AseoHosting Blog

Year: 2011

  • Is Outsourcing Your Social Media Management Worthwhile

    Is Outsourcing Your Social Media Management Worthwhile

    Many small businesses find getting to grips with social media to be a troublesome aspect of online promotion. They often oversell and alienate potential followers, go overboard with sharing to the point of spamming, or set up a Facebook page or Twitter account, send a tweet or two, and then completely forget about it.

    Social media for businesses is a marketing tool, and as with all marketing tools its use has to be consonant with overarching business goals. But, it’s not as simple as filling a page with products and declaiming how awesome you and your team are.

    In creative writing classes, students are often told that the number one rule is “show, don’t tell”. The same rule can be applied to social media. Brands need to demonstrate their value to potential followers and sharers, rather than declaring it in overwrought PR speak or heavy product promotion. Authenticity is key. (more…)

  • SEO And The Elusive Controlled Experiment

    SEO And The Elusive Controlled Experiment

    Over on Search Engine Land, the perennial discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of using subdomains vs. directories has recently been reignited.
    In his post, 5 Whopping Lies That Keep SEO At Status Quo, Ian Lurie, presents as his 4th most egregious lie:

    “We Can Put The Blog On A Subdomain. It’s Fine.”

    The conversation on this issue has been swinging back and forth for a long time, with people on both extremes and quite a number in the middle who claim that it doesn’t matter at all for SEO. which is also Google’s stated position.

    Micheal Martinez, of the excellent SEO Theory blog responds in the comments that:

    “You and [Rand] Fishkin are completely wrong on the subdomain issue. It’s a shame this kind of misinformation is still being shared on major SEO Websites like Search Engine Land.” (more…)

  • SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of February 2013

    SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of February 2013

    February may be the shortest month of the year, but that doesn’t mean there’s any less of the awesome content marketing, social media, and SEO content that we love to share. So, for your delight and edification, here’s some of the most informative and actionable content that we’ve come across this month.

    SEO

    18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2013

    Let’s get back to basics. Honestly, arguments with ad agency copywriters bother me. This makes me dislike talking about metadata. However, the reality is this. Search and Social are rapidly converging. Therefore, SEOs are left with the technical tasks. Consequently, metadata continues to be our responsibility. The most …

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  • How the Hilltop Algorithm Impacts SEO Rankings

    How the Hilltop Algorithm Impacts SEO Rankings

    When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the Google search engine, their core insight was implemented as the PageRank algorithm. Put simply, PageRank determines where a page should rank in the SERPs based on the PageRank of incoming links from other sites — it’s a recursive algorithm.

    The higher the PageRank, the greater the assumed authority of a particular site. That authority can then combine with a keyword analysis of a page. Then, they use this combination to devise a ranking of pages in response to a search query.

    Thus, PageRank is a proxy measure of authority. Google’s algorithms, in their early days and even now for the most part, couldn’t determine a page’s authority for a specific search query by just looking at the content.

    PageRank significantly improved upon previous methods, as early search engine users remember. However, it wasn’t perfect. This imperfection created opportunities for manipulating the system through various link-building tactics.

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  • Does Keyword Density Matter? The Data Says No.

    Does Keyword Density Matter? The Data Says No.

    Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy. They are the thread that links sites to customers via their search terms. Over the years, people have focused and speculated a huge amount about how precisely to use keywords in on-page content to signal relevance to search engines and to rank well.

    Historically, people have talked about keywords a lot, often focusing on minute details like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”: where to place them in the content, how many words should separate them from the start of a page or heading, the ideal ratio of keywords to other text, and so on.

    Some (not very good) SEOs strive to produce content that contains an exact percentage of keywords, often with the result of producing content that isn’t very readable to humans. And some stick to the old tactic of writing as many pages as possible stuffed with keyword variants and synonyms to cover all possible long-tail searches.

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  • SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of January 2013

    SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of January 2013

    The first month of what promises to be a year of change in the SEO industry is drawing to a close. As usual, we have for you the content that we have found most interesting, informative, and entertaining during January.

    The debate over the value of content marketing seems to be shifting away from straightforward cheer leading or nay saying towards a more nuanced dialogue. We expect that continue as the year progresses, and of course, we’ll continue to share with you the high-points in the inbound marketing landscape.

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  • Java Is A Security Risk: Here’s How To Deactivate It

    Java Is A Security Risk: Here’s How To Deactivate It

    The Problem

    For those who aren’t aware, Java is a programming language that requires installing a piece of software called the Java Runtime Environment on machines that run Java code. Many people use Java to create applications that run in browsers however to do this, browsers need to have a plugin installed.

    Unfortunately, over recent months there have been numerous security problems discovered in Java, some of which will allow malicious third parties to infect machines running Java with malware via the browser.

    Java’s owners, Oracle, have been slow to issue patches to fix the security vulnerabilities, and researchers are discovering new zero-day exploits with alarming frequency.

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  • The Truth About SEO: It’s a Long-Term Commitment

    The Truth About SEO: It’s a Long-Term Commitment

    There exists a misconception among many business owners that SEO is a process that once done is done forever. This can lead businesses to fail to extract the maximum benefit from their online presence. If we truly consider search engine optimization a continuous process, businesses might be losing out.

    Their competitors likely have a more aggressive and nuanced approach. These competitors are refining and adjusting their strategies constantly. Consequently, the businesses with a less dynamic approach risk falling behind.

    We’re going to take a look at three major reasons why business owners should consider SEO as an ongoing part of their marketing and promotion.

    First we should define our terms. In this article we are conceiving of SEO as not just optimizing for keywords and traditional link building. Since the Panda and Penguin updates, high-quality content has become the bedrock of effective SEO strategy. SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand.

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  • What Can Google Wallet For Web Content Do For Bloggers

    What Can Google Wallet For Web Content Do For Bloggers

    Monetizing can be a bit of a puzzler for bloggers. For those who blog for its own sake rather than for SEO or content marketing purposes, turning posts into money generally relies on an advertising model.

    Advertising is how most commercially viable blogs fund themselves. Using AdSense, or some other third party advertising provider, they display advertising and hope to get a sufficient amount of clicks to generate a decent revenue.

    Unfortunately click-through rates are pretty low, often as few as 1 in a 1000 visitors click, which means that even a very popular blog with visitors in the hundreds of thousands can fail to make a livable income from their work. (more…)

  • Backup Your WordPress Site to Amazon S3: The Ultimate Safety Net

    Backup Your WordPress Site to Amazon S3: The Ultimate Safety Net

    There’s nothing more heartbreaking for a website owner than having put dozens or hundreds of hours of work into perfecting their WordPress site, only to have it trashed by hackers, hardware failure, or a simple administrative mistake.

    WordPress is enormously popular, with good reason, but as with any complex software it’s susceptible to malicious individuals and user errors. Always back up your WordPress database and other assets so you can easily restore your site if disaster strikes. By reinstalling and importing your data, you can quickly return to the state your site was in before any issues occurred.

    Most decent hosting companies will keep a backup for you, but as the saying goes, if your data doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist at all. Having a backup available that you fully control can be very useful.

    There are many services and extensions that will help you with backing-up, but we’re going to take a look at how to back up to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

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