Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/211-dominant-search-engine-optimiation-practices-for-2018

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is ever changing and have proved to be far more beneficial than advertising and other online marketing methods. With Google rolling out more frequent and complex updates, SEO will significantly shape the future of many companies. Google is constantly pursuing a better search experience. Focusing more on user experiences. The result had been the changes to how they index and rank pages, resulting in changes to SEO.

It is likely that in 2018 and beyond, new tips and SEO practices will start emerging. In this post, we shall look at some of the emerging SEO Trends expected 2018 and beyond.

Before we proceed to examine the upcoming SEO trends for 2018 and beyond, let us delve briefly into some background understanding of SEO.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/810/Automatic-Update-in-WordPress.html



WordPress will by default update itself when a security or minor release is available. For major releases, you have to run the update yourself. Plugins and themes also require manual updates. It is important especially for security reasons to keep your WordPress site updated. So also it is necessary to keep up with the latest version of plugins and themes installed on your website. You need to install updates for themes and plugins to get new features and bug fixes.

However, you may have noticed that some of them are updated more frequently than others. A lot of popular plugins are updated almost weekly

Two Different Update Types

Functional Updates

This type of update adds features and options to the WordPress core. It involves the major core updates. Functional updates are first offered as a beta and then the release version is made available.

Security Updates

This update type contains security or minor fixes that are set out to repair a vulnerability or bug in the WordPress core.

WordPress Automatic Updates

For some WordPress users, it is a bit disturbing, annoying and time consuming to always check up available updates regularly to be in tune with latest and up-to-date releases. They wish updates could be automated. But applying automatic updates to all plugins, themes and WordPress core may not always be a wise decision. Let's look at the pros and cons.

The benefits of automatic updates are glaring from the foregoing. Besides keeping you secure with the latest version of software, it save you times especially when you have to manage multiple websites.

Automatic updates also have its downside. Basically, if you fall into one of the following groups, you may not want to allow automatic updates:

1. You have made customizations to the core of WordPress website. Any automatic updates to those core files will override and erase those customizations.

2. If you run third party (non-official WordPress.or) themes/plugins on your website. You wouldn't want to run the risk of your site updating beyond the compatibility of your theme and plugins. That will break up your site and can lead to serious security breach. It can even bring down your entire website.

It will be a better option to setup WordPress to automatically install updates for WordPress core, trusted plugins, and themes.

Let's see how you can take total control of WordPress and minimize the time spent on installing updates.

Setting up Easy Updates Manager

First thing you need to do is to install and activate the Easy Updates Manager plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Dashboard; Updates Options page to set up the plugin.

Manage WordPress updates page

The plugin's settings page is divided into different tabs. You will land on the Dashboard tab which has three columns and two rows.

This page provides you quick access to turn off updates for WordPress core, plugins, themes, translations, etc. The default settings here are recommended for all WordPress site owners.

We strongly recommend not to turn off updates for WordPress core, plugins, or themes. It will seriously compromise your site's security and health.

Next, click on the General tab in plugin settings. This page provides you access to Enable or Disable WordPress updates globally on your site.

Global update settings

Setting Up Automatic Updates for WordPress, Plugins, and Themes. Easy Updates Manager allow you to quickly enable automatic updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes.

Go to the plugin's settings page and click on General tab. After that scroll down to the automatic updates section.

Managing auto updates

Here you can quickly turn on automatic updates for Core, plugins, or themes. Simply click on enable and then click on save changes button to store your settings.

This plugin also allows you to selectively turn on automatic updates for some plugins or themes. If you would like to selectively turn on automatic updates, then click on Select Individually next to the Automatic Plugin Updates option.

Set Automatic Updates for Select Plugins and Themes

If you selected to individually enable automatic updates for few plugins, then you need to switch to the plugins tab under plugin settings.

Enable automatic updates for individual plugins

Here you will see a list of all plugins installed on your WordPress website. Below each plugin, you will find a link to enable automatic updates for that plugin.

Switch to the Themes tab, and you will see a list of themes installed on your site.

Select which themes to automatically update

Simply click on enable automatic updates for themes that you want to be automatically updated.

How to Rollback to a Previous Version of Plugin or Theme After Update

Plugin or theme incompatibilities is the major reason why some users are not willing to run automatic updates. Even though most good developers thoroughly test their plugins, there can still be bugs that can cause your site to break. It is suggested that you look up plugin reviews before you make a choice.

The first step you should take to protect your website is to install a WordPress backup solution.

However, restoring your WordPress site from a backup can be a lot of work. If you know what plugin or theme update caused the problem, then it would be easier to just rollback the update.

Here is how you can easily rollback plugin or theme updates.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Rollback plugin.

Upon activation, go back to the plugins page on your WordPress site. You will notice a new Rollback option below each plugin installed on your site.

Rollback plugin updates

Clicking on Rollback will allow you to rollback your plugin to any previous version you want. It can also rollback theme updates

Hope this was helpful. Please let us have your comments.

Read fug ppost at https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips/210-a-review-of-4-popular-joomla-seo-extensions

Joomla is the second most popular content management system (CMS) after WordPress, used for website development. It is robust, very flexible, secured and can be used to build websites ranging from the simplest to very complex websites. Joomla also has a large community of developers who support its users with components, plugins and modules. These three are simply called extensions and actually define the look and feel, the usability and functionality of a Joomla website.

Like other web-building software, Joomla is designed to be search engine friendly. It has its in-built Search Engine Friendly (SEF) capability, you have the option to turn on Search Engine Friendly URLs and can choose to add website branding or not. But beyond the in-built Joomla SEO capability, there are plugins which can boost Joomla's capacity to feature a website prominently on search engines. This post will look at five of those plugins, there pros and cons. They are actually applications that you cannot do without if you are to do well with Joomla in the highly competitive world of the internet.

Also read: Tested Tips To Increase Joomla Website Loading Speed

What is SEO

We will adopt the definition of Rand Fishkin which serves our purpose quite aptly. He defined Search engine optimization (SEO) as "the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic that you earn through the organic results in search engines".

This definition underscores three components: Quality of traffic, quantity of traffic and organic results. Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google search engine results presents you as a resource for web hosting when you are actually only involved on website hosting and not providing any learning resources, you will find that you get the traffic but they won’t be quality traffic. It is better to attract traffic who are interested in products that you offer.

Quantity of traffic. Having the right interests click your link from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Organic results. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for. These come from several sources including links and referrals.

Also read: How to Set Up Your Personal Blog With Joomla

Now that you know what SEO means, you probably have an idea on why websites should be properly optimized. Let's look at some of the gains of SEO and why it should be taken seriously.

Why is SEO important

In January 2016, I held a discussion with a the CEO and developer who manages a large company website. Neither he nor his employer believed in the power of SERPs and how it can turn round the business fortunes. Their focus was on developing modules and functionalities and leaving out a key aspect as SEO. SEO is important and will remain so. According to Google, 94% of all clicks accounts for organic search results and 90% of users never look beyond first page of Google.

