Archive for November, 2008

Quality Free SEO Tools

What is website content and how do we create good quality content ? Opinions vary, however, the basic concensus is that by regularly updating your website with unique fresh content and making it more interactive, you will be targeting your niche market.

Testimonials.
 
Not this one again. Yes, this one again. This allows your satisfied customers to voice their opinions about the quality of your product or service. An online Testimony has the added advantage of having links to and from your customer and this in itself is a good thing.

Forums and Blogs.

Forums and Blogs provide instant interactive appeal to your website customers and visitors. Apart from the fact that they are by themself an essential element, they also add fresh relevant content to your particular website.

Calendar of Events.

Calendar of Events allows you to promote a particular product, service or launch. The calendar allowS your visitors to bookmark, add to their own, share it plus other features that would take a blog of it’s own to write about. If you have upcoming events related to your website’s products, services, or Business then include it in your calendar of events.

Product Reviews.

Consider writing a Product Review. Be mindful that your review must be fair and just and include both the advantages and disadvantages of your particular product. By writing an honest review of your product, will also give you credibility to your website visitors.

Geographical Maps.

If you have a brick and mortar business, then consider using maps to pinpoint your location.  If you are writing about a golf course or hotel, then use Google Maps to show it’s location. It helps the website visitors as they look for specific locations and they will come to rely upon your website as a valuable resource.

All of the above mentioned tips are designed to assist you in creating valuable relevant content, which is aimed at delivering quality traffic to your website. After all isn’t that the goal and aim of all of us.

Until Net Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian SEO Specialist

Australian Domain Names

Your Domain Name or Names are a vital component of your Business identity. They are not only an integral part of your online business but they are also an effective and efficient marketing tool.

The majority of businesses, register their business name/s as their preferred Domain. Where possible and depending upon which Country you live, it may be prudent to secure the .com and .com.au version of your Domain name.

In our case, we secured www.hostingimpact.com  www.hostingimpact.com.au www.hostingimpact.net and www.hostingimpact.net.au

Why ? Simply to protect our brand. We have heard horror stories whereby an Australian Business has secured their .com.au domain and have left their .com domain name available. Their opposition have come through and registered the .com version and then built a site along the same lines and yes you guessed it, customers would forget to type the .au extension and go to the opposition. Let’s be honest, for the sake of around $15.00, why would you not secure it.

If you’re not ready to design and develop your website just now, thats ok, however, registering your domain name is still an important step to consider.  The added advantage of securing your domain name, is the fact that you can then create personalised email addresses, e.g. support@hostingimpact.com instead of yourbusinessname@hotmail.com  

Congratulations, you have secured your Domain Name, now what….Please ensure that your Domain details and registrant contact email address remains valid and up to date.

For additional information regarding Australian Domain Names please visit www.auda.org.au

Search for your preferred Domain Name here.

We trust you have found this post of benefit and should you require additional information please do not hesitate to contact us accordingly.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian Domain Names

Australian Website Design Professionals

There is a general concensus out there in internet land that Meta Tags either don’t work or of no use anymore. Be that as it may, We, Hosting Impact, do not subscribe to that theory. True, the search engines may not lend as much weight to them as they once did and we have the spammers, once again, to thank for that. Any useful tool that has been designed to assist everyone, has been exploited by the spammers, used, spat out and disgarded like an old toy, until it serves little or no purpose.

With all that aside, Meta tags still have a place within Websites and the correct implementation of Search Engine Optimisation procedures. Meta Tags offer a hint or clue to the search engines of what lies beneath and within the website. This hint is enough to entice the engines to crawl your website and rank it accordingly.

We are not saying that Meta Tags are the be all to end all, however, we do believe that if you use them and use them correctly, they will provide you with a benefit. How much of a benefit, is up for debate and we are not interested in that. We are more interested in developing and implementing sound SEO practices and web design techniques.

In a nutshell, if the content of your website reflects or relates to the hidden meta tags, then it stands to reason that the spider has a valuable point of reference on the content of that page and more importantly, your keywords and or keyword phrases. Keyword Suggestion Tool

We trust you have found this of benefit. Please feel free to contact us to discuss this in length.

