This tutorials spells out the steps we took to improve the speed of our website, todhost.com. In the end, the site loading speed is now 1.3s

Article source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/image-optimization-for-the-web.html

Image Optimization for the Web

Optimizing images for a website has become very important to speed up the webpage. Fortunately, there are lots of tools that can further help you reduce the size of your images and help improve the speed of your website. Google has made it clear that speed is a ranking factor and should be taken very seriously.

Google notes that images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page and also often occupy a significant amount of visual space. Google dislikes slow loading websites. Image optimization is therefore very important especially as the speed of a website is now considered to be a ranking index in Google Search Results. In this article, we examine how to optimize images for the web. Before we look at our core objective, let us consider why it is important to optimize the images you use on your website.

Also read: How to create an animated GIF image

Why is website speed important?

Improve Your Load Time: Web images constitute part of the downloaded content when web pages are opened. Even for cached content, images still account for part of the content downloaded. If a website has lots of images, it simply means that more time will be taken to download the page. This is more difficult when the image is not optimized to load faster. So to improve the speed of your website, you need work on your images to make them light for use on a website.
Search Engines Love Optimized Images: When you load an image, you can easily understand the meaning from your visual look. But search engine bots do not. The get to know how to categorize images from the name and alternate texts used in the image description. To get your image to appear in the search engines with the proper name and categorization, you need to optimize them. Again, in doing this, you should be mindful about the filename and like mentioned above, the alternate text also. These are the areas from which search engine bots will be able to understand your image. You will have to avoid the default image name that came after the camera shot the image because that will not be easy for search engines to interpret. You will have to change the name to something readable for the search engines.
Users Love Fast Websites: This is important not only to keep users on your websites but also helps with Google ranking. Google algorithm changes has recently shown that the search engine giant is becoming more interested in user behavior and will reward websites that are more user friendly with higher rankings. One way Google assess user friendliness is to look at the speed of the website. Presumably, Google knows that users will love websites that are fast more than websites that are slow.
Speed Helps Conversion: Speed Directly Correlates With Conversions: Studies have shown the serious impact that a website speed can have on sales conversions. For example, BrandPerfect reports that, after surveying 2500 online shoppers from the UK and USA, that two-thirds of respondents (67%) from the UK and more than half (51%) from the USA stated that a slow website is the main reason for abandoning a purchase that they were going to make. Similarly, Mozilla found that reducing their loading time by 2.2 seconds they could increase conversions by over 15% , leading to an additional 10 million downloads over one year.

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Image Optimization Tools

JPEGMini

JPEGMini elps reduce your image by up to 6 times the original size while not reducing the image uality. JPEGMini is available for Mac OS X and Windows as a desktop app, available as a free (limited) or a paid version.

To use JPEGMini, simply choose or drag folders to the app for it to optimize each image automatically. It also offers a server package, which enables you to lower your storage and bandwidth costs by reducing the load time of image-intensive web-pages.

Shrink O'Matic

Shrink O'Matic is a free application and can resize your images automatically. It is an Adobe AIR application and works by way of batching and resizing images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs. Just drag and drop images into the app and they will be resized. You can customize the settings and choose the output sizes, rotation, name, location, format and watermark.

Smush.it

Smush it is a relatively popular tool for optimizing images. It wors as an online service from the Yahoo! Developer Network and uses lossless compression techniques, so the file size is reduced without changing the look or visual quality of the image. Give it a try and you will be impressed about the functionality of this tool.

Smush it supportsJPEG, GIF and PNG files with maximum sizes of 1MB. The optimized results are available for download from a temporary URL, which is valid for up to 30 minutes afterwards.

Image Optimizer

Image Optimizer is great tool for resizing images for the web and truly will optimize your images. Both the free and paid upgrade version are good and are none is functionally advantageous over the other except that the paid version will not include a promo text which appears on the free version.

Image Optimizer is very simple to use and allows you to choose your optimization quality, maximum width and maximum height. It also allows you to compress images in bulk and view the progress of the optimization.

CompressNow

CompressionNow is also a free image optimization service available online. It will help you upload images from your computer, choose a compression percentage and download the optimized image. It supports GIF, JPG and PNG formats. CompressionNow allow you to load up to 10 images and download the optimized format. The maximum individual file size allowed to be uploaded is 3MB.

Shrink Pictures

With Shrink Pictures, you are able to resize pictures, optimized them by choosing the level of compression to apply on your image. Shrink Pictures supports JPG, GIF and PNG. You can select the maximum image dimension, apply special effects, and download the optimized images.

ImageOptim

ImageOptim is free image optimization toll and is great in so many ways. It will find the best parameters for compression and remove unnecessary comments and color profiles, It is used to optimize PNG, JPEG, and GIF formats.


JPEG Optimizer

JPEG Optimizer is easy to use, free online tool to that will help resize and compress your photos and images.

JPEG Reducer

JPEG Reducer, as the name goes will shrink your image the size to make them load faster. To use JPEG Reduces, you will simply upload your image or enter its URL and press "Reduce It." You can then view the compressed images and thumbnails, and right-click the image to save it.

Tips for Saving and Optimizing Your Web Images

Image file formats: The rules and preferences vary but generally, the most widely used are the JPEG, PNG and GIF image file formats.

Here we provide a basic guide to saving images for the web.

Make sure you have saved a copy of the image as a lossless version, meaning that you can come back and edit it again later if needed. For example, .raw, .tiff, .png, .psd file formats to name a few.

If it is a photograph, then select .jpg file format to save the final image. Remember to test several quality and compression settings until you get the perfect balance between quality and load times. If your image editing tool allows the "progressive" setting use that as it will allow the image to "blur" or display gradually as it is rendered on the web instead of line by line. The load time is not improved with the progressive setting, however it does give the image a softer look and feel when rendering on screen. If your editing enables "save for the web" then use this as it will make your image a bit lighter.

Read also: A Guide to Website Optimization for Mobile Devices

If your .jpg image is to be used as a background on the web document then use the Medium or Low compression setting. Otherwise for displayed images keep the compression at High.

If you have the option to adjust the image "quality" then use the settings to make the appropriate change; again, remember to strike a balance between acceptable quality and suitable file size.

Read also: Boosting Your Website SEO with Google Analytics

File sizes: Depending on the use of the image follow these guidelines for optimal file size:

For background images try to keep the file size around or below10KB.
For banners or header images a file size up to 60KB is acceptable.
For high end photographs try to keep them to within 100KB at an absolute maximum.

Final Words

You will by now have understood the critical role of image optimization on your website performance both in terms of search engine ranking, pleasurable user experience and conversions. These are real benefits that cannot be sacrificed for the time it taes to achieve the optimization of your website images. Image optimization for some websites, like news websites, can be very time consuming but it is definitely worth it.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/image-optimization-for-the-web.html

A learning center for Joomla developers: https://www.todhost.com/blog/joomla

From the very beginner to advanced tutorials on Joomla. https://www.todhost.com/blog/joomla

50 Percent off all web hosting plans on Todhost. Offer last till May 1, 2017
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50 Percent off alll web hosting plans on Todhost. Offer last till May 1, 2017
https://todhost.com/web-hosting.php

Luiz1:
Every keyworld is becoming competitive bro. The 3rd world war would be caused by SEO nd the venue will be on Google's search engine. Up to 2 million blog posts r being published everyday across all verticals. Now tell me if there won't be war?!

Interesting! I love the wars we fight without the use of weapons.

IsaacBuchi:


Oh, I just saw it.....cool site!

In your opinion is blogging really worth it? Does it bring in the green bulk$?

Yes! It does. Very important will be the primary area of interest. We built a blog for Ogoninews.com and it is amazing how much traffic comes in there.

virus05:
For beginners.. Your site wont get to first page fast with this. Unless you're patient enough to wait for upto 1 year

Patience is required for SEO success. Thanks for noting this. But again, for non-competitive keywords, high ranking can come quickly with quality content

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-complete-guide-to-good-seo-for-beginners.html

Investing in your website design is good, it will help build a good reputation for your especially with your first time visitors. It will help conversion easy, it will help you get referrals. But all these will be difficult to achieve with a poor Search Engine Optimization. We have been dealing with lots of clients here at Todhost and one major problem they want to overcome is how to build traffic to their website. The simple answer is that you should begin to take SEO seriously. In this article, we undertake to present the essential steps you should tae to achieve good SEO for your website as a beginner.