Also read: How to Prevent Spam on Your Joomla Website

There are several reasons why you should continue to invest in SEO. We will take a look at some of them in this post.

1. It still works - Recent updates to the search engine algorithms have reduced the impact of old fashioned search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, like using keywords and link exchanges, notwithstanding, SEO still works and makes a huge difference. Meta data, including the title and headings affect rankings. Although Google claims that descriptions do not affect rankings, the fact that they still appear in search results is an indication that they still matter.

These statistics will tell you how much search engine results page (SERP) do matter today.

93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
90+% of searches are done on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, with Google getting 65-70% of all searches.
The first 5 listings on page 1 of search engine results is the hot zone - about 95% of searchers click in this area ONLY as it's considered the most relevant and trusted of all results. If you're not in the top 5, your listing is unlikely to get clicked.
75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results - if they don't find what they want there, they refine their search and try again.

Also read: Recommended Security Checks For Your Joomla Website

SEO techniques will continue to work, at least, it is not expected to stop working soon. Based on the way search engines appear to be evolving, it is not likely that SEO will cease to be effective any time in the foreseeable future.

2. It is cost-effective - When compared to the costs of other forms of online marketing such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, or purchasing leads for an email marketing program, SEO provides fairly good ROI.

3. Search engines generates greater market share - More customers now check online reviews prior to making a purchase, and this number is only expected to increase. It is estimated that between 70-80% of customers check online reviews before a purchase. It may not take so long before virtually everyone will be searching for products and services online.

3. Your competitors are doing it - Given that search engines generate more traffic than advertising, companies are competing for search engine positions and make continuous efforts to gain ranking positions. If your SEO efforts do not make you gain an improved position, then you are losing ground to a competitor. You can't let your competitors outsmart you and so you've got to make efforts to gain ranking positions.

4. SEO brings credibility to your business - When people make searches and find your business withing the top 10, first page, it is definitely a sign that Google is telling the customer to check out your page. That gives some credibility to your business. You may not know that ranking high is like getting an endorsement from Google but that is what you actually get with doing your SEO rightly and gaining ranks.

5. SEO brings business visibility and branding - People conduct searches not just once, find what they need and that is it. No! You will rather find that they refine their search terms, search over and over. Each of the results places the websites on their mind and if your website features prominently in the search outcomes, you will find that you will be gaining a higher level of mindshare. The implication of this is that if you can continually show in all these search results, you will continue to gain more and more mindshare with each potential customer. Chances are that they will eventually click through to your website, and since you are continually displayed in all their search results, they will trust you to some extent. That registers your brand as trusted and gives you good business through good visibility in the search engine result pages.

Also read: Web Hosting Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Indispensable Joomla SEO Plugins

Extension Overrides Joomla! core files which can break functionality Basic URL rewriting, no plugin obligation Generating URLs from backend automatically Static XML sitemap file Dynamic XML sitemap link Configurable internal links Social Bookmarks Unicode (UTF- URLs website
AceSEF No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Joomace
ArtioSEF No Yes No No No Yes - Yes Artio
SEFAdvance Yes No No No No No - Yes Sakic
sh404SEF Yes No No No No - - No SH04SEF


Overall, all five plugin do have great features and will serve the basic purpose of improving your site SEO. For any Joomla website that is serious about SEO, it has to use any one. They are great and I have seen them used on numerous websites particularly sh404SEF and AceSEF. I have used AceSEF quite often and on nearly all the Joomla websites I have developed.

Enhance your search engine performance in simple steps https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/207-enhance-your-search-engine-performance-in-simple-steps

Thanks for the lead. We will put that tutorial together.

cowleg:
Please teach how to install premium theme and the customization

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/205-a-step-by-step-guide-on-how-to-create-a-wordpress-blog

WordPress is a great and free publishing platform that can be used to create blog and its use had been extended to corporate websites and applications like social networking, real estate management and a lot of other uses.

WordPress is easy to use, and a fast and flexible script. It comes with some good features which makes user experience pleasant. With WordPress you can easily:

Publish and edit posts
Sort articles in categories
Search within your content
Manage users access
Change your website themes
and more .......

For you to automatically create your WordPress blog using the 1-click install tool in cPanel, this tutorial will guide you effectively on what you need to do to get your blog running. Let us get started with the required steps:

Domain name
Web hosting account
Blogging software

Step 1: Choose a right domain name for your Blog&

A domain name is essentially your web address that people will use to find your blog on the internet. With recent development on the internet, your domain name should reflect the niche you intend to blog for or the particular area you want to focus on in your blog posts. For example, ogoninews.com - one will expect that such blog will dwell mainly on Ogoni events and news stories.

There are few things to keep in mind before you rush out and purchase a domain name.

1. Make sure that there will be no legal problems with the domain name you choose. Ensure you do not choose a domain name that will later be placed under restrictions.

2: Register a Domain Name: Once you have chosen the domain name you want, it's time to get it registered with a reliable domain name registrar. Some web hosting companies offer free domain registration for every web hosting order. You will need to check if your hosting company can also provide the domain registration service.

To order web hosting and domain registration service with Todhost follow these steps:

1. Go to todhost

2. From the homepage, choose your preferred web hosting plan. You can click on the web hosting menu to view the detailed features of all web hosting plans to be able to know which plan will best suit your need.
3. Enter your domain name in the box after you click "get started and you will be able to know if it is available for registration. You will not be able to proceed with the new domain registration option except the domain is available.
4. Choose the duration for which you want the hosting. It could be for 1 year, 2 years or more.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions and complete your web hosting order.
6. Complete the form required for your billing information.
7. Proceed to complete your order and may applicable payments. Once you pay for your web hosting order, your account will be created for you almost immediately. Once your account is created, you will receive an email titled: new account information; which will contain details of your account including username and password for your cPanel account. With those details, you will be able to login to control panel and install WordPress.

Now that you have your domain name and hosting account, the next step is to install WordPress. You will find the 1-click install under the software section of your website. On Todhost, it is listed under QuickInstall. Remember, this will be under the software section in cPanel. You can also find this tool under Softaculous.

WordPress is a software that helps you create and manage your own blog or website.

To install WordPress with QuickInstall, follow the steps below.

1. In your cPanel, click on the QuickInstall or Softaculous under the software section of your website.

2. Click the Install button to begin the installation process.

3. Choose the domain you want to install WordPress on (you can leave the directory field blank if you want to install in the root folder or enter the directory name to install in a sub-directory or folder). I always prefer to use the www version of domain.

4. Continue with the install and follow the on-screen instructions. Watch your WordPress install successfully and the admin details sent to the email address you entered as you performed the installation.

