SEO Considerations for Web Hosting

SEO Considerations for Web Hosting

Choosing a web hosting solution that aids in your SEO efforts can be a challenging. In order to make an informed decision, you need take various factors into consideration, including features, technical support and price among other vital aspects. This article will provide some golden tips that will give you the best possible change of succeeding with your SEO campaign.

Company Background - In the web hosting industry, track record is everything. For this reason, it is important that you find out how long prospective hosts have been in the business. This is critical because new companies enter the market all the time but many of them fold within the first year. These flight-by-night hosts leave you out of your money and a website. Experience varies but you at least want to sign up with a company that has been around for a couple of years.

Services and Features - Apart from SEO tactics, you need to make yourself familiar with some of the technologies involved in the web hosting arena. For example, you need to have an idea of how much disk space and bandwidth your website will require to support files and traffic. You also might want to check out the email options for keeping in touch with your clients as well the provided tools designed to help you boost search engine rankings. Hosting providers are increasingly offering features such as keyword optimizers, web stat utilities, Google Webmaster tools, unique IP addresses and others that make it easier to optimize your website and maintain rankings.

Support Considerations - Whether SEO is involved or not, support is one of the most vital aspects of any hosting solution. This is one point that simply can’t be stressed enough as the host forms that crutch you need to even run an optimized site. The hosting provider’s support staff should be there whenever you need help whether it is a week day, week night or rare hour over the weekend. Finding this quality in a web host isn’t as easy as it sounds because support on the market ranges from outstanding to virtually non-existent. You could be doing everything right but without quality support, your SEO efforts are likely to prove futile.

Cost Factor - The last consideration on our list relates to price because let’s face it, no one ever wants to overpay for anything. You definitely want to keep your eyes on the price, especially when looking into a company that advertises their service as “SEO web hosting.” They could be doing so because a special set of search engine optimization tools are included in the package, or simply trying to bank off a fast growing niche market. If you don’t mind paying a little extra to boost your rankings, just make sure you are getting value for every dollar you invest.

Conclusion

There are several web hosts out there but few have your best interests in mind when it comes to SEO. This is why it is so vital to do your homework. Without a reliable hosting solution, you can optimize all you want and still won’t even sniff the pages of Google.

How To Back Up a Blogger Blog

How To Back Up a Blogger Blog

If you have a blog hosted on Blog*Spot and you've upgraded to the new version, there's an easy way to backup your blog.

This page lists the latest N posts from the blog:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=N
Instead of N, type the number of posts. If your blog has less than 1000 posts, you can save this page:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000

To download all the photos uploaded to your blog, DownThemAll comes to the rescue. The Firefox extension lets you download all the files with a certain extension from the current page, so it's a good way to download all the images from the previous listing.


There's also a way to get all the posts in an XML feed. This is a better format if you intend to import it in a database.
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000

The number of posts can be easily obtained from the dashboard.



You can also backup the comments:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000

How To Back Up a Blogger Blog

A Blog Seo Strategy: Maximize The Long Tail

I've come across a blog search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that is a nice way to help maximize long tail traffic to a blog. This may have already been written on before, and I don’t think it’s a secret. But, it is a simple way to optimize what you’re already doing for cumulative results.

This works best assuming your blog already has a bit of trust in Google and your articles are getting at least somewhere on page one.

Here’s what to do:

1) Write your articles as you normally would.

2) Optimize for search with something like the All-In-One SEO pack.

3) When it comes time to title your articles, cross reference what you plan to title the post with Google’s keyword tool. Use the tool to find a phrase to incorporate into your headline that actually has some search traffic to it.

Now, the trick is, don’t pick something that is insanely popular. You won’t realistically get to page one for something with 40,000 queries a month. Pick something with less than 1,000 approximate average monthly search volume and it probably won’t be a term too hot on anyone else’s radar. Smaller here is better, anything slightly higher than ‘not enough data’ will suffice.

4) Make sure your title contains the phrase, use the phrase as a page tag, and throw it in text/description for good measure. Don’t let your writing suffer, and don’t force the phrase anywhere. You should never write blog entries purely for search engine optimization anyway, that isn’t the point of keeping a blog.

5) Publish your post. That’s it – you thought there would be more?

This might not work for every post, but you should be able to find a way to do this successfully for many of them. This is a nice, easy strategy to integrate into your blogging work-flow if you would like more traffic from Google.

Of course, the long tail should catch up with you eventually and bring you decent traffic for everything you’re doing if you publish enough, but if you can appear on page one for things that have even a small amount of traffic monthly it is a nice strategy to bring recurring, fresh visitors to your site.