Until Net Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian SEO Specialists

Australian Website Design Professionals

Blogs are or should be considered a strategic business communication and marketing tool. Why do we believe that ? Good Question … Here is a brief list of why we believe that.

1. Blogs are becoming a standard for savvy Internet users. The number of users, feeds and blogs are growing everyday and businesses recognise the fact that they can engage their potential customers on a more personal level.

2. Keyword / keyword Phrases. This wold have to be the one single reason why they rank so high. You are talking about a particular product or service and with that comes relevant high quality keywords. Simple as that and yet we still have customers that can not understand, accept or acknowledge that concept. Read the rest of this entry »

Quality Free SEO Tools

All online businesses and websites have 2 aims or objectives and they are to make their website stand out from the crowd and secondly, to make sales.  With this in mind, it’s understandable that the majority of our time is directed towards getting ‘traffic’.  Without it, a website has no prospects and thus no sales.

Consider this option though, instead of a constant need and push for additional website traffic, why not utilise the traffic you already have?  For example, you may currently make 1 sale for every 400 unique visitors, however, by refining your web pages,  you could very well make 1 sale for every 200 unique visitors. By refining your current webpages, you have effectively doubled your sales.

You will find below a number of options to consider in refining your current webpages. The secret though, is to test and evaluate, test and evalute. Track your results at all times.

1. A subscription box to your newsletter. By way of thanking them for siging up, give them a free gift or ebook.

2. A window that appears only as the visitor leaves your site. Please remember though that some people detest popups of any kind. Ensure that you have good quality information and content available.

3. Experiment With your current Web Site Design. Add additional images, add new content, add a poll, ask for your visitors comments. Make your website more interactive. Does your website have a clear path to follow or clearly defined “Call to Action”

4. If your website has too much information or clutter, Simplify your page. More choices does not necessarily make it better.  View it from your customers eyes or point of view. You know what you like and don’t like when you when you visit a website, then implement that.

Test and evaluate every aspect of your website and make the best use of your exisitng traffic and by converting 1extra customer from every 200 unique visitors is effectively doubling your sales and increasing your profit.

Have a clearly defined “Call To Action” and get your website visitors to interact with your website, either by way of signing up for your newsletter or making a phone call or sending an email. Anything is better than nothing.

Trust you have found this of benefit and should you require additional information or assistance please do not hesitate to contact us accordingly.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Small Business Hosting

Quality Free SEO Tools

Keyword research is without doubt, one of the most important aspects of a website and yet, a large percentage of “Web Masters” / “Website Owners” do not or can not grasp this concept. In our humble opinion, little or no keyword research is like jumping out of a plane, without a properly packed and certified parachute. You just wouldn’t do it.
You know your business better than anyboby else and We can think of no place better to start from. Build a list of your products or services most relevant keywords.  Lost for inspiration, then take a look at your sales brochures and refine your keywors even further. Ask your family and friends and your customers, what they type into the search engines when looking for xyz item. Take a quick peek at your competitors website or stay for as long as you want. Either way, dissect their site and find out why they are placed higher than yours. Quick hint though, they have probably conducted extensive keyword research.

 
Please feel free to utilise Hosting Impact’s keyword suggestion tool.  This keyword suggestion tool is easy to use, simply enter the keyword you would like to find similar keywords for and then press “GO”.
In addition to the above, you may also want to consider the following:

Include variations of your keywords
spelling mistakes, i.e: accomodation, acommodation etc…
keyword phrases (eg Port Stephens weekend accommodation)
single and plural versions of each word where possible (eg use port stephens hotel and port stephens hotels)
common abbreviations

and our personal favourite:

Geographical location…well dur you are thinking, however, how many times do customers phone up and say they want to be number 1 for the word accommodation, which will not do them an once of good especially when you consider that there is approximately 127 000 000 search results. However, if they included their geographical location, “port stephens accommodation” then there is only 680 000 search results. Much better don’t you think.

That is our thought, for what it is worth, but above all else, research, research and research and use freely available seo tools to assist you in your endeavours.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Free SEO Tools

Quality Free SEO Tools

1.  - Choose relevant keywords to drive targeted visitors to your website. Keywords that potential customers would type into a Search Engine.

1a. – use a keyword research tool to assist in your endeavours.

 
2. – Incorporate these keywords and or keyword phrases into your website pages.