These login information will be used to login to the backend of your WordPress blog. So it's a good idea to save these details somewhere safe. You will also receive an email with your login information as soon as the installation is complete.

Congrats, you can now access your WordPress dashboard by going to yourdomain.com/wp-admin in your browser.

What's next?

Wait, you're not yet ready to start working on content. There are still some checklist of things you need to do after installing WordPress to improve the user experience and the SEO of your website or blog.

If you have any questions with this process, feel free to leave a comment below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/204-a-guide-to-manage-google-algorithm-changes

The internet has changed significantly and so have the signals that determine search engine ranks. We recently made changes to our website title. Some two years ago, such change would have affected our search engine ranks but today, it does not really cause any ranking gain. The fact is that titles are now expected to be more related to page content and not just built around keywords.

We've got to change our strategy and do so very fast following emerging guidelines and indicators that the recent changes to Google's algorithm are pointing us to. So be careful with tweaking critical content like page title, description, main menu titles, other menu titles and description. They add up to how Google accesses your website friendliness and usability.

An algorithm change can create a major upset and force a radical change to how pages and content are constructed. That's the dynamism of the internet and sets us on the path to thread cautiously. We must keep in mind that changes to the search engine algorithm is continuous. One thing that seems constant is the focus to improve user experience. If you keep your content development efforts on improving user benefits, you are not likely to get a penalty even with future update to the search engine algorithm.

You may be struggling to recover from a past penalty and drop in ranking. We have once suffered a heavy rank loss in Google search engine. Dropping from top 5 position and going down to 32 for a very relevant keyword.. That was because we frequently fiddled with metatags at a time it played very important roles and hoped that those changes will force Google to re-access our page and push it up. It worked but when the penalty came, it was also huge. That was the lesson that got us to know that there can be penalties for some things. We began to learn about the best and acceptable practices and have since moved up steadily. Slow and steady is the way to go. Never be in a hurry, stick to the rules and work with the advice of reputable SEOs, that will bring you eventually to a winning position.

In this article, you'll find very useful guidelines that will help you avoid a penalty and also help your recovery if you are suffering a Google penalty. The focus of this writing is on Google from 2015. We shall be looking at the last four big algorithm updates from Google and lay out a strategy for dealing with the damage.

Let's look at them one after the other.

1. RankBrain, 2015
RankBrain signaled the introduction of advanced machine learning into the search algorithm. This algorithm uses advanced features of artificial intelligence, working with data from users, trends, queries, and other input sources to understand websites.

Google have clearly made known, the impact of this change and how it is used to process a very large portion of the search volume it receives.

RankBrain had been around for a while and now dictates the results of the search algorithm. The impact of RankBrain is very significant and is reported to be impacting about 15% of all queries. This is a huge figure. Keep in mind that a previous change (Panda 4.0, May 2014) affected only 7.5% of English-language queries.

What Impact Did RankBrain Have

Though very massive, RankBrain's SEO collateral damage has been pretty low. The algorithm isn't trying to regulate the ranking of existing websites, rather, it is focused on interpreting user queries. The biggest impact of the algorithm change is an upside for users. Users who input ambiguous or more natural human language queries can expect to get more relevant results.

How to Repair a Damage from the Algorithm Change
You may or may not have had any damage from RankBrain. Whichever may be the case, these suggestions are good to keep you on the advantageous position and to help a speedy recovery from a hit if there be any. You accomplish this by:

Creating the best user experience possible. Make your website easy for user navigation and for them to find answers to their querries.
Post content that provides answers to the questions your users ask.
Deemphasize the stress over keywords. Not bothering to channel your content to focus on target keywords but rather write for user benefits is a better practice. Just be natural and try to solve problems.

2. Panda 4.2, July 17, 2015
This was another major algorithymic change. Relatively an old news, it is still worthy to lay some emphasis and talk about how to recover from any penalties that may have arisen from its updates. According to MOZ, Panda 4.1 is the 28th of the Panda updates. Some of the negative effects Panda 4.1 (which Search Engine Land calls Panda 4.2) were still being felt as recently as October 2015, two months after it was implemented.

To be technically accurate, Panda updates are actually a refresh. The algorithm doesn't change as much as it processes new information, learns from it, and makes adjustments. Essentially, the Panda algorithm is a quality factor. It is basically designed to lower the rank of sites with low quality or thin content, and upgrade the ranking of sites that have strong, authoritative, longer form content.

What Effects Did It Have?
Panda 4.1 affected around 3% of queries. Sites that escaped previous Panda updates were most likely hit by this update. But there was a good side of it. If you have been hit by a previous Panda update and you made improvements, you most likely got an upgrade.

How to Repair a Panda Damage
If you still suffer from a Panda penalty, then here's how to make improvements:

Make your content longer. Short-form content doesn't rank well.
Create a strong page title that matches the content on the page.
Solve a real problem with your content. Do not just write and fill up pages with words.
Improve on your spelling and grammar.
Remove or reduce the number of adverts on the page.
Check to make sure your links are working properly.
Create a strong meta-description to encourage click-through.

3. The Quality Update, May 2015

Google's Quality Update was unexpected as Google actually modified their core algorithm to adjust how it processes quality signals. In other words, Google was probably shifting some of the 200-or-so ranking factors that they use to rank websites.

This update had some significant impact on content-heavy sites. The How to articles were the worst victims like those found on Answers.com, Hubpages, and WikiHow. Each of those sites was affected by the algorithmic update. This update was similar to Panda because it focused on content. However, there were noticeable performance differences. There seemed to be a high degree of intuitiveness in the way that Google assessed the quality of the sites and pages that were affected.

How to Recover from a damage induced by the Google Quality Update

Google appear to be more interested in improving user quality rather than reducing spammy content. The Quality Update is meant to increase the quality of searches by bringing long-form content to the forefront. If an article title suggests that it will explain how to do something, then Google wants to make sure that the article has authority, validity, and a thorough explanation; it wants to ensure that the article provides what it claims.

The recommendation here is that you ensure that your content is authoritative, comprehensive, and detailed.

4. Mobilegeddon, April 21, 2015

Google's comment on this update which was simply a mobile-friendly update puts it like this:
"As we noted earlier this year, today's the day we begin globally rolling out our mobile-friendly update. Were boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling".

To check if your website is mobile friendly, use the Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool

The mobile-friendly update made the biggest headlines but did not turn out to be so destructive. It however gave a strong signal and had some impact for mobile users which has increasingly become a huge community.

It had some limitations also:

1. It only affects search on mobile devices.

2 It applies to individual pages, not to entire sites.

How to Repair a Damage from this Update

If you don&' yet have a responsive or mobile-friendly site, it's time to change. You can test the mobile performance of individual pages by using Google's mobile-friendly test.

Conclusion

Google's algorithm updates are basically driven by the need to improve user experience on the web. Working to ensure that your visitors are happy when they visit your site through the quality of content they read is a sure way to get the thumbs-up in the eyes of Google.