1. Use Analytics for Monitoring

There are lots of free analytic tools. The most popular is Google Analytics(GA). With GA, you can track the performance of your website, monitor its bounce rate, now where your visitors are coming from in terms of country and city, monitor the length of time visitors spend on your website and so on.

You also need a Google Webmaster Tools account to track your traffic, view site errors, view your click through rates, check how your website is performing with various keywords and areas that need improvement like short and long metatags, short and long title tags, descriptions and so on.

GA helps you to see which pages receive the most hits, see where your traffic is coming from. Who links to your site? What keywords are people searching when they find your site? These are both important factors to help inform your future efforts.

You will also find other analytic tools very useful. One of such very useful tool is Pingdom. Pingdom will help you determine the speed of your website at ever point in time. This is very important because website speed has become a ranking factor in Google. Google's focus on user experience places a lot of importance on the speed of your website and Google simply wants websites that make users happily to be placed at the top of their search engine result pages.

Other useful analytics for SEO will include Seositecheckup, Scrubtheweb, Woorank, iwebchk and Seoptimizer.All of these analytics will provide useful guide on areas needing improvement on your website. One good thing about them is that they provide a score for your SEO efforts and tell you if you rate well or poorly.

2. Use Quality Keywords

Keywords are still relevant. Although Google has announced that it no longer use keywords to rank websites, The keywords placed in website content are still valuable to help the search engines understand what your website is all about. Keywords should appear naturally in your content, in the titles of pages, URLs, image names, and in the content itself. Don’t force keywords in there. When considering which keywords to focus on, don’t go too general. Be precise and just use the keywords naturally. If you make clots for women, then just stating that you are a "Women Cloth Designer" will just be enough to drive traffic to your site by ranking you high for people who search for "women cloth designers".

How Not to Use keywords

Google cites the following as examples of keyword stuffing - the practice of placing as many seo keywords onto a page as much as possible. These are the cases of bad use of keywords and should be avoided because Google hates it:

Listing phone numbers without substantial value to your users
Big blocks of text listing cities or states you want your webpage to rank for
Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural (like in the example above)

What then, you would ask, should be the best practice?

We will recommend that you write just the way you speak. Be professional in writing, selecting your words and using them rightly within the right content. Let your use of words be natural and you will find that you have been able to put out an excellent piece of writing.

3. Other On-Page Tags

One of the most important aspects of your website SEO is your title page. The website title remains a ranking factor and should be taken seriously. It should contain the keywords you want to rank for and we recommend that it should end with your brand name.

We have used the following format for our website title:

Primary keyword - Brand Name

MOZ Recomends the following as an optimal format:

Primary Keyword- Secondary Keyword - Brand Name

In both cases, the primary keyword precedes the brand name and you should avoid placing your brand name first when writing website titles. This is not to say that websites who place rand name ahead of their primary keywords perform worse than those who place brand name behind keywords. Some evidence suggest that this is not always the case. However, Google tend to consider the words you place first as more important than those you place last.

Note: Keep title tags between 10 to 55 characters. Although we have recently tested and seen title tags as long as 63 characters in Google SERPs, we strongly recommend that your title should not be longer than 55 characters because we have also seen titles as short as 50 characters. Google tend to present about 60 characters and rarely will show more than 55 characters.

So, ensure that your title and descriptive tags contain the relevant keywords for the page. The title tag should be short and descriptive. The meta description tag should be a somewhat longer description of the content and should be kept at about 150 characters.

Heading tags should be used inside the content itself to set up separate sections. Only ever use one H1 tag, at the top of the content, for the main header of the content.

4. Use Clean Search Engine Friendly URLs

Depending on the tool with which you have designed your website, if you have used a Content Management System like WordPress or Joomla, ensure you enable search engine friendly urls in the admin section.

Always make sure your urls are like this: https://www.yourwebsite.com/university/article/avoiding-negative-and-bad-seo/
and not like this::
https://www.yourwebsite.com/university/article.php?s=115673

Search engines pull information from URLs. The first URL lays out the content precisely, the second gives no information whatsoever. Using plain language makes it very easy for search engines and browsers to understand the content of the page they’re visiting..

5. Use a sitemap
A sitemap will help search engines easily navigate your website and its content structure will be easier for human visitors also. Sitemaps includes internal links to your content, linking it together and requiring fewer clicks to get through. You will also have to submit your sitemap to the search engines especially Google and Bing.

6. Optimized the Speed of Your Website

The speed of your website is very important. A fast website is much more appealing to visitors and search engines love it and will always reward such websites with better ranking because they are appealing and provide better user experience.

Basically, to speed up a website, you need to take not of the following:

Ensure that cache is enabled on the website. If you are using a CMS, their should be a plugin to enable which will handle your caching system. You may want to check the documentation of your content management system on how to do this and you also learn more about caching here.
Ensure that you optimize your images, template CSS, JS, and disable the development mode in your template settings.
Check up your website script documentation for additional steps for caching.

Note: If visitors come to your site and it doesn’t start loading near-instantly, they’ll quickly grow frustrated and look elsewhere. Search engines take this into account and if your site loads slowly while they are crawling it, your rankings will suffer. It’s always easier to start off making sure your code, images, and other assets are optimized rather than go back and make changes later. Use tools like Pingdom or PageSpeed Insights to give you ideas on where you can improve your site’s speed. That way you will now how much improvement is required. For a simple guide, if your website loads in less than 2 seconds, then it is fast. If it loads between 2-5 seconds, then it is normal. If it loads in greater than 5 seconds, then it is not good and will require immediate attention.

Also remember, server speed could be a factor for speed. If server speed is slow, then their is probably nothing you can do to change the situation but to move to another web host.

Did we miss anything or are there things you'// want to add to this, let us know in the comment box.

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Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-build-your-website-credibility.html

Web hosting is a service. One of its characteristics is impersonality. It is delivered through a medium that you cannot feel or touch. One way to judge its quality is the impression it sends about its credibility through a website that delivers the service.

Building website credibility starts with building customer confidence. This is the focus of this post - how to build the credibility of your website to increase its conversion, reduce bounce rate and reduce the number of people who turn away from your website.

Trust is everything for a website owner. When it comes to running a website, making sure that your audience trusts you and your brand is critical, and that’s where credibility comes in. After all, if visitors don’t find your site trustworthy, they’re likely to take their business elsewhere. They cannot see you to explain the quality of service, you cannot deliver the service personally and evem when you are known, they need to trust that you are the person communicating.

There are several ways to boost your site’s credibility, and fortunately, most of them happen to be easy to implement. For example, simply setting up an SSL certificate might be enough to increase your conversions. Customers trust websites that implement the SSL protocol than those who do not. So one way to build trust and credibility for your website is to implement SSL on your site.

It is quite easy to do this and in very simple steps, you can have SSL enabled on your website. All you will need to do is to order SSL and contact our customer support to do the rest for you. At Todhost, you can have your SSL enabled and installed on your hosting account for free. Just contact customer support after your order and we will take it from there.

Now, let us explore why website credibility is crucial for a successful website and how you can enhance yours.

Why Trust Matters for Ever Website

Trust and credibility are hard to quantify, but they’re vital for any website that hopes to succeed. For example, most people wouldn’t want to engage with a site that spreads misinformation or doesn’t handle data securely.

