway pages focus on particular keywords and phrases targeted for search engines and serve as an entry page to visitors. These used to be a popular means to achieve high rankings with Search Engines, but recently, many Search Engines have started completely ignoring websites with doorway pages. Because creating doorway pages used to be so easy, especially when using programs that can automatically generate hundreds or thousands of pages in a heartbeat by using a simple template and merely placing the keywords in the right places, many sites lost control and created enormous amounts of them. The search engines initially tolerated this behavior, but as their databases started being filled with doorway pages they soon realized that these pages would quickly conquer the top ranking spots from normal content-rich pages. This would reduce the quality of their indices and lower the value of the search results, resulting in users abandoning the search engine. Search Engines such as AltaVista began removing doorway pages from its index and in some cases even banning the sites that were using them. Other engines followed suit and soon it was safe to say that the age of doorway pages, at least in the form we used to know them, had passed. Instead of focusing on doorway pages, you should focus on optimizing your actual content pages.
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Browse Site2. the Different Between Se & Directory 3. Algorithms, Crawling & More 4. Submitting Your Url to Google 7. How Does Inktomi Rank Web Pages 9. How to Boost the Rankings of Your Pages 10. Must Have Features Your Web Site 11. Bonus Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic 12. Web Hosting Services and Domain Names |
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