Do you have something to contribute or share on this issue? Let's know.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/203-website-cloaking-what-the-search-engines-allow-and-disallow

According to Google cloaking is when "a website returns altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, a human reading the site would see some different content or information than the Googlebot or other search engine robot reading the site.

The reason people implement cloaking is to improve their search engine ranking by misleading the search engine robot into thinking the content on the page is different than what it really is. While cloaking does not necessarily turn people away from your website, it can be more damaging as search engines frown seriously at it. Some kind of lying to the search engines and given them a misleading representation.

How Search Engines Respond to Cloaking

Most search engines will wield a very heavy penalty on any website found to be engaged in cloaking. Most search engines will immediately delete and sometimes blacklist a site that is discovered to be cloaking. They do this because cloaking is usually intended to completely fool or manipulate; the search engine's algorithms and programming that determine what makes a site rank high or low in that engine.

If the page that the customer sees is different from the page that the search engine bot sees, then the search engine cannot do its job. So they ban sites that use cloaking strategies in an attempt to gain ranking.

Personalization and Cloaking

The key question here is to determine if website personalization amounts to Cloaking.

New and advanced websites display specialized content which depends on various factors and determined by the customers themselves. For example, on About, if you haven't visited the site in several months, you might get different content displayed in the navigation menus than you would if you regularly visited the site. Other sites use a technique called "Geo-IP which determines your location based on the IP address with which you are accessing the site or with which you have logged in and displays ads or weather information relevant to your part of the world or country.

Some argue in favour of this practice as cloaking positing that this kind of personalization displays and delivers different to a customer than what is delivered to the search engine robot. But the robot receives the same type of content as the customer, just personalized (if you will) to that robot's locale or profile on the system.

Common Forms of Cloaking?

What are some common Cloaking Practices?

Webmasters use a combination of techniques to present different information to users and search engine crawlers. We will look at these practices.

1. Invisible or Hidden text

Using this approach, webmasters can stuff keywords, overwriting content in a way that is invisible or hidden to the users. In most cases, webmasters use text color to keep content away from users but search engines crawl and detect the content. For example, if a text is written in white color and displayed on a white background, the human eyes cannot see it but search engines do. Such texts can be used to stuff keywords into web page content without the knowledge of human users.

2. Flash Based Websites

The use of flash, as you may know, is today not a recommended technique to display content as far as SEO is concerned. Notwithstanding, lots of websites are still built on flash. Some of the websites cannot be converted into something better and what the owners do is that in order to feed search engines with content from the websites, they write content rich web pages and provide them to search engine crawlers  and flash pages to visitors.

3. E-mail Cloaking

In e-mail distribution, cloaking is the act of masking the name and address of the sender so that the recipient does not know who sent the e-mail.

4. HTML Rich Websites

Good SEO practice recommends having TEXT to HTML ratio as high as possible. In other words, your web page should have more text (content) as compared to your HTML tags. But if anyone is writing short articles or posts, your text to HTML ratio will be very low. To avoid redesigning a website, some webmasters choose cloaking to meet SEO guidelines

5. Image Gallery Websites

Because web crawlers do not scan images, websites with Image gallery websites with more images than the actual content on their pages try to use cloaking to get top placement for relevant keywords.

Can There be Acceptable Cloaking Practices

Some practices are allowed despite presenting different content to search engines and users. Some content delivery methods now acceptable to Google that might have once been considered cloaking include:

Geo-IP Location
In Geo-IP location cloaking, content is presented to different users based on their location. If you take the case of Google itself, you will find that if you do a search for SEO from your location (country), it will present a different result from when you do the same search from another country. This is not considered as bad cloaking. It is done to provide a better experience to users so perfectly fine for any webmaster to do on their website.
First Click free, Users clicking from Google to a listed page can read the page without having to pay or register with the hosting site. You let Googlebot through as if it were a registered member and also allow anyone coming from Google's search listings through.
URL Rewriting. This practice includes the removal of unnecessary parameters and other URL (URL cloaking). It is a perfectly acceptable practice to present a different URL for a particular content to make more search engine friendly.
Replacement of Java Scripts. Using JavaScript to show content to non-JavaScript capable visitors that matches the textual information within a Flash or other multimedia element.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/201-a-simple-guide-to-website-performance-evaluation

The task of building a well performing website is not an easy and straight-forward task. It is the work of a combination of skill, experience and patience. In this post, we shall provide a checklist of website performance evaluation criteria that are useful to maintain good health for a website.

The performance of a website is usually done regarding user experience and website security. These are very fundamental to success.

The First Steps

URL (Intuitive) - The URL needs to be short and simple. The best URLs are intuitive. From the URL, you need to be able to understand what the website will be all about before you read the content of the website. An example is todhost.com It tells you that it is about a web hosting service.

Download time - Size of home page. The is very important for users. Most users are not willing to spend so much time waiting for a slow website. This factor has also become a search engine ranking factor and so should be taken seriously. It is recommended that all pages should be kept under 50k in size. The homepage should be especially small and quick to load.

Look and feel - Readability. Make your website easily readable, clear and easy to understand. It is important not to clutter a site with text and images. The font size needs to be large enough to be readable and rioting colors need to be avoided.

Conditions to enter the site - Avoid asking users to download an application or a plug-in before entering a site. This can cause upsets and send your visitors away. Pay importance to the home page (above the fold) It is a good practice to have the major services offered and everything the site is to appear on the homepage without having to scroll down.

Unique Selling Point (USP) or Value Proposition - Try to create a key selling factor that gives your website a major advantage. It is extremely important for users to quickly find the site to be potential benefit to them. The unique selling point should be on the homepage.

Ability to take action (Key action point) - The site should be interactive and encourage user participation from the outset. There should be direct links to key action points immediately visible on the homepage. Links like order now, get started, begin a search etc will need to be strategic and easily visible.

Feeling of wanting more -; Depth of site - The site should strive to create a feeling of wanting more in the user. The goal should be to get the user to stay as long as possible and to come back to the site again.

Contact details - Providing immediate contact details such as e-mail addresses and telephone numbers build confidence and trust in using the site.

Credential validation - certifications, associations etc. - Providing credential information is a useful way to build trust in the user.

Statement from management - This provides an opportunity for the surfer to see the business vision and values of the company.

Website Security - It can be very upsetting to visit a website only to find that it has been hacked, defaced, or put offline due to a security issue. This can put off customers significantly. When you want to perform some maintenance, you need to choose a low traffic time, say 1.00am at night when you will expect users to very minimal on site. If you have registered users, you need to send an advance notice ahead of your scheduled maintenance.


Pay attention to brand consistency: Endeavor to ensure consistency in the pages. The colors, layout, image format etc need to consistent throughout your entire website. If you have a separate blog, ensure that the logos are the same and the colors and not in sharp contrast. Build consistency throughout the site.