There are several ways credibility can benefit your site – here are some of the reasons you should be serious about your website credibility:

Higher conversion rates. If people trust you, they may be more willing to spend their money on your site. We live in a world where it has become increasingly difficult to trust people. Despite efforts of website hosting companies and domain managers to curtail internet fraud, there are still websites that are fraudulent and will continue to be difficult to detect. This has made people more skeptical and will want to be convinced that it is not out of place to do business on a particular website. If people can trust you, they will be willing to transact with you and so it is a good investment to build the trust of your website.
More sharing of content. Once you are trusted, the information you provide can always be taken to be true and shared with others. Users only tend to share content they consider reliable, which is where credibility comes in. Content sharing has a lot of positives. One of such positive value of content sharing is that it helps your Search Engine Optimization, SEO, efforts. The more people share the content from your website, the more links you get. The more links that come to your website, the more Google consider your website to be trusted and rewards you with better ranking.
Increased social endorsement. People are more likely to provide positive reviews and testimonials if a site seems credible. This is especially valuable, as lots of users rely on reviews and word of mouth to make their decisions about online purchases.
Trust builds referrals. When you are trusted, it is more likely to get referrals to your website.

As you can see above, there are key reasons why trust matters. With that in mind, let’s find out more about how to earn it!

How to Build Your Website Credibility

There are lots of ways a website can build up its credibility. For instance, a solid core strategy is to publish relevant valuable content over the long term in order to attract a captive audience. However, for this article, we’ll focus on methods that can be implemented quickly and deliver reliable results.

1. Obtain an SSL Certificate

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a protocol that makes it possible for your browser and a server to establish a secure connection. To put it simply, this protocol keeps the information that your users share safe, which is paramount in today’s online landscape.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-build-your-website-credibility.html

Source: Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-wordpress-website-updating.html

Updating your WordPress website is good for its security, content and data integrity and also for good user experience. Each time your website goes down, is suspended, hacked, defaced, exploited and slowed down, it comes with an unpredictable but definitely unfavorable cost – users hate it. Sometimes, it makes your users frightened and they never want to visit again. This underscores the very essence of tight security for every website. Failing to keep your WordPress website updated exposes it a security loophole.

In this post, we focus on WordPress updates and strategies you need to adopt to keep your WordPress installation up-to-date.

1. How to identify an outdated WordPress plugin

You can manually scan your WordPress website to identify outdated plugins. The second way to identify an outdated plugin is to run the No Longer in Directory plugin.

2. How to Manually Scan WordPress for Outdated Plugin

WordPress has built-in plugins and also uses some third party plugins to add functionality to the site. To know whae an update is available for a plugin, you need to monitor your website.

For WordPress core, if a new version of WordPress is available, you can’t miss it, as you will see a message at the top of almost every page of your administration panel. You will even see another message at the bottom of these pages!

For plugins and themes, it is different, but if they are available on WordPress.org, then the CMS can tell you if a new version is released. All you have to do is visit the ‘Updates’ section of the WordPress dashboard.

You will see right next to this entry in the menu, how many updates are available. This number also appears in the bar at the top of your screen on all the pages of your website when you are logged in. If this number doesn’t appear, good news: WordPress and all your plugins and themes are up to date!

3. Find Updates with No Longer in Directory Plugin

The No Longer in Directory plugin is an excellent tool for maintaining the plugins in your WordPress site. It performs two checks:

Has the plugin been removed from the WordPress.org plugin directory?
If the plugin is in the directory, is it outdated (not been updated in over two years)?

The plugin will check the plugins on your site and list those that match either of those criteria. It only scans plugins that are listed in the WordPress.org, so it won’t scan premium (purchased) plugins. You should manually check to make sure those are still maintained by visiting the plugin author’s site.

3.1 How to use the No Longer in Directory Plugin

Install and activate it.

In the WordPress admin menu, under Plugins, click No Longer in Directory. No Longer in Directory only runs when you manually run it; it doesn’t automatically run in the background. So, as a site owner, you should manually run it every time you want to chec for updates (unless you’re covered by our WordPress Maintenance Service).

4. What to Do With Outdated Plugins

If you detect an outdated plugin, you can take the following action to address the problem:

If you don’t need the functionality that the plugin provides, delete it.
If you need the functionality that the plugin provides, replace it with an actively maintained alternative.

Hopefully you can find an alternative in the directory. If not, you’ll need to consider having a developer create and maintain one.

5. Why is Plugin Maintenance So Important?

We have in the introductory section tired to explain this point. Plugins that aren’t actively maintained can cause security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues, which could break your site.

6. Updating WordPress with a Single Click

Since WordPress version 2.7, it is possible to update WordPress quickly and easily with one click method. This method is preferred, as WordPress will automatically download and replace the right files by itself. That way, you avoid errors and save a lot of time.

To update WordPress in one click, go in the ‘Updates’ entry of the ‘Dashboard’ menu. If you don’t have the latest available version of WordPress, you will see the message ‘An updated version of WordPress is available’ before two buttons.

By clicking on the second button, you will download a ZIP archive containing the latest version of WordPress. You will then be able to create a new installation of WordPress or manually update your current installation.

The first button is the one click method. If you click on the ‘Update Now’ button, WordPress will lead you to another page which will inform you of the progress: automatically, it will download the latest version, deactivate your plugins, replace the right files and reactivate your plugins. All you have to do is wait just a few seconds or minutes.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-wordpress-website-updating.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/4-common-web-hosting-mistakes-you-must-avoid.html

For a number of reasons, every business should own a website. But most businesses do not have an in-house I.T employee who takes responsibility for their website, they will usually engage an external freelance designer to setup their website and that will be all. In this post, we look at the web design mistakes commonly associated with Nigerian entrepreneurs and suggest ways to deal with them. But first, why will your business need a website? The following reasons justify a business website for your company or small business:

Why You Need a Website

A website is a standalone business and offers a lot of benefits, some of the benefits offer reall support for your real world operations. Here are some of the reasons every business needs a website:

Why Do I Need a Website?

Reason #1 – Online brochure

Companies spend millions creating brochures and distributing them. By having a website you can skip that entirely. Your potential customers can find out about you and any of your products online. If you get most of your business through networking and personal connections, then they will want to check out your website.

Reason #2 – More customers

More than 2.4 billion people use the internet every day, and some 90% of those have purchased something, or contacted a company, online in the last 12 months. So by not having a website, you will be missing out on a big piece of the pie.

Reason #3 – Business value

Have you tried getting a business loan recently? It’s not easy, but if you try and the bank manager asks to see your website, you better have a pretty good one. It doesn’t just stop with the bank, the perceived value of your business will be lower in everyone’s eyes – especially your customers.

Also read: 13 Reasons Every Business Should Have a Website

Reason #4 – Influence

By having a website potentially thousands of people are going to see it. You are able to influence people’s decisions and educate them.

Reason #5 – Time to show off

You know that great feeling you get when people recognize your work? Well, by having a website you can show off what you do and take pride in your work.

Reason #6 – Helps with business goals

That’s right! When it comes to writing the content for your website you are going to revisit things about your business that you haven’t in years. You will most likely reassess your business goals.

Reason #7 – Low barriers of entry

Ever wanted to start a business? Well, now you can do it with virtual space. In fact, by using some free website providers you don’t have to pay a penny.

Reason #8 – 24 hours per day

Your website runs 24/7 without any supervision or need to lock it up. You can always be there for your customers.

Reason #9 – Communication with customers

By having a blog or even just a feed on your website, you can update customers on your newest offers, products, promotions, events, photos, or any other content.

Also read: Website design influence on Google rankings

Reason #10 – Marketing

The internet has opened up a whole new world of marketing that didn’t exist before. Your website can attract new business by using a whole host of low cost marketing techniques.

Reason #11 – Customer support

You can greatly reduce the cost of customer support by have a ticketing system, or even just an FAQ on your website. I can think of about 5 companies off the top of my head that streamline your customer service straight from your website.

Reason #12 – Email@yourwebsite.com

I know there are other ways to do this, but by having a website you can have your own email address@whateveryouwant.com. It is more professional and easier to remember. I know you love your name@gmail.com , but it doesn’t really resonate with customers.

Reason #13 – Press releases

I know that sounds a bit far out, but it is true. You can run really cheap press releases online about your business, but to do it you will require a website. In fact, I have had clients who were absolute nobodies get one million views on YouTube because of online press releases.

Reason #14 – Stick it to the man

The best answer to “Why do I need a website?” would be that you can stick it to the man. It is the easiest way to quit your job and earn a living.

Reason #15 – Any Discussion is Allowed

Do you love sports? How about ballet, alternative dance, photography, holidays, Kit-Kats, cars, skateboards, science or animals? Well, then you have a business idea just waiting to happen. The internet has room for an unlimited number of niche blogs that can attract traffic and revenue. Just pick something you love and start writing about it.

Also read: Starting a new business: Basic considerations and decisions to take

Reason# 16 – Connect with fellow web masters

On a little side note, if you own a website you get to call yourself a ‘web master’. Pretty cool! But reason #16 for ‘why I need a website’ is that you can easily make new business and personal connections with other website owners. This can lead to extra streams of income for you!

Reason #17 – Gives you a voice

Have you ever been in an argument with someone and said “Well, I have written an article about that on my website, and actually, that isn’t the case.” It feels great! For some reason people don’t want to argue with you if you’ve written about something on your website. It also gives you a place where you can voice your opinion without judgment. If someone leaves you a comment you don’t like you can just drag it over to the spam folder.

Also read: Website Security Guide for Shared Hosting Accounts

Reason #18 – Do business your own way

You don’t need permission from your boss or company lawyer. Ash Ambridge drops the ‘F-Bomb’ all the time because she can, and no else is asking her to stop. Now she has a world class business with thousands of customers.

Reason #19 – Easy Way to Beat the Big Competitors

Have you ever wanted to get into business, but don’t know how to compete with all the big names out there? By creating an incredibly beautiful website with a solid strategy behind it you can smash the big guys to pieces. You have no chance of building bigger skyscrapers, but your website can break down the perceived wall between you and them.
Reason #20 – Instant credibility

Have you ever had difficulty making that sale? Or convincing someone that you are the real deal. By having a well structured website you can foster instant credibility with anyone. You can provide the ultimate proof that you are, in fact, the realest of all deals (couldn’t resist that phrase).

Also read: How Small Businesses Can Compete and Win Against Big Businesses on the Web

Reason #21 – Helps you to find a new job

I bet you didn’t see this one coming. I have been harping on about how a website can help your business, but it can help you personally too. Not only can a website host your resume or CV, but by owning and managing your website you have demonstrated tons of hard and soft skills. Having worked in HR once upon a time, I know it is valuable.

Web Hosting Mistakes You Ned to Avoid

From the above, you can see why you need a website. However, there are mistakes you must avoid as an entrepreneur to have your website run smoothly and uninterrupted and here are the most common we have seen from our experience with clients and you must avoid them all:

Mistake #1: Ensure Your Domain is Registered in Your Own Email

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/4-common-web-hosting-mistakes-you-must-avoid.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-fresh-content-impacts-on-your-website-ranking.html

Quality fresh content is like good food for the search engines. The more fresh content your website receive, the more the search engines will love to visit and that also comes with ranking gains. But how often should you add fresh content to your website to benefit from this ranking gain? That is a question we will address in this post.

Plenty of research by some very knowledgeable people has already been done on the effects of blogging frequency on SEO results, and we’ll share those key findings with you in this article. But that won't be without a warning and that warning is that you will never substitute someone else’s experience for your own. No research in the world is ever going to take the place of personal knowledge, gained by first-hand experimentation and tracked results, of what will work best in your own particular situation.

Also read: 16 Mistakes That Turn People Away From Your Website

Ideally your blog is addressing a particular topic, and is written for a specific niche or industry. By doing your own research and compiling your own statistics of what’s working and not working for your blog, you may well find instances where a bad idea according to the research of others is actually working very well for you. Or that what should be a good blogging practice just doesn’t seem to apply in your case. These are things that you’ll never know unless you do your own observation and experimentation..

Later in this article we’ll look at some ideas for conducting your own research to help you optimize your blogging efforts for maximum results. For now, let’s see what others have found to be working for their blogs.

Also read: 20 ways you can reduce your website bounce rate

1. What’s the Lifespan of a Blog Post?

The sensible way to start a discussion of how often you should be blogging is to understand how long the average blog post is going to stay fresh and relevant, which means how long it will continue to attract readers and be shared across other blogs and various social channels.

On average, blog posts have a lifespan of 2 to 3 years. In some cases, it could be even longer. Compare this with an average life of 3 hours for a Facebook post, and 2 hours for the average Twitter tweet. The lesson here is simple: if you only have a limited amount of free time to work with, spend it on something that will do you the most good for the longest time. This means blogging.

Also read: A Guide to Manage Google Algorithm Changes

Many of the longest-lived blog posts are written about “evergreen” topics. Evergreen simply refers to content that never goes out of style or becomes outdated. As long as your content remains relevant to the search term, Google may continue to rank your post indefinitely.

Even non-evergreen content can get a new lease on life by recycling your post with updated information and the latest developments.

Why Fresh Content Is Important

Fresh Content = Frequent Indexing

Don’t confuse this phrase with the thinking that fresh content will always give you higher indexing. That may not be the case. However, the more frequently you update your website with articles, downloads, and new web pages, the more frequently a search engine will stop by to visit your website. When search engines look at your site more frequently, you have the opportunity to achieve higher rankings based on the content you provide. Quality is key.

Search engines use web crawlers (a.k.a robots, bots, like “Googlebots”), which are simply high-tech programs that scan the internet for websites. The web crawler “indexes” a site based upon a number of algorithmic factors determined by the search engine company.

For instance, a site may be indexed based upon a combination of the number of incoming links to the site, the number and type of subject keywords used, and how often a site is updated. Every time you make an update to your website, the search engine takes notice and re-arranges your site’s ranking. Thus, if you want to increase the chances of your website getting a higher ranking, update the content frequently so that a search engine will reassess your position on its index.

Keep in mind, more content is not the key here, quality is. So,, it is a good idea to update frequently, but keep your content standards high. If you blast your page with a ton of low quality articles stuffed with keywords, you are going to be penalized.

Also read: Checklist of SEO Best Practices That Will Drive Trafic to Your Website

Google Loves Frequently Updated Websites

By far, the most frequently used search engine is Google. As the king of all search engines, Google has tremendous influence on webmasters and how websites are constructed. When Google expresses its love for websites that update frequently, this is a sure sign that you should add fresh content to your website as often as you can.

Of course, you should not make unnecessary changes, additions, or postings every hour of every day. However, a site that is updated once a day, or at least two to three times a week, is considered a frequently updated site. The “Googlebot” that crawls the web is constantly searching for web pages that are new or updated and then adds the fresh content to the Google index. If you update your content often with reliable and valuable information, then you have a better chance of Google ranking your site higher with each update.

So, add an article, an image or just make some change on your site to get noticed. The easiest and most effective way to stay fresh is to add a blog on your site and continue to add articles that will get noticed by your viewers.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-fresh-content-impacts-on-your-website-ranking.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-speed-up-your-joomla-website-with-the-caching-system.html

One common problem with Content Mnagement systems (CMS) is that they have load problems. The are slow except you do something about their speed. Fortunately, the developers have introduced a system, called caching, to help mitigate this problem.

Many, especially those who are new to Joomla try to make their Joomla sites run more quickly. They find the caching options which promise to help speed up their site but there are several caching options available and they also need to kknow how to apply each and what they will do to website speed.

This blog post explains what options are available and how you can enable them.

What is a cache?

A cache stores all or part of a web page so that it doesn't have to be pulled from the database. By not needing to connect to the database, a website can respond much more quickly to a visitor.

Does cachingreally help? Yes, absolutely! There are many ways to speed up a Joomla site, but we often see far better results from caching than anything else. As Klas explains in his post, retrieving stored website pages is up to 10 quicker than waiting for them to be created.

Also read: Best Plugins for Faster Loading WordPress Websites in 2016

Useful information about the Joomla cache options

By default caching is not enabled in Joomla. You need to enable the built-in caching features included in Joomla.
Cached content is only displayed to visitors who are not logged into the website. Logged in visitors will not be provided with the cached content.
It does not apply to the Administrator area of the website.
All cached content is stored and retrieved from the /cache/ directory.
Caching is split into the following key areas page caching, View and Module caching.
The system cache plugin takes precedence over global configuration and module cache settings.

Also read: How to Reduce Website Bounce Rate

How does the web cache work?

Joomla wants to present the fastest user experience possible to the visitor. As someone clicks through the site, Joomla makes snapshots of where they have been and saves them to a temporary directory. If the person wants to return to a previous location, the server grabs the temporarily saved page, which should be faster than going back to the data base and generating an entire new page which will load all plugins and extensions. The temporary page is like a static page and so it loads faster.

Sometimes this cache doesn't get cleaned out soon enough, so when you make a change in the administrator area then go to the front end to view it, you're actually looking at an "old" page that hasn't been updated yet.

Read also 16 Mistakes That Turn People Away From Your Website

To make the update apparent, you need to delete the temporary copy and force the browser to build a new page.
This gets double complicated because not only does Joomla make temporary pages, but your browser does as well. So even though you cleared Joomla cache, you may still have to clear your browser cache to see the changes. Clearing the browser cache may not be necessary if the browser cache system is not enabled.

You can minimize the effects of Joomla cache by clearing it occasionally, or you could just turn it off while you are developing and making changes. You can turn it back on again after you publish the live site.

Also read: How to Prevent the most common Application Attacks against websites

Caching Options

Option #1: Cache Settings
Go to System > Global Configuration > System. You'll see an area called Cache Settings with these three options:
• OFF - Caching disabled
• ON - Conservative caching
• ON - Progressive caching

Here's the default tooltip explaining the difference between the two options.
• Conservative caching: smaller system cache.
• Progressive caching: faster, bigger system cache, includes module renders cache. Not appropriate for extremely large sites.

Read full log post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-speed-up-your-joomla-website-with-the-caching-system.html

Dullahi:
This is very informative. I have a question though. How possible is it to migrate an already purchased domain to a Nigerian Host?

It's quite easy. Simply make an order for web hosting with your preferred host and choose the transfer option. Contact them later with details about the transfer. In some cases, you will have to fill a transfer form, in other cases, you just need to mail in cPanel login info.

Web Hosting Tips and Tricks for Beginners https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips-and-tricks-for-beginners.html

Web Hosting Tips and Tricks for Beginners https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips-and-tricks-for-beginners.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips-and-tricks-for-beginners.html

This post is definitely targeted at newbies. You will want to wonder why we should be concerned about beginner instructions for web hosting. Well, the fact is that we chose to answer as much as we can, some of the questions we have been inundated with, coming from new entrants to the web hosting industry. Let us begin with the basic fundamentals::

How to Identify a Good Web Host

1. Check Customer Reviews

Experience, they say is the best teacher. That is true. A good starting point will be to learn from the current users of the web hosting service. Start with client reviews. Check what they are saying and do not be in a haste to quickly accept their complaints and positive comments. Take a thorough examination of the reviews and make an informed judgement based on that.

Note: A critical comment should not be sufficient for you to mark down a web hosting provider. Some clients could be a problem. For instance, some web hosts like Todhost will log you out of client area once your browser IP address changes. This is a security measure to ensure that any new attempt to log in to your cPanel client area is authenticated. Some clients get very infuriated with this and will put the blame on the web host instead of their Internet Service Provider(ISP). The fact is that if you use a dynamic IP address on any system where Brute Force Protection is enabled, this is bound to happen each time your IP changes.

IP changes is common with the MTN Nigeria and Etisalat Nigeria, both are ISPs. We have found that this is not the case with Airtel Nigeria, and Glo Nigeria. With these other networks, you will stay connected with your current IP until you disconnect you internet connection or the system rests wit your ISP.

2. Check Server Uptime

Server uptime is a good way to measure the performance of your web hosting provider. One thing you will never want is to have your website go down. Outages hurt your website’s reputation and more than that, you never can predict the opportunities you lose to outages. This is not to say that an outage is not possible. Outages occur on every network but you must check to be sure this is not a problem current users are complaining about.

3. Customer Care

You may want to try the response time on tickets by sending an inquiry and checking how long it takes for a response to come. Some web hosts provide live chat support on their site. If this is not available, then there should be a telephone line to call in time of immediate need. The best support is usually provided through the ticketing system because it allows a specialist on the area of your question to address and fix problems for you. Telephone calls are good for server restart, re-connection after a suspension and for sales inquiries.

4. Web Hosting Features

Many web hosts offer what they actually do not provide. Be sure to check customer reviews to see that you do not get something different from what you want. Generally, you will have to check the features of the web hosting and ensure that it has what you desire. Most Nigerian web hosts run on cPanel and provide free 1-click install software through Softaculous and Quick Install. This enables you to install scripts like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Module, OpenCart and lots more with few clicks.

Please note that these scripts are 3rd party scripts and your web host will likely not provide any technical support for them. You will need to understand how to configure your website script or you will have to contact a website designer to do it for you.

Website Security

This is about the most important aspect of your hosting – how to secure your website and prevent a hack or an exploitation. Your web hosting control panel is secured with a username and password. This will be contained in an email sent to your after your web hosting account is created.

Note: Before you commence using your web hosting service, please read the welcome email thoroughly because every error could be costly.

If for any reason, you choose to change your account password, please ensure that you follow our password rules and make sure your new password is at least 10 characters, at least a capital and special character and include a combination of numbers and letters.

Display ads and inbound marketing are not inherently incompatible. In fact, applying inbound marketing principals to your display ad strategy can help maximize your potential to reach and attract more useful and targeted leads.

One best way to create successful display ad campaigns is proper planning and positioning. Positioning in this sense include creating a status impression, an image for your brand in the mind of your target customers. In this article, we'll cover how to define performance metrics for your display ads, set measurable goals, and ultimately analyze successes.

Analyzing Ad Performance and Setting Goals

The following is an excerpt from Display Ads & Inbound Marketing.

The starting point for your first ad campaigns is to ensure that you understand what constitutes success for each advertising, which performance indicators to track, and how to measure your progress in real time. We will begin by examining that.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/inbound-marketing-and-the-performance-of-your-display-ads.html

Links have long been one of the primary factors used by Google and other major search engines to rank websites and pages. Which means, if you want to rank in search engine result pages, SERPs, you're going to have to build links.

The problem: there's a lot of information out there about link building. Some of it good. Some of it not so good. Some of it just very bad. So to help you build links the right way, we've put together this complete and user friendly, guide to link building.

In this post, we will be covering:

link building theory
essential skills and tactics
the best link building tools
linking to some of the best link building tutorials and case studies on the web

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-search-engine-friendly-guide-to-link-building.html

ugoboss26:
I want to learn more about this, I intend starting my own Vlogging and making good use of my data for cash rewards, more so I've got passion for entertainment

You will take your time to read relevant articles at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/seo-amp-marketing-tips

Being familiar with how any system works help you to exploit it to the fullest. Google Adwords is no exception. In this post, we examine how you can optimize your adverts placed on Google. Google Adwords is the easiest way to pull traffic to your website. Though the traffic generated through Adwords are not organic, they can also help to bring about some sales and primarily set your website to become visible to lots of people who ordinarily wouldn’t have seen it.
As you probably know, Google AdWords is a pay-per-click marketing system, which is a great way to get traffic to your site. But if you don’t know the ins and outs, it can end up costing you a lot of money and not making you any.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/google-adwords-tips-the-power-of-using-the-right-keywords.html

Generating website traffic is such a crucial and important task for every webmaster. In some cases, not being able to generate traffic creates a problem and could lead to the failure of an online project. Generating natural, organic traffic is a sure way to remain in business and be very relevant. Quite often you will hear website managers asking the question: "How do I get traffic to my website?"

Being able to generate traffic for a website requires addressing and properly configring certain key areas of your website. This is the basic aspects of search engine optimization outsite improving the sppeed of your website. To best discuss this topic we should break this down into categories.

1. Title Tags
The title Should contain keywords and keyword phrases that are important to your site. Our recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 60. Todhost tries not to go beyong 55 characters.
When counting your characters remember that spaces are considered as well.
Titles should appeal to the reader otherwise even a top position will lose a lot of clicks.
For example, "shoes,nike shoes,best shoes,review shoes," is unlikely to induce a click. What may induce a click would be like:
Shoes - Find out the latest styles on name brand shoes.

Although the role of keywords have been significantly played down in Google search engine ranking algorithm, there are some evidence that it is not yet completely over with keywords. For instance, not using the right keywords in writing your web page title is still seen as a disadvantage for competition because it could affect how Google and other search engines understand the focus and offering of your website and that could seriously affect its search engine placement.

Note that although keywords and content generally can be useful in getting the search engines understand your website and what it talks about, keyword density and the likes are currently not a ranking factor. Ranking today is linked other factors like the website title, external and internal links, freshness of content and social sharing.

The role of keywords and how it affects search engine understanding and placement of a website can be related to a real life story of how we dress to be noticed. People dress well or do something bizarre in order to be noticed or make a statement. To get ahead in life or business one needs to be at the top, first in line. Now more often than not, the World Wide Web too functions along the same principle.

With tough competition between websites, blogs, and e-commerce sites what makes one more successful than others is the position a site gets on search engines. The higher the ranking the larger the number of hits or traffic to the site. To achieve a higher position websites use the strategy of Search Engine Optimization, SEO, and content is written such that it contains some of the relevant keywords.

Read full blog post at https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-best-to-use-keywords-in-your-website-content.html

Quuality backlinkks are one of the strongest factors that build up a website's ranking in Google and othher search engines. Google is concerned with the backlinks your website receive and the quality of the links too. In tis article, we shall be looking at how to build quality links which we can also call good backlinks, we shall also look at what should be avoided which constitute back link building. Put simply, this article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

Discusions about today's most popular social sharing websites focuses mainly on Facebook and Twitter, leaving out YouTube. That gives the impression that YouTube may not as significant, creating much impact as FaceBook and Twitter. That is not the reality. YouTube has a lot going for it. Although Facebook might be the largest social networking site, YouTube has the second greatest reach after Facebook in terms of general usage. It's also the second biggest search engine behind its parent company, Google.

Also read: How to get more YouTube Subscribers to your video channel

There are lots of things you can do with YouTube that you might not know about, whether you use YouTube to watch videos, post them, or both. For example, did you know that YouTube automatically creates a written transcript for your videos -- and that polishing them can help you get your videos found more easily in web search? Or that you can use YouTube to easily create a photo slideshow, and even set it to music using its royalty-free audio library?

To help you make the most out of YouTube, we've put together a list of 16 of the lesser-known hacks, tips, and features YouTube has to offer.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/16-youtube-features-you-need-to-know.html

This is a very important topic for webmasters and especially for managers of ecommerce websites. Google ranking is crucial and takes a whole lot into account. In a recent post, we discussed some of the factors not commonly discussed yet are important to rank high in Google. All that had been based on our experience at Todhost. Today, we do a more comprehensive evaluation of the factors to take into account to rank high in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

There are many factors to take into account if you want to rank high on Google but some of them are more important than others. What we will outline below are the essential steps that you need to take if you want to get better rankings on the Google search results. It is also important for you to know that patience is required as you walk through this road.

Why you need to rank higher on Google?

Good rankings are hard to get and when you do it’s only after a lot of patience and hard work. By knowing the benefits of having a web page on the first positions of Google you can find the motivation and courage to work until your targets are met. So let us begin with the benefits of good ranking in Google.

Higher rankings means more traffic – Obviously the first advantage has to do with the traffic gains. The higher your ranking is, the more organic traffic you will get from Google. The more traffic you get, the more likely your conversions will be. Have in mind though that statistically the first 5 positions get the majority of search traffic which accounts for more than 60% of search traffic.
High ranking is a signal of trust – One of the reasons Google became the World’s most popular search engine is because people trust it. They trust it because they know that when they search for something on Google they will find what they are looking for. Ranking high in Google search engine makes people trust you for quality and reputation. Google is currently using more than 300 ranking signals and more than 15 years of research and development on ranking algorithms and they have become very good in choosing quality websites to show in their search results. When users find your website in the first pages of Google they know that it’s a good website since Google is trusting it and showing it in their results.
High ranking will give you more social media shares and comments – A website found in the first page of Google gets more social shares and comments because it receives more traffic and because of the ‘trust’ reason explained above.
Good rankings on other competitive search engines – Once you rank high on Google, you will also rank high on other search engines. Google is not the only search engine available but it’s the one with the most traffic. Nevertheless, the other search engines have SEO rules which are similar to Google and once you get a good ranking position on Google, it is certain that good ranking positions will follow in the other search engines as well.

How to get a higher ranking on Google

Now, that you understand the importance of good Google rankings let’s go into greater detail about how to get them.

Read full log post on https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-get-high-ranking-for-your-website-in-google.html

Website managers and administrators are increasingly focusing their attention on the online medium as a powerful marketing communication tool. This is as a result of the growing importance of the internet ith its large number of users. Marketing is undoubtedly the engine room of every business. From consumer studies to implementing strategies that can drive sales, marketing is the key that determines success. If you have a good product, idea or service and you get it wrong on the side of marketing promotion, you are no way going to achieve the success that would have been with good marketing.

Digital marketing is becoming increasingly important especially as it relates to search engine marketing. Much has changed in the way marketing business is conducted. Apart from the need for careful planning drawn from market studies, there are key changes that shape the direction of every online marketing buusiness.

This outline provides you with all relevant and key information that should shape your decision making as you create a strategy for marketing in 2017 and beyond.

Read more blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/checklist-of-seo-best-practices-that-will-drive-trafic-to-your-website.html

Getting more website traffic is extremely important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Also very important is that the visitors you get should be coming from organic traffic. Organic traffic are the visitors you get to your website through unpaid sources. So, when you advertise your website on Google or other medium, they are paid for and do not constitute organic traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is ever-changing changing and the change increasingly tends towards greater focus on user experience. Search engines are increasingly adjusting their ranking patterns to get highly relevant results on top of its results – what is generally referred to as Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

A good SEO Checklist is the key to keeping your organic presence for your website and taking the best advantage possible. That’s why we’ve created this SEO Checklist. It’s the list of all the essentials you need to fully optimize your website and it will help you drive more traffic and deliver higher conversions for your online business. Before you begin the implementation of these recommendations, it is vital to conduct an SEO audit which will help you determine the changes needed to make better progress.

ONSITE SEO CHECKLIST

OnSite SEO which is also referred to as OnPage SEO focuses on optimizing content for target keywords. This includes use of proper heading, keyword placement, content quality and many other factors.

Title Tags:

Title tags are the main indicator and headline for what a page is about. Search engines use title tags to understand if and how the content on a page would be useful to a site user. When a search engine displays multiple search results, a concise and descriptive title helps the user know your link is the best to click on.

In setting up title tags, you must do your best to avoid Duplicate title tags. Duplicate tags confuse search engines that are trying to determine the relevancy of each page on your site. If you can’t create unique title tags for certain pages, you should consider whether or not the content should exist in the first place.

Avoid Missing Title Tags: Because users and search engines use title tags to understand what a link is about, missing title tags compromise a page’s ability to rank for that content in SERPs.

Long Title Tags: If a title tag is longer than 65 characters, it may be cut off when it is displayed on a search results page. Titles should comprise of at least 10 characters and should not be longer than 0 characters. We have seen search engines display as much as 70 characters but we recommend you stick to not more that 60 characters.

A fully visible title helps the user know exactly what the link is about. If they can’t parse what the link is about quickly, they may abandon your link for another.

Redirects: Redirects forward one URL to another. Setting up redirects is a way to have visitors to a particular web page sent automatically to a different page.

There are a couple types of redirects.

301 – Moved Permanently

This redirect is an HTTP status code for when a page has been moved to a new location or URL. The major benefit of a 301 redirect is that all the value or clout of all the inbound links to the first URL will carry over to the new URL. You might use a 301 redirect when a website changes domain names.

307 – Moved Temporarily (formerly 302 – Found)

This type of redirect is much less common, but allows a temporary movement of one link to another. Unlike the 301, the value or clout of the link does not carry over to the new, temporary URL. A case of a temporary redirect would be during website/page maintenance.

Hostname

Many sites allow users to visit them through different hostnames which may or may not include the www. (http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com). It’s important that all of your hostnames direct to the same site. This is called url canocalization. It simply means that the search engines will be made to index only one url format. So you need to choose whether to allow or not allow the www to be added to url url in search engines. This has become important because search engines could view the url with www to be different from the one without the www and this creates a lot of duplicate issues which search engines do not like and for which your website could get a penalty.

Reachability

Reachability refers to the ability to access the most important pages on your site in a small number of clicks. Your toplanding pages must be designed to allow easy access to your entire website. Good reachability makes for a better user experience. It also helps search engines crawl more pages, faster. If search engines can’t access, and therefore can’t read, pages on your site then they cannot be indexed or ranked.

Anchor Texts

Anchor text is the clickable text of a hyperlink that leads to another page on a website. Like title tags, users and search engines use anchor text to help decide what the destination page is about. This makes for more efficient indexing and more relevant user browsing. Descriptive anchor text also contributes to link relevancy – a big factor in SERP rankings. Anchor tets have also been useful in reducing website bounce rates.

Broken Links

Broken links are links that return an error instead of going to the destination page, file, or image. They can occur for a variety of reasons, like linked content being deleted or a URL being moved.

Broken links can negatively affect search engine rankings because they stop crawlers from indexing your site completely. This means less coverage and poor rankings. Broken links are also a poor experience for the user. If a user encounters a broken link, they may be discouraged from visiting other pages on your site.

Long URLs

Generally, shorter URLs are the better. Since search engines display URLs as part of search results, long URLs may be cut off and deter users from clicking. Shorter URLs are easier to share socially and are more readable. There are several recommended practices for structuring URLs.

Avoid Dead End Pages

Dead end pages have no outgoing links on them. If a user or web crawler hits a dead end page, they are unable to navigate anywhere else on your site. Dead end pages are a poor experience and can negatively affect SEO.

Page Not Found

Otherwise known as a HTTP 404 code, Page Not Found errors appear when a visitor tried to access a page on your site that does not exist (has been deleted) or moved. If moved, a 301 redirect would be the appropriate solution. Sometimes, you may need to use the .htaccess file to redirect to more appropriate page.

Customized Page Not Found pages can create a better experience for visitors, and tells search engines not to send traffic to a non-existent page.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to content that appears at more than one URL. As a result, search engines are forced to prioritize the relevance and originality of each piece of content. This problem had been common with some SEO plugins developed for Content Management Syatems like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal. You can find a way to tweak your settings to avoid this problem. Often this means only one piece of content will be ranked in SERPs, which may lead to poor placement for your URL. Canonicalization or 301 redirect can be used to address duplicate content.

Duplicate Meta Description

A meta description is the descriptive text that sits underneath the title tag on the SERP. Duplicate description for multiple pages on your website can reduce traffic from search engines if users aren’t able to differentiate between pieces of content on your site.

Too Many Links

Too many links can negatively impact how search engines assess the quality of the page, and make your site harder to navigate. Google’s Matt Cutts recommended less than 100 links on a page is a good rule of thumb. While you won’t be penalized for going over a certain threshold of links, it comes down to the authority of your site. In short, the more links you have, the less authority (PageRank) will be allocated to each one.

Server Errors

Server errors indicate there is a problem that keeps your web server from returning a requested page. There are numerous server error codes, but common ones include:

Error 500 – Internal Server Error

Error 503 – Service Unavailable

Error 504 – Gateway Timeout

Robots.txt

The Robots.txt files serves a useful purpose of restricting crawlers from certain pages. The Robots.txt file can be used to restrict search engines’ access to all or part of your site. They can also be used to save bandwidth on your site, which can contribute to faster page speed and load times.

Session IDs

Session IDs are snippets of data that are used to track visitor activity. They are sometimes included at the end of a URL. Unfortunately, search engine crawlers have trouble understanding these IDs, as they aren’t concise or descriptive of the content the link represents. They aren’t intelligible to humans either. Parsing URLs that included session IDs or other parameters also consumes unnecessary crawler bandwidth that may result in fewer pages indexed on your site.

On-site/Internal Links

On-site links (also known as internal links) refers to the way pages on your site lead to one another. Onsite links help visitors navigate the content you provide. They are also the building blocks for the structure (or hierarchy) of your site and reduce your website bounce rate. Finally, on-site links help distribute page authority throughout your site. Better internal linking means increased and better quality visitor engagement. It also makes it possible for crawlers to navigate and index your site – hence, better rankings.

Low Word Count

The amount of text on your website indicates to crawlers the depth and quality of the content you can provide users. Pages with low word counts may receive poor placement in SERPs.(see Google’s update) because crawlers can’t determine the viability of the content. The number of words you have on a page will vary. But as long as your content is relevant and targets a specific keyword(s) that addresses customer need, you will be rewarded by the Search Engines.. Low word count aims to address poor user experience more than anything. Again, this does not mean you have to write irrelevant content just to increase the word count. The primary focus should be how the content addresses user queries and that is what Google is primarily interested in.

Image Descriptions

Image descriptions assist search engines with indexing your site’s non-text content. Incorporating appropriate keywords into your image descriptions or titles will allow those images to show up in search engine results, potentially driving additional traffic to your site. Image descriptions also benefit those using text browsers, screen readers, or other assistive technologies for the vision-impaired.
Also read: Image Optimization for the Web

PERFORMANCE CHECKLIST

Speed Analysis

Website speed has now become a search engine ranking signal. This goes to show how much emphasis Google is placing on user experience. How fast your web pages load has a tremendous impact on user experience, conversion rates, and the number of pages that search engines can index. Crawlers have designated crawl budgets, so the longer your pages take to load the fewer pages may get indexed.

SECURITY CHECKLIST

Insecure Forms

When forms aren’t accessed through a secure connection (https), it can compromise the security of information visitors submit in forms on your site. Secure forms protect emails, passwords, and more from being intercepted by malicious individuals, builds customer confidence and increases the potential for conversions. This makes the use of SSL very important for every website. Take note that the use of the https protocol has also become an important ranking actor in Google.

Insecure Meta Information

Insecure meta tags on your site provide information about the underlying software that could help someone attack or compromise your website.

REPUTATION CHECKLIST

Inbound Links: Links from Top Sites

Your site’s reputation and search engine placement can be influenced by the number of sites that link to it. But more important is the uality of the links. The more sites that link to your pages, the more authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant search engines will interpret your site to be. If the sites that link to your pages are very authoritative, this is an even stronger signal to search engines that your pages are authentic.

An important rule of thumb for any linking strategy is to always prioritize quality over quantity. Because in the end, search engines use a number of variables for link analysis:

The number of links to your pages
The popularity of the sites linking to you
The relevance of links to your pages – Does the anchor text include target phrases on your site?
The linking history of the site linking to you (Spammy websites tend to link to each other)
The freshness of the links to your pages
Social shares – Are your pages linked to on social media platforms?

Conclusions

This SEO Checklist will help you navigate the “must do’s” for an optimized website. The starting point is to conduct an SEO audit and proceed to implement the recommendations list in this post. All the checklist are very important and non should be preferred over the other. Ignoring or downgrading one in preference for the other could hurt your overall SEO efforts.

Source; https://www.todhost.com/blog/7-seo-tips-that-will-help-your-website-rankings-yet-are-not-often-talked-about.html

Every website owner is concerned about top ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This task is a huge one and require careful approach to avoid a penalty from the search engines and also to achieve high performance in the Search Engine Result Pages. The most popular among the search engines is Google and muh of our points made in this post are based on experience with Google, though not exclusive.

Avoid Frequent Changes to Website Title

Way back in 2011, it was possible to make frequent changes to the website title, adding more keywords and gaining positions in SERPs eventually. Today, it is no longer so. You need to be careful with website titles in 2017, making sure you have crafted the best possible title rich in keywords and descriptive of your business. You can read more on how to craft your website title as recommended by Google guidelines in this post covering op-page website optimization.

Website titles play a key role in boosting page ranks. While the role of keywords has recently been downplayed, some experiences we have had with websites we manage point to the fact that Google still uses keywords, especially when present in page title, to understand a website content and ranking placement.

Focus on Less Competitive Niches and Keywords

If your business is targeted at large groups with competitive keywords, a country for instance, you could face real competition with others offering similar services or products providers within the country. You can create pages within your website which focuses on smaller niches, that could give you good ranking placements for those searches. Since organic searches and clicks have been linked to affecting search engine ranking, you could make marginal gains from those clicks and your website could get an overall benefit from those clicks.

For instance, if you provide professional accounting services nationwide, this will be a huge task optimizing for nationwide searches. You could focus on Port Harcourt, Lagos, Abuja, Owerri and Enugu. If you can gain top ranking for these major cities, it will be rewarding and earn you a lot of clicks which will also help ranking for your website even for the nationwide search.

You will have to take keyword research very seriously. In other words, find low competition keywords that your website has a chance of ranking for. Cumulatively, these will help your website gain popularity and usability. Your popularity will be rewarded by Google with greater ranking especially if your bounce rate is low, suggesting that your content addresses the needs of your users. Finding the best keywords for your website is the foundation of a strong SEO strategy. Without a solid keyword strategy as a strong base, everything you do to optimize for search will be unstable.

Use Short, Readable URLs

Most content management systems like Joomla and WordPress have an option for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) within their admin area. You will simply need to enable this option to shorten your URL. In most cases, this option will require that you also enable Apache Mode Re-write and rename your htaccess.txt file to .htaccess

You may follow some guidelines for your specific Content Management System to fully optimize your website with short and clean URL structure.

Avoid Frequent Changes to Website Title Tags

We have tested this changes to the website title and found that it has some profound effect on rankings. Google has noted the importance of site title as a search ranking signal but making frequent changes to get the most out of it could hurt ranking. We found consistently that too many changes to site title led to a major demotion in at least five cases. We could not draw a definite conclusion given the changes to Google algorithm which took place during the period. One site was demoted from top 10 to position 53 and has taken 5 years before it started regaining ranking to 27 for a specific keyword. The title changes were made in at least 20 times. Changes occurred at least once in 2 weeks.

While changing title could be helpful, it should not be done so frequently so that you can see how best each title is performing. Initially, making the changes helped Google to re-assess the website and adding more relevant and specific keywords into the title boosted the rankings. After a period of about eight months, rankings started dropping and continued to drop as changes were made to the title.

Be Patient

This point is supported by the explanation given under frequent title changes above. Be patient to observe how your changes and settings impact on your site ranking in Search Engines. Do not be in a hurry to see the impact of your changes. Just continue to do the normal website updates and observe how your site performs overtime.

Take Website Auditing Seriously

Before you make SEO changes to your site, be guided by at least a basic SEO auditing. These can be done with Semrush, iwebchk.com, seositecheckup.com pingdom.com and woorank.com These are some of the basic tools that will guide you to make changes but they in no ay judged to be the best or exhaustive.

Never Fail to Maintain Regular Updates

Updates are like food to the search engines. If you provide this food regularly, the search engines will always visit your site to see if food is available. So, apart from having a sitemap which actually tells the search engines how often you update, the search engines will always visit once your website dishes out quality food for them.

Also read: Enhance your search engine performance in simple steps

The other consideration should be how often to update. It is a good idea to fix a specific period or day Most webmasters update thrice a week and that is usually Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. We prefer those less busy days and go for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Also read: How to Submit Your Website to Top Search Engines for Free

Do Not Ignore a Sitemap

It is recommended by Google that you have a functional sitemap for your site. Make sure your sitemap is submitted to Google and always check for any reported errors so you can take appropriate action. Most Content Mnagement Systems have plugins that can help you generate a sitemap - both xml and html sitemaps. You can also use sitemap.org to generate your sitemap. upload to your website and submit to Google and other search engines.Every website owner is concerned about top ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This task is a huge one and require careful approach to avoid a penalty from the search engines and also to achieve high performance in the Search Engine Result Pages. The most popular among the search engines is Google and muh of our points made in this post are based on experience with Google, though not exclusive.

Avoid Frequent Changes to Website Title

Way back in 2011, it was possible to make frequent changes to the website title, adding more keywords and gaining positions in SERPs eventually. Today, it is no longer so. You need to be careful with website titles in 2017, making sure you have crafted the best possible title rich in keywords and descriptive of your business. You can read more on how to craft your website title as recommended by Google guidelines in this post covering op-page website optimization.

Website titles play a key role in boosting page ranks. While the role of keywords has recently been downplayed, some experiences we have had with websites we manage point to the fact that Google still uses keywords, especially when present in page title, to understand a website content and ranking placement.

Focus on Less Competitive Niches and Keywords

If your business is targeted at large groups with competitive keywords, a country for instance, you could face real competition with others offering similar services or products providers within the country. You can create pages within your website which focuses on smaller niches, that could give you good ranking placements for those searches. Since organic searches and clicks have been linked to affecting search engine ranking, you could make marginal gains from those clicks and your website could get an overall benefit from those clicks.

For instance, if you provide professional accounting services nationwide, this will be a huge task optimizing for nationwide searches. You could focus on Port Harcourt, Lagos, Abuja, Owerri and Enugu. If you can gain top ranking for these major cities, it will be rewarding and earn you a lot of clicks which will also help ranking for your website even for the nationwide search.

You will have to take keyword research very seriously. In other words, find low competition keywords that your website has a chance of ranking for. Cumulatively, these will help your website gain popularity and usability. Your popularity will be rewarded by Google with greater ranking especially if your bounce rate is low, suggesting that your content addresses the needs of your users. Finding the best keywords for your website is the foundation of a strong SEO strategy. Without a solid keyword strategy as a strong base, everything you do to optimize for search will be unstable.

Use Short, Readable URLs

Most content management systems like Joomla and WordPress have an option for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) within their admin area. You will simply need to enable this option to shorten your URL. In most cases, this option will require that you also enable Apache Mode Re-write and rename your htaccess.txt file to .htaccess

You may follow some guidelines for your specific Content Management System to fully optimize your website with short and clean URL structure.

Avoid Frequent Changes to Website Title Tags

We have tested this changes to the website title and found that it has some profound effect on rankings. Google has noted the importance of site title as a search ranking signal but making frequent changes to get the most out of it could hurt ranking. We found consistently that too many changes to site title led to a major demotion in at least five cases. We could not draw a definite conclusion given the changes to Google algorithm which took place during the period. One site was demoted from top 10 to position 53 and has taken 5 years before it started regaining ranking to 27 for a specific keyword. The title changes were made in at least 20 times. Changes occurred at least once in 2 weeks.

While changing title could be helpful, it should not be done so frequently so that you can see how best each title is performing. Initially, making the changes helped Google to re-assess the website and adding more relevant and specific keywords into the title boosted the rankings. After a period of about eight months, rankings started dropping and continued to drop as changes were made to the title.

Be Patient

This point is supported by the explanation given under frequent title changes above. Be patient to observe how your changes and settings impact on your site ranking in Search Engines. Do not be in a hurry to see the impact of your changes. Just continue to do the normal website updates and observe how your site performs overtime.

Take Website Auditing Seriously

Before you make SEO changes to your site, be guided by at least a basic SEO auditing. These can be done with Semrush, iwebchk.com, seositecheckup.com pingdom.com and woorank.com These are some of the basic tools that will guide you to make changes but they in no ay judged to be the best or exhaustive.

Never Fail to Maintain Regular Updates

Updates are like food to the search engines. If you provide this food regularly, the search engines will always visit your site to see if food is available. So, apart from having a sitemap which actually tells the search engines how often you update, the search engines will always visit once your website dishes out quality food for them.

The other consideration should be how often to update. It is a good idea to fix a specific period or day Most webmasters update thrice a week and that is usually Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. We prefer those less busy days and go for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Do Not Ignore a Sitemap

It is recommended by Google that you have a functional sitemap for your site. Make sure your sitemap is submitted to Google and always check for any reported errors so you can take appropriate action. Most Content Mnagement Systems have plugins that can help you generate a sitemap - both xml and html sitemaps. You can also use sitemap.org to generate your sitemap. upload to your website and submit to Google and other search engines.