Posts Tagged ‘website visitors’

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indexes.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

See You In the Search Engines

Steve
Hosting Impact

Google Analytics and monitoring your website statistics

It never ceases to amaze us how, when, where and why our website visitors find us. We constantly track, monitor and record all avenues and are constantly surprised yet delighted on how they do find us and in particular our Sub Domain pages.

One of the many monitoring tools that we use is Google Analytics. We have heard all of the conspriacy stories about Google, however, love them or hate them, they do provide outstanding data about your website. Google understands the importance of monitoring and benchmarking your website and your website visitors and they do not leave anything to chance, so would should you.

A brief sample on some of the keywords and or phrases used to locate Our Sub Domain Pages: Read the rest of this entry »

Free SEO Tools to assist you in improving your website

Congratulations, you took the first step, in building your website and promoting your products and services. Where are your website visitors and more importantly, where are the sales. It has often been said that first
impressions are the most important, so it is best to make the best impression that you can, because there won’t be a second one.

It is estimated that you have approximately 45 seconds to make a good first impression. Your website visitors will judge your site in that short space of time. They will judge it on colour, load time, layout and professionalism.

Prior to unleashing your website onto the unsuspecting masses, ask for unbiased, brutally honest opinions from family, friends and business associates. Listen to their feedback, step aside and look at it from a customers point of view.

Does it pass the test of professionalism? Does it truly represent you, your business, your products and services in a professional light. Are your graphics of a high quality ? Is the information written in such a way that is easy to understand. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Website Design Professionals

Video blogging or VLOGS has a lot of distinct advantages over text-based blogging, and it is little wonder that this new technology is catching on all over the internet. Video blogs or VLOGS very effectively grab the attention of your website visitors, and people are much more likely to become excited about the dynamic content of a video blog than they are likely to find a written posting very thrilling. The more enthusiastic viewers are about a site, the quicker the word of mouth spreads, and in a perfect world, this then equates to more traffic. Additionally, with Video Blogs or VLOGS, you are personalising your brand as well and if your website visitor can relate to you and your image, you have then created trust with your potential customer. They then have a perception of you, your company and your product, based purely on your VLOG.

In our situation, we were unable to secure Brad Pitt for the role, so you are stuck with me and my droning voice, but that is not the point. The point is that the information that we are presenting is for the benefit of our website visitors and we trust that they find the information of assistance. Please follow this link.

http://www.hostingimpact.com/blog/2008/10/on-the-couch-with-hosting-impact/ 

Each week we will be presenting “On The Couch” with Hosting Impact in an endeavour to raise the awareness of our website visitors and also to answer viewer questions. Please feel free to email us with questions you would like answered. Anything ranging from, SEO Techniques, Web Design to Hosting. Send all requests to live@hostingimpact.com 

Hosting Impact - Support Desk

Of course, on the other side of the coin, there are plenty of disadvantages to video blogging as well. Hosting a v-blog can require quite a bit of server space, which can make it difficult to get started. It takes more time to process and upload a video file than it does to dash off a quick bit of text, which means that running and updating a video blog may take some work. In addition, web surfers sometimes grow frustrated with the slow loading times of the files on many video blogs. Whether you opt for a video blog or not depends on what kind of subject matter you want to cover, and how much time you can devote to video blogging. Before you decide to pursue a video blog, consider if there is an easier way for you to get your message across. 

We trust you have found this information of benefit and we look forward to answering your questions.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian Search Engine Optimisation Specialists

Creating Your Website Presence

There is no doubt whatsoever that a Wordpress blog, hosted on your own domain and web hosting account should be the way that you go when you create your business blog, in our humble opinion.

As you will read throughout this blog, the interactive element of Web 2.0 does present a massive range of new and exciting opportunities for promoting your site or blog. 

But, that being so, you must have a blog site that can take full advantage of those opportunities.

In other words, if you are generating traffic from what we might call Web 2.0 activities, then you must send that traffic to a site that the visitors will feel comfortable with, and will hopefully like enough to add to their bookmarks folder.

If website visitors find your content through a Web 2.0 related resource, and then end up on a dull and somewhat lifeless hosted blog then your credibility and their stay on your website or blog are both going to be extremely short lived!

You must appreciate that you do not only want people to visit your blog or site but you also want them to visit, stay and return often, You need them to interact with your site in some way, with the aim of them returning time after time.

Eventually, of course, you want them to become your customer as well, but they will not do any of these things if they land on a boring, lifeless blog or website the very first time that they visit.

We believe that using Wordpress on your own hosted domain is the simplest and quickest way of getting a superbly interactive blog set up that is fully in-tune with the requirements of all the traffic (both Webs 2.0 and 1.0 ‘styles’) that this blog will teach you to generate.

The Wordpress that you have just installed on your domain name is a superbly flexible system, but it is far from perfect.

There are a 1001 things that Wordprss cannot or does not do ‘straight out of the box’, but what Wordpress does have is immense flexibility and malleability.

So, Wordpress users all over the world have created hundreds of plug-ins and widgets for Wordpress that you can install into the admin area of your blog (usually free) to add a huge amount of additional usability to your blog.

Wordpress has plugged itself into the open source communities’ ability to create any number of widgets or plug-ins that can massively enhance all of your marketing and conversion efforts, and there is simply no other system around with this level of increased functionality.

In other words, everything that you could ever want to change, alter or enhance about your blog site can be done by installing the correct plug-in or widget.

That is not to say that that you would ever use or utilise all of them, because you wouldnt, however, you can certainly use the ones that would benefit your goals or objectives.

In the event that you would like to install Wordpress on your Domain and require assistance, please contact Hosting Impact Blog Installation.

Long Live Open Source.
 
We trust you have enjoyed this update and please feel free to contact us for additional information.

 
Until Next Time…

Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian Search Engine Optimization Specialists