Tools for Testing Website Performance

Let's now look at some 5 Tools for Testing Your Site[s Performance and Speed. But before then, you need some insights into why websites load slowly.
Keep in mind that fast-loading sites have better user engagement, conversion rates, and search engine rankings.

Why Does Your Site Load Slowly?

There are multiple reasons your site could be performing less than acceptable or usual. Loading speeds are going to vary site by site, but there are a few factors that trip up most sites.

For most websites, especially content management systems like WordPress, the most common causes of page loading are bloated plugins, having a poorly coded theme, big image files, and/or having poor hosting not suited to your website. Below we'll show you how to fix these common issues. However, before you jump into optimizing your website, you need to see how fast it's running in the first place.

Tools For Testing Your Site

The following tools will give you a complete picture of your website's performance. You can use a single tool, or use them all.

Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a brainchild of Google. This app measures your site's performance across multiple devices, including desktop and mobile browsers. This is useful if your visitors are accessing your site from a variety of screen sizes and devices.

Pingdom
This is a free tool that gives you full-site performance information including load time, page size and an analysis of each page on your website.

GTmetrix
GTmetrix gives you a complete history of the website's loading speeds and a report that suggests ways to improve the performance of your website.

WebPagetest
WebPagetest gives insights into the load speed of your website and a breakdown of your site's performance. It’s unique in that it allows you to select a country to view your report from, so you can see how your site performs across different countries.

YSlow
YSlow is a browser plugin that lets you track the performance of any site you're currently visiting. It doesn't give you the actual load time, but it does break down over 20 different performance criteria.

Websites are impersonal ways of communication and so they require strong confidence building measures to keep visitors and get them to return to the site. In this post, we have compiled 16 things that could turn people away from a website. Web builders/designers do forget to note and implement some of these recommendations even when they have themselves been irked by some of these things on other people's website. That happens to most of us but working with a simple guide like this one can help overcome some of these problems. This guide could therefore be simply referred to as a guide to what not to do when designing your website.

16 Reasons Visitors Hate Your Website

1) Slow Website Speed.

People have real trouble waiting for websites when the load time is very high. According to a KISSmetrics report 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Even a one-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%. This can have very strong and negative impact on website bounce rate. Faster loading website can help reduce bounce rate more than most other factors.

Slow loading time frustrates your site visitors and affects conversion rate and brand perception -- especially for mobile users, who are sometimes relying on slower cellular internet connections when browsing the web. How does slow load time impact brand perception, you might be wondering? According to an Ericsson study the longer it takes a website to load, the more website visitors blame the content provider instead of their mobile internet service providers.

So, optimizing your website load performance should be a priority and you need to spend time and research into getting it right below 2 seconds. If you are running a content management system, you need to pay attention to caching. Page load time can also be impacted by poorly optimized images, code, videos, and other factors This can be addressed by plugins if you built your website with content management systems like WordPress

2. Website is Not Mobile Friendly

If you are a mobile phone user and browse with your mobile phone, you should have come across some websites that you will have to scroll from side-to-side to read copy on a website or zoom to view the text content of the website. These are the painful UX people can have on websites that aren't optimized for mobile.

Google announced a major mobile algorithm update n summer 2015 that penalizes websites that aren't mobile-friendly, and announced it would strengthen the ranking signal from mobile-friendly websites starting on May 1, 2016. That simply means you have to take mobile friendliness very seriously.

The major reason why Google continues to make these changes is to improve the web browsing experience for mobile users. So if your site isn't optimized for mobile devices, you'll likely lose out significantly in the organic search rankings.

3) Poor navigation

When someone visits your site, do they get confused about what to do, Where to go, What their next steps should be. You have to make navigation easy and clear to things easy for your website users.

A research by Small Business Trends suggests that 80% of small B2B business websites lacked a call-to-action -- as recently as 2013. They were missing out because they simply didn't provide any direction on their website or ask people to click around.

To address this problem, you will have to include clear headline copy, jargonless page copy that explains the value of what you do, and a clear primary call-to-action that shows visitors how to take the next steps -- whether that's subscribing to your blog, getting a free trial, watching a video, or any other action you hope visitors will perform on the site.

4) Excessive pop-ups.

Pop-ups can sometimes be very annoying. It disrupts users flow while browsing.

If you're going to use pop-ups there is a right way:


Use them in moderation. That way, you aren't constantly bombarding your visitors with content they may not be interested in.
Make them smart. Making them smart means displaying a different pop-up (or no pop-up at all) to different types of visitors based on whether they've visited your site before, or whether they're at a certain stage in the buying cycle.
Track them for effectiveness. Assess the number of views and clicks on each pop-up along with how many submissions the pop-up actually leads to. If you find it isn't performing very well, consider editing or removing it to create a better user experience for your visitors.
Use delightful copy. Far too many sites use language meant to force visitors into taking the desired action. Use a polite language and give them the option to say no.
Use small banners that slide in from the side or bottom of the page with a call-to-action. They tend to be less obtrusive, providing users with more information while still allowing them to continue reading the piece of content.
5) Multimedia content that auto-plays.

People are mindful about how their internet resources are used and do not just want to be taken by surprise. If someone's enjoying what should have been a silent browsing session and suddenly gets bombarded with your theme song or a talking head on a video for which they didn't press play -- especially if they can't find the button for stop - this can be very annoying for people who are very mindful about noise and the use of their internet resources.

6) It boasts disorienting animations.

Animations, autoplay videos, blinking and flashing paid advertisements, and other interactive entertainment may seem a good way to sell an idea or product very quickly but if they're too obtrusive or disorienting, they can detract visitors' focus during those critical three seconds. Interestingly, visitors dislike this. Keep any animations on your website as simple as you can.

7) Too Much Generic Photography.

Working with images is great as they can represent a thousand words and ease understanding. But sometimes, we use generic images to create a wonderful impression about our company and people working there. We want to show images of happy people and we end up taking internet photos and use generic images showing the impressions. It ends up placing some questions in users mind about the reality about your company or business. You've got to be real and believable with your presentation.

A Contact form With no Additional Contact Information.

Users want to be sure that they are dealing with a real company. On the contact us form, you should have more information about a physical address and telephone number. A Contact Us form should not be used just to generate a mailing list.

We have seen users using a contact us form to generate a mailing list and end up with lots of spam mails. The reason being that some persons just contact you with fake email entries just to test your contact us form and when you take such entries, you end up with lots of spam mails. You also need to realize that using the contact us form for opt-in email list is really the least valuable form of lead generation for you and your site visitors. Not only is it terribly generic, but it also doesn't indicate whether or not the contact actually wants to receive ongoing communications from you. It's more likely that they have a one-time problem or request that needs to be addressed and may not want further communication on other issues.

9) Poorly Crafted About Us page.

Does your About Us page truly explain what you do? Your about us page should be truly professional in the use of language and should tell the reader that you know your business, know what you do and understand the terrain.

10) Website Fails to Clearly Explain What Company Does.

Similar to a bad About Us page, it's will be a huge mistake and frustrating for users to find that your website does not clearly explain what company actually offers. You should be able to clearly present who you are, what you do, how you do it, the advantages you offer and why you are better than competition and so on. Your work and the products and services you provide along with the benefits should be clearly understood on your website.

11) Too Much Focus on Keywords - Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing had been an old practice way back around the year 2000. Website owners will over use a keyword in order to gain search engine advantages. Those copy were written for crawlers not humans. Today, it is recommended that you write for humans and not the crawlers. Avoid overuse of keywords because you want to force a high search engine rank. That's no longer beneficial and can really frustrate your efforts at a good presentation. Write for your target visitors and human users and not for bots.

12) Missing social sharing buttons on content.

Having the social sharing button on your site makes it easy for people to share your content on the social networks. Rather than copy and paste, it is good to have the social share button allowing your users to simply click and share.

13) Not Having a Blog

Some website owners think they do not need a blog simply because they may be a small company and not interested in regular posts or publications. Many think that blogs are for publications and news alone.

The fact is that although not having a log may not necessarily turn visitors away, it actually will have some effect on your capacity to attract new visits and even to get repeat visits. Blogs are an attraction for people who want to learn new things, get the latest advice, get product updates. Some companies feel too small to run a blog because their activity level does not support a weekly of bi-weekly update. No matter how small your size and activity could be, you have some events and news to report and so you need to have a blog.

A blog will help you provide fresh content to your website and attract web crawlers to revisit and index your content. Search engines like fresh content and so having a blog is a good way to gain their interest.

14) Titles and Headlines Not in Congruence with your Content.

Build content along the titles you have created. When titles and content are not in congruence, in increases bounce rate as users get irritated with content. Remember that visitors are attracted by titles, when the content does not meet their expectation based on the title you have provided, then there is a problem, a gap that creates user dissatisfaction.

15) Call-to-action Not in Alignment with the offer.

Ensure that your call-to-action delivers what visitors were offered. If you offer a free one-month website hosting plan, do not hide it under a conditional clause for them to subscribe to a 3 year plan before they can enjoy the one month free. Out rightly, offer them a one month free hosting for a 3 year subscription.

When you mislead your visitors by offering them a kind of bait-offer that is hidden in conditions, you are not only insulting to your visitors, but it will also hurt your reputation and conversion rates.

16) It contains internal linking that isn't user-friendly.

Internal links are useful both for visitors and search engines. It actually help search engines link your internal pages very fast. When done correctly, internal links are helpful for readers and website alike. They point readers to other relevant information, and help you improve the organic ranking for important pages on your own website. But some websites seem to have trouble executing internal linking correctly pointing users to irrelevant pages, linking strange phrases within the copy, and overdoing it to the point of making content unreadable.

Let's know what other website mistakes drives you crazy and could get you to abandon a page. Lets have your comments

Read full blog post at:: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/199-16-mistakes-that-turn-people-away-from-your-website

Have you received a warning from your web hosting notifying you of an unusually resource use from your account and asking you to upgrade from your shared hosting to a more expensive plan like a VPS or a dedicated server where your resource use will have less impact on other clients. That is probably because you are overusing the allocated space way beyond their expectation or going outside the prescribed usage in the web hosting company's fair usage policy. You'll need to manage the process by taking a look at your files and entire data on your WordPress website.

In this post, we look at this issue as it affects a WordPress website. No doubt, WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) and website building tool today. That accounts for our dedication of much resources on WordPress management.

Managing your website size is crucial to running a stable website. Infact, you will find that one major cause of failed backups associated with WordPress is the lack of disk space. Once you are able to address this issue and prune down the size of your website, running a backup for your site will no longer be an issue.

Now, let us look at some steps that will help reduce the size of your WordPress website

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips/198-7-steps-to-reduce-the-disc-space-used-by-your-wordpress-website

Traditionally, Joomla website update had involved three methods: writing files directly, updating with a url for the file source and updating by uploading an update file. All of them are good and I cannot speak of any major advantage of one over the other except speed. Writing files directly can be faster than most other update methods.

There are cases when you are unable to use any of the methods, a manual update method will work in such cases and I will show you how to get this done in this post.

Why Update a Joomla Website?

Regular update for your Joomla website will help you keep your website operational in terms of security, usability and performance. This is a very important process that every business has to take into account to ensure that their website is still at its best.
The world of Content Management Systems (CMS) is constantly evolving, and users are very often not fully aware of the changes that apply to their own websites.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/806/How-to-manually-update-a-Joomla-website.html

How to Submit Your Website to Top Search Engines for Free https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/197-how-to-submit-your-website-to-top-search-engines-for-free

Boost Your Website SEO with Google Analytics

https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/190-boost-your-website-seo-with-google-analytics

A Guide to Website Optimization for Mobile Devices

https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/189-a-guide-to-website-optimization-for-mobile-devices

Best Plugins for Faster Loading WordPress Websites in 2016

https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips/187-best-plugins-for-faster-loading-wordpress-websites-in-2016

Source: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/804/How-to-safely-disable-the-WordPress-automatic-update-feature.html

Beginning from WordPress version 3.7, there were some very exciting features and security patches. This WordPress update became significant as it added the automatic update feature. WordPress now updates itself without asking the user for any conformation or notifications to update.(Note the automatic updates are allowed to update to only minor changes which include security issues i.e. from 3.7 to 3.7.1 and 3.7.1 to 3.7.2 by default, It asks you only conformation when there is a major update i.e. 3.7 to 3. WordPress team had introduced this feature to improve the stability and security of your WordPress installation.

Before you proceed further, you need to check to see if your WordPress installation can run the automatic update. To do this, you will have to install the Background update tester [official link] plugin on your WordPress installation and confirm if your installation meets the requirements for WordPress automatic updates. This will also help you to find out, if your hosting is compatible with WordPress auto-update feature or not.

Automatic Updates

This feature may sound great for normal WordPress users who don't worry about updating their WordPress sites/installation and also it means you can save money that would have been spent on developers you would hire to handle updates for you. (some managed hosting providers update their client's WordPress sites automatically once the updates are available). But when coming to the issues of Developers they are worried as they don't know which update may screw-up the things on the site!. And some developers need some time before getting their plugins ready for the updates.

There are also some professional bloggers and users who would like to update their WordPress site themselves, to know what changes are made in each update to their blogs. So here this post is for the advanced users who really want to stop WordPress automatic updates, And want to have control over the updates on their sites.

There are two methods which can be used to control the automatic updates on a WordPress installation

Method 1:-The Plugin Method

This is simplest and best method to gain some extra control over the updates on your installation. You can get the Updates Option plugin which is developed by George Stephanis and Chip Bennett from WordPress plugin repository[official link] . You can access the settings of updates from Settings-General. This plugin is best for those who don't want to touch the code and need to be done quick.

Update Plugin gives all the options of the Automatic Updates in simple drop box menu. If you don't want to mess with option and just want to disable the automatic updates then you can simply opt for NO option at Automatic Updates Enabled?. This plugin not only offers automatic WordPress core files updates control, it also supports the update control over the plugin and themes updates

Method 2:- Configuring wp-config file

This second option is a little advanced when compared to the above method. If you want to disable all the WordPress updates including the minor and major core updates then add this code as it is in the wp-config.php

define( "WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE" false );

If you want to enable the minor and major both the automatic updates then add the below code.

define( WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE, true );

If you want to restore to default value i.e to enable the WordPress installation only for the minor updates then use the below code line.

define( WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE);

The preference is for the user to choose which option best suits his need. Most newbie will prefer the plugin method as it is safer and does all the job neatly. Most developers will editing the WP-config method, as it takes off the burden of adding another WordPress plugin to the blog.

Remember to maintain a functional and complete backup of your WordPress blog every day, to avoid any future issues with WP auto update.

What is an SEO Audit, and How Can It Help Your Business?

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/186-what-is-an-seo-audit-and-how-can-it-help-your-business

https://www.todhost.com/
Unmatched quality web hosting

Read full blog post at https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/185-how-to-create-an-animated-gif-image

13 Recommended Steps to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area

https://www.todhost.com/blog/website-security/184-13-recommended-steps-to-protect-your-wordpress-admin-area

Two factors play key role in website optimization. These two factors are Onpage optimization and Offpage optimization. This post will dwell on on-page optimization and we will be examining some good on page SEO techniques that should be implemented to achieve high ranks on search engines. The target is for top 10 ranks.

Onpage SEO optimization focuses on optimizing content for our target keywords. This includes use of proper heading, keyword placement, content quality and many other factors. We will look into them one by one in this post.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/183-onpage-seo-guide-for-top-search-engine-ranking

Web Hosting in Port Harcourt - https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/317/Web-Hosting-in-Port-Harcourt.html

WHM are tools that has become synonymous with web hosting. Once you wish to an account to start a web hosting business, even as a reseller, you will want to check if cPanel and WHM will be available. But in most cases, branding is an issue with this tools. While we hosting providers will easily use this software to manage their customers and provide easy-to-use web hosting platform for clients to manage their websites, email accounts, databases, and many more, they have little options to customize, personalize and do branding of the services they offer their clients.

cPanel and WHM recent built has changed all these. Now, with additions like Paper Lantern to our software suite, web hosts can alter the color, feel, and overall experience of the cPanel dashboard to provide their customers with a personally branded and truly unique cPanel experience. Now you can customize the cPanel dashboard as if it was your own product.

Read full tutorial at https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/802/cPanel-Branding-and-Customization.html

OpenCart is taking the e-commerce world by surprise, growing to become one of the most secure e-commerce platforms and also one of the most recently used. Although OpenCart security has been widely acknowledged, it is still recommended that these four steps be followed for the security of an OpenCart e-commece store.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/website-security/182-best-practices-for-opencart-website-security

In our technology driven world, small businesses can contend with large and established ones. With access to different online tools, a small business can succeed at new levels never thought possible.

Through computerized promotion which join online video and email showcasing procedures, you can open new doors of chance for your little business.

Computer-Based Marketing

Computerized promoting puts your little business before an immense number of potential customers. Leveraging YouTube and diverse stages creates open entryways for small businesses to accomplish massive clientele. Propelled publicizing positions your small business in the same stages as substantial business online and allows them to battle on a proportionate playing field. A couple of associations use custom activities and development representations to make their imprint in the business world while others use standard video messages passed on by the CEO. By utilizing the instruments you have accessible, you create conceivable outcomes of accomplishment in matching gigantic business.

Email Marketing

Email promoting are another unfathomable way a small business can fight with tremendous businesses. Email messages can get you and promote your business to countless buyers, while moreover serving as an effective leads generator. Email serves as a prompt customer specific instrument which makes the customer experience more encounters. You can implant connections with your associated site and recordings in your email communications. Studies have shown that people will most likely read an email totally if it has a video within the message.

Drives Generation and Customer Acquisition

Drives allow little organizations to have permission to the same leads and potential customers as substantial associations do. There are a couple of ways to produce drives that will bring about deals. Offering free information or access to coupons can make for a little business so it can effectively equal more prominent associations. The goal of leads time is to focus on concentrating on the right customers that are well while in transit to purchase what you offer.

Nature of Service

Using instruments that automate procedures allows little businesses to have access to the same customers the colossal brands do. Through online structures and e-exchange gadgets, little businesses can offer a rate of the same raised prerequisites of organization that tremendous business customers have become use to. Minute access to things and organizations is one of the keys to purchaser dedication. Setting up a robotized email response to customer solicitation is a shrewd thought. Your target should be to automate the method with the objective that it is set up to handle trades at whatever point. By means of motorizing methods, for instance, arrangements and customer organization, little associations can fulfill the same level of affirmation with their customers that huge ventures appreciate.

The Importance of Analytics

Measuring the progression of your online business is vital to its flourishing. Using Google Analytics and other online gadgets is another way to deal with and compete with colossal brands. Tremendous associations use methodical programming instruments every day with the objective that they can see the change they are making toward their association's goals. By using these same gadgets, you can evaluate your association’s advancement, see the examples with respect to customer change rates, and grasp the stream of your business on new levels. This information will be beneficial and help drive the best ways to focus your action and acquire concentrated on more leads and visitors.

Level the Playing Field with Internet

Steve Jobs said in a meeting in 1995, The most diminutive association on the planet can battle with the greatest association on the planet on the web. He expected then that the web would change the way business is done, including customer acquirement and arrangements. This declaration has wound up being substantial in our present world as more associations go on the web. More wage is being made on the web through e-business than in honest to goodness stores today. People are getting on mobile phones more than ever some time as of late. Little associations can misuse this miracle by displaying their thoughts and contemplation on YouTube and other social stages and by making responsive locales for their flexible gathering of spectators.

As Steve Jobs expected over 20 years prior, the web has changed everything. More retail stores are selecting to put their associations on the web. Gigantic brands run online with the objective that they can make their region known in the electronic medium. The online agitation has allowed little associations with a webpage and a web systems administration record to fight with immense names and colossal brands.

Through absolutely masterminded advancement methodology furnished to address online customers, and by making the asking for and customer organization strategies robotized, little business can largely influence the world. Along these lines, in case you are a little business, apply these norms and don’t surrender. You’re playing with the tremendous young fellows now!

Credit:https://www.todhost.com/blog/small-business/181-how-small-businesses-can-compete-and-win-against-big-businesses-on-the-web

Today, most marketing teams are structured to drive traffic towards websites, which then converts into leads for the sales team to close. Once this process starts to deliver results, marketers then seek to generate even more traffic, and hopefully even more success.

An oversimplification, but that’s the standard marketing playbook. Few marketing teams focus on getting more from existing traffic. That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. In this blog post, we’ll teach you all about CRO — what it achieves, why you should do it, and how your team can execute it. We’ll explain how you can drive more results from your existing traffic so your content can work smarter, and not harder, for you.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Many websites are designed to convert website visitors into customers. These conversions occur all over the website — on the homepage, pricing page, blog, and landing pages — and all of these can be optimized for a higher number of conversions. The process of optimizing those conversions is exactly what CRO entails. CRO is a huge, often untapped opportunity for marketing teams, and you might be surprised by the oversized impact you could deliver by fine-tuning your website for conversions.

When Is Conversation Rate Optimization (CRO) Right for Your Business?

Once your sales and marketing engine attracts website visitors who consistently convert into leads for your sales team, you should start thinking about CRO.


Read full blog post at; https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/180-a-guide-to-conversion-rate-optimization

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/178-30-most-important-google-ranking-factors-for-beginners

Google has an inconclusive and ever changing list of factors taken into account by its search engine algorithm in ranking a website. However, attempting to optimize a website for all the factors will mean a lot of work and webmasters may not be able to optimize more than 5 websites in a year. Understanding the direction of Google in ranking websites and focusing on the more important factors with greater impact on website overall performance is the recommended way to go. In this post, we take a loo at the most important factors and how to optimize your website for these factors to achieve ranking success in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

On-Page factors:

On Page factors, also called On-site SEO is about optimizing content for target keywords and essentially focuses on the use of proper heading, keyword placement, content quality and many other factors. On Page search engine optimization on any website has the most profound effect on its rankings. From our experience, proper On-Page optimization can significantly affect the possibility to rank within the top ten results in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Here are the critical on-page optimization factors that can affect its search visibility quite significantly:

Keyword in the title tag.

The title meta tag is one of the strongest relevancy signals for a search engines. The tag itself is meant to give the accurate description of the pages content. Search engines use it to display the main title of a search result. Including a keyword in it will indicate to search engine what to rank the page for. Website titles define how a search engine understand the purpose and primary focus of a website and invariably will help search engines what to rank the website for.

It is recommended that the keyword should be placed at the start of the title tag. Pages optimized this way will rank better than those with keyword closer to the title’s tag end. This is generally the rule but we have also seen websites that simply place keywords within the title and not necessarily starting the title with keywords ranking much better than websites that start with keywords in title.

Keyword in meta description tag.

The meta description tag has gained less relevance since Google made it known that it does not use this tag in page ranking anymore. However, we still thin it is important for Google because our tests reveal that a poorly written meta description affects Google's understanding of a website's primary focus and could affect how Google places the website in its search engine result pages. Remember that Google's focus is to give users the best search experience and so Google tries to place websites it considers to be of high quality at the top of its search engine result pages.

Having said that, it should be understood that the meta description tag today is is nonetheless still a relevant signal as it is crucial for gaining user clicks from search results pages. Including some relevant keyword in it makes it more relevant to a search engine and a searcher. The bottom line is that you still need to take the meta description tag very seriously.

Magento is the most popular e-commerce application and had attracted a lot of attacks as well. Protecting your Magento website is important not just for the security of your website but also for your pleasant user experience which is important for your reputation and search engine ranking as well.

Although these recommendations have been made with the security of a Magento website in mind, they will apply to many other content management systems. Generally speaking, website protection principles are generally applicable to most platforms and will be peculiar to most applications only in some specific cases.

Magento is the most widely used e-commerce application and that makes it naturally a target for cyber-criminals. Sometimes, hackers attempt to steal personal customer data, misuse credit cards or perpetrate identify theft. Other times, they simply want to deface a site by hacking into it or to take it down with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Magento is a relatively secure system and is frequently patched, it is critical that you (or your Magento site administrator) invest time and effort in order to ensure that your Magento security is as tight as possible.


The following list of security recommendations and practices will help protect your Magento websites against attacks.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/website-security/177-best-practices-for-magento-website-security

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/172-reasons-your-business-should-own-a-website-in-today-s-world

A website is a single domain that consists of different web pages. Many people operate very successful website while a lot more do not see the real reasons to even own one. In this article, we examine some of the reasons people should own websites and show why it becomes misplaced not to own a website in today's business world. Statistics show over 3.5 billion internet users in the world today with Nigeria ranking number 8 with over 90million users based on the ownership of internet connections.

With this staggering number, if you have a business and don't have a website, you are losing out on great opportunities for your business. To many, being on the top ranking list is the only way to run successfully, but that is actually far from the truth. With long-tail keywords and focus on smaller niches, it has become possible to operate successful websites that serve smaller localities.

Also read: Web Hosting Tips and Tricks for Beginners

A website can be used to accomplish many different growth strategies to help your business expansion programme. As a business owner, you need to know where your consumers are. But what if consumers know your business and what you can offer, but they can't reach you? That is one of the risks you take by not having a website for your business. Owning a website helps your availability all the time and limits the problem of distance.

So, generally, what are the benefits of owning a website?

There are several reasons people setup a website. It varies as it depends on the purpose or objective of the website owner. However, there is some agreement that these reasons below justify owning a website especially for a business.

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Why A Business Should Own A Website

Cost Effectiveness

When compared to a shop, a website is incredibly cheaper to run and operate. It takes a few dollars to get a hosting account packed with free scripts and templates. Once you understand how to set these up, you can get your website running within 24hours and at less than 30US Dollars for one whole year.

On the other hand, a physical location for a business could cost up to 1,000 U.S. Dollars to pay for accommodation. Getting the layout in place could cost even more.

Besides the initial setup costs, a brick and mortar store is susceptible to many risks out of the ordinary occurrences which could blow out the costs such as leaving the lights on, theft, damage, extra staff etc.

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A website provides tremendous benefits and costing outlines. In fact, you make enormous savings with a website. A website will serve as your point of sale and does not require a physical office. This has been one of the most exciting features of the website/online business. The benefit of starting a business without any legal registration requirements, physical location and yet build trust and become a very successful business.

24/7 Accessibility

Your website will be available and accessible to deliver services 24/7/365. People can order at any time even though delivery can be done hours later. A website helps to ensure that businesses are not lost to non-business hours. Imagine that you want to buy from a store.

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You put in all the effort required to go to the store, but when you get there, it's closed. We all know how irate we feel in that situation. On the other hand, with a website, purchases can be made at any time since a website is operational round the clock.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/172-reasons-your-business-should-own-a-website-in-today-s-world