2a. – Use them within the Title Tags and heading tags.

2b. – Use the keywords within in the main content of your website.

2c. – Use them where possible within the links, both internal and external.

2d. – Construct paragraphs around your keywords that give them meaning.
3. – Get links to your site, not just any links but good quality, relevant links.

3a. – Assess and clean up your internal link structure. Ensure that the links are operational and relevant.

3b. – get external or backlinks to your website. 
4. – Promote your website at every possible opportunity.

4a. – Provide users with a html sitemap and a Google xml sitemap.

5. – Constantly monitor, adjust, review and revamp your website.

5a. – Be aware of your Traffic Ranking. 

Avoid where possible all links pointing to the 1 page, for example, www.hostingimpact.com if you are talking about SEO, direct them to your SEO page, talking about Web Design, direct them to your web design page etc. In essence, what you are doing is pointing relevant links to the relevant pages or deep linking of your website. That is a far better proposition than having all links directed to one page.

For a range of Quality FREE SEO Tools that you can use all the time please follow this link. Quality Free SEO Tools

We trust you have found the above information of benefit and should you require additional information or assistance please do not hesitate to contact Hosting Impact accordingly. 

Until Next Time … 
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Quality Free SEO Tools

Australian Website Design Professionals

Search Engine Commands are normally utilised by search engine professionals to identify certain key aspects about a particular website they may be currently working on.

Knowing them can really bring information about a specific site and its standing in the World Wide Web to light. Here are some of the more often and most important search engine commands:

Site: – Displays all of the pages indexed by the engine of the site. 

Link: – Locates some links pointing to the site.

Cache: – Shows the last indexed and cached version of a site.

Info: – Displays general info about a site with other search commands. 

Related: – Shows websites that may be semantically or directly related to the site.  

Try them on our own site or alternatively check out the opposition, but above all else, have fun. As with all aspects of SEO, do not rely on just one method or level of research. Check and confirm everything and when you have finished checking and confirming, there is one last thing to do and that is to check and confirm again.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian Search Engine Optimisation Specialists.

Creating Your Website Presence

Getting traffic or visitors to your web site is one thing, however, you need to understand how they got there in the first and without analyzing your traffic, you wont be able to improve upon the overall results.

Within your Hosting Control Panel, there should be a Web Stats Programme such as Webalizer. Web Stat Programmes use various terms to describe web site traffic and it’s visitors.  It is important to understand what the terms are and how they relate to your website in particular.

Visits – these are requests made by a specific user to the website during a specific period of time, normally 24 hours.  Users are identified by cookies, username or hostnames/ip addresses.

Hit – this is a request to the server for a file not a page. Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic files, audio files or javascript files etc, resulting in a number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a hit.

Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes multiple hits to view a page. You may at times see website owners sprouting that they receive 1 000 000 hits to their website, so come and advertrise on our site. Hits are not the same as individual users and a site receiving 1 000 000 hits is certainly not receiving 1 000 000 unique visitors.

Pageview / Impressions – this is the number of times a page is accessed completely.

Unique View – A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour period.

Referrer – A page that links to your site. By looking at your referrers will tell you who’s linked to your website or more importantly what page are they linking to. This is of particular value, because you can determine where your search engine traffic is originating.

User Agent – This refers to the software used to access your site.  Sometimes known as a “browser” or “client”, the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot.

We trust you have found this of benefit and should you require additional information or assistance please do not hesitate to contact us accordingly.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian Small Business Hosting

Australian Website Design Professionals

If you want a quick way of finding Websites or Directories that accept your link/s or offer a reciprocal link option then consider using this within Google, Yahoo or MSN:

“Add Link” “hosting”
“Submit Link” “hosting”

Place “Add Link” “hosting” into Google and instead of “hosting”, place the word that best suits you, your business and website. Or use “Submit Link” “hosting” to find the best results.

This will then return the search results for websites or Directories pertaining to that particular keyword, that accept or offer a reciprocal linking programme.

We have found that the above two tips have helped to reduce the amount of time spent searching for websites that accept our links. You have the added advantage of being able to look at the actual website, prior to giving your information. If you like it and it measures up, then submit.

Trust you have found this information of benefit.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian SEO Specialists