I was asked recently to provide an example of how potentially powerful Blogs are. Let me clarify that, how potentially powerful, well written and informative blogs can be.

The first thing I do when writing a Blog or Post, is identify and name the Title of the Post. In this case, I have selected Belmont Home Loans as the Title. I do not have any Home Lending experience, nor am I affiliated with any Home Lenders, nor do I make any representation regarding any product, service, lender or planner. This post is written purely to showcase our skills, or lack of skills in writing effective posts. 

I then, provide a brief background of the Title eg: Belmont is located on the shores of Lake Macquarie New South Wales, approximately 1 hour north of Sydney and there are approximately 25 000 people living within the area.

Now we dive right into the heart of the subject. Belmont Home Loans. From here you would discuss the various types of Loans or Mortgages that are currently available for people living within Belmont, New South Wales. Read the rest of this entry »

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.

The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?

When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is achieved by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The generally accepted standard for keyword density on a website is between 3% and 5%,. This is  believed to be the  most acceptable number to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

See You in the Search Engines

Steve
Hosting Impact

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

Real Time Results on The Power Of Blogs. Hosting Impact uploaded a specific blog yesterday and less than 24 hours later that particular blog was currently number 2 out of 2.8 million results Australia wide. Read the rest of this entry »

On The Couch with Hosting Impact  – 4 Steps To Make Money Online – The Power Of The Blog

A Business Associate and myself were discussing various things last night, as we do and it never ceases to amaze me, the amount of subjects we touch upon nor the solutions to some of these problems. Although, to be honest with you, I can not see some of our suggestions being accepted and approved by the wider population…hee hee

One of the more heated subjects was “How To Make Money Online” and to cut a very long story short, we finally nutted it down to the following:

1. Create Your Website, Product or Something

2. Generating Income – Affiliate Programs, Google Adsense, Your Own Product

3. Marketing / Promotion – If people don’t know where you are, you ain’t selling squat.

4. Profit – It must be profitable

WATCH THE YOU TUBE VIDEO HERE Read the rest of this entry »

Web Hosting

Every enterprise or website business owner wants to increase their business in one way or the other. With the onslaught of the internet entering our world, ecommerce has now flourished and will continue to do so. Traditional brick and mortar businesses are now investing money into their websites to sell and promote their stock and or services. This investment is all aimed at increasing their brand awareness amongst their customers. In fact, small businesses can now compete effectively and efficently against the big corporations and more importantly get their message out.

It is one thing to have a good website that is selling your widgets, however, you need a reliable web hosting comany to ensure that your website is live on the internet. There are literally thousands of web hosting providers that are available in the market today.

The question remains  of how to choose a good web hosting provider for your website. Read the rest of this entry »

SEO Professionals to assist you in improving your Website Rankings

A number of our Hosting Customers have contacted us of late regarding emails they have received from at least two companies apparently located in China and Hong Kong, urging Our Hosting Customers to register their exisitng Domains into the Asian equivilent. We advised our customers, not to respond to the emails and under any circumstances, do not click on any of the links.

At the same time auDA had also received questions from concerned Domain Name owners and as a result, auDA sent the following email to Domain Name Registrants,  which we include in it’s entirety:

Misleading unsolicited emails from Asian domain name companies

30/Apr/2009

auDA is aware that at least two companies apparently based in China and Hong Kong have been sending unsolicited emails to people with .au domain names, attempting to mislead them into registering their name in a number of Asian domain spaces.

Examples include: Read the rest of this entry »

SEO Professionals to assist you in improving your Website Rankings

We often get asked what are the best things to do to get a higher ranking on Google, Yahoo or MSN for that fact.  We don’t believe that there is just 1 thing to do to achieve a higher ranking, but a combination of a lot of little things.

The Search Engines use a complex range of algorithms to achieve the findings that they have and rightly so, they are very protective and cautious in regards to the integrity of those findings and the algorithms that are used. With that in mind, it would be then fair to suggest that they have the right to constantly change, alter, amend or rectify the code at any given time, to prevent spammers and people with unethical motives from dominating the search results.

In our experience, we have found that by utilising the guidelines, albeit very loose, and making your website, a website of worth and value, will over time ensure you of the high rankings you desperately seek. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »