Looking to build a website for your business? Good call. These days, every business needs an established digital presence to succeed.
Thing is, you’re not a web design expert, nor are you a web developer. You can probably use WordPress or a similar site-builder with a bit of effort, but that may still require time you don’t have. What you need is a webmaster.
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“The majority of feedback from readers is that they block because of the nuisance of ads,” Destructoid founder Niero Gonzalez told Forbes in 2013, after finding out that over half of his visitors used ad-blocking software.
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That’s no longer the case. Google updates its algorithms. Each update makes search smarter. It understands what users like. Social media drives much web traffic. People share interesting pages. They share on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter.
Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a paradigm shift in SEO. Search algorithms still matter. But now, focus on users. Don’t just chase tactics. If people dislike your site, it won’t rank well.
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WordPress exploded onto the scene in 2003 and quickly established itself as one of the best content management systems in the world. It’s easy to see why. It offers one of the most user-friendly interfaces around and equips users with excellent features and functionality, both free and paid.. Because of this immense popularity, there exists a staggering amount of plugins with which writers can optimize their blogs.
I (and many others) love that the platform builds in much of the SEO into the blog design. Even an SEO newbie can properly optimize their blog posts using a tool such as All-In-One SEO.
However, proper optimization isn’t easy. You must take the necessary steps to write SEO-friendly posts to fully use the platform’s potential.
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Guest posting and corporate blogging have become an essential part of SEO and inbound marketing. If you’ve not written blog posts regularly, it can seem like a straightforward exercise, but when you’re looking at a blank page and a pile of notes,
it’s not quite so simple to pull it together into a effective SEO package that is maximally sharable and readable for the intended audience.
We will look at actionable tips. These tips and techniques will help structure a blog post. This will help marketers and SEOs create great content. We’ll learn from journalists. They excel at conveying information clearly and briefly. However, we will adapt their advice. This will make it more useful for SEOs and marketers in general.
We’re going to assume that you’re on top of the research, have your market personas in order, and know what you want to say, but just need a little help organizing and structuring it on the page.
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Web hosting can range in cost from free to pennies a month to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. If you’re contemplating setting up a website, you may wonder exactly what you get for your money.
The services that web hosting companies offer vary, but all of them share a basic set of costs that enable them to get your site up and running on the net. We’re going to have a look at those costs and think about how free web hosting and very cheap web hosting companies pay for them.
For a company to offer web hosting, they need servers. Servers are usually high-power computers that are capable of processing lots of data and delivering it to web clients. Your average home computer can do much the same thing at a less efficient level, but hosting companies need specialist hardware that has lots of RAM, disk space, and processing power.
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A little over a year after its introduction, the Penguin algorithm was given a major update. As many have discovered, Penguin has had sweeping effects on the way Google deals with sites it considers to be trying to game the system with over-optimization.
Since Penguin first hit the servers, there have been two significant updates. However, both were largely tweaks or minor data refreshes. Penguin 4 introduces a major update to the core algorithm and delves much deeper into sites to detect spammy tactics.
If version numbers confuse you, remember this: Google revised the Penguin spam program three times. They labeled this update Penguin 4. However, they call it Penguin 2.0 because it’s the first major algorithm revision.
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Capturing real-time analytics is all the rage at the moment. Knowing exactly what’s going on at every moment is deemed an important part of site management.If you often spend hours staring at Google Analytics, watching your site visitor numbers rise and fall, you may be overstressing yourself. Too much information can be just as harmful as too little. However, there’s good news. Google has recently released a raft of improvements to its real-time features.
The productivity killing aspects of real-time data aside, it can, on occasion, be very useful to track exactly what’s happening on a site at a particular moment, rather than relying on aggregate data where useful information often falls between the cracks of statistical agglomeration. (more…)
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.
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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