You don’t even have to be the first result to capture traffic. Here’s an example from this blog – my article on beautiful web design, and using that phrase as the search string.

Use the keyword tool to find a phrase to incorporate into your title…even if you your phrase doesn’t show up in the tool, Google will help you by suggesting similar phrases:

You can below see I’m #7, which is hardly at the top — but there is still a great enough amount of traffic for this term it equals sustained visitors monthly.

Being #7 still brought me 32 unique visits from Google for August. It would have been much more if I was higher up. And, it’s on track to bring me about the same amount this month.

This doesn’t look like alot of visitors does it? It’s not – but that’s the whole point. Imagine you had 100 articles each that were generating around 30 visitors from Google a month. That traffic would scale nicely. What if you had 1,000? Even better. The numbers get higher as you get closer to the top too, but don’t even worry about being number one, you’ll still get some traffic.

It’s long tail, just as keywords that bring you 1-2 visitors per month are, only it is a little bit closer to the head of the graph. The interaction is not as high here, as you’ll notice with the ~2 minute and 49 second average interaction time. But, you’ll win the really specific keywords and phrases that generate deep interaction I talked about in the long tail of search post just by blogging as you normally would.

Granted, most of the traffic to this article has been generated by social media. I published that article on July 30, and clearly it has received more than 32 views:

But, Google will never be a huge traffic driver for you for one article all at once unless you’re at the front for a big term. Google might, however, bring me that many visitors over a longer period to that article.

It’s smart to diversify your traffic streams between various social media sites and blogs in the short term and search engines in the long term because then you are never too reliant on one source for traffic. If someone changes the rules on you, you should be okay if your traffic streams are diversified.

Converting the traffic to subscribers
Adding an email subscription and RSS subscription to the bottom of each post, as Daniel at Daily Blog Tips suggests, is a smart way to potentially convert search engine traffic to subscribers.

That traffic might not notice your subscription chicklets at the top or on the sidebars, as they are looking for something ultra-specific and want to dive right into your content. Daniel’s numbers in that article shows that this is effective at converting, certainly something you should incorporate (I have recently done it here).

Why A Blogs Seo Is Different From Seo For Other Websites

SEO for a blog is different than SEO for most other websites, largely because of the social elements baked into blogging technology. SEO for blogs is less about buying links or tricking inadequate search technology. SEO for blogs is more focused on giving people something to talk about and creating something worthy of attention.

The Social Nature of Blogs

1. RSS and feed readers make it easy for readers to subscribe to every post you write, and be notified the moment you publish it.
2. Many people who read blogs also write them, and many of them have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. If a few reputable bloggers syndicate your story it can have a cascading effect where many of their readers share your story.
3. Popular blogs that solicit reader feedback may have dozens or hundreds of comments on each post, adding unique content which the page can rank for.
4. Optimizing a blog is more about capturing attention and getting credit for spreading ideas than it is about optimizing page copy to match search relevancy algorithms.

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Seo Blog Advice

Free Search Tool

It happens to everyone at some point in time. You have a great idea for a blog, on a new niche topic. You create the blog; you post interesting and creative posts to it each day, and then nothing. You post your brilliant and original thoughts for everyone online to read, but no one is coming around to read your blog. And, because no one can find your blog to read it, you are not generating any links or improvement in your search engine rankings either. What is a blogger to do?

Promoting your blog is essential to its success. You need to promote your blog so that you become recognized as an expert in your chosen niche and can monetize your blog. However, you also want to promote your blog to increase the traffic to your site, reach a new reading audience, and most importantly to create as many inbound links as possible. Creating inbound links ensures that your website rankings and search engine optimization efforts pay off for you in the biggest ways possible. You want to promote your blog to as many people in your niche market as you possibly can. And, you want to do it as often as you possibly can.

Some people believe that the best way to promote a blog is through comments on other popular blogs with a link to your own blog, comments on UseNet or other Internet message boards or forums, posting press releases and articles, etc.. However, the easiest and most time efficient way to promote your blog is through RSS feed and blog submissions to directories hands down.

The issue with using a manual feed submitter, or using an individual RSS submitter, is that it is very time consuming to deal with on a consistent basis. Most bloggers want to write their posts and be done with their work for the day. They do not want to spend a half-hour writing a post and then three more hours trying to submit their RSS feed and content to directories in hopes of bringing in some readers and sneaking up their search engine rankings. The good news is that today programmers have developed some great semi-automatic RSS feed submit tools which you can now choose from to help submit your RSS feed and blog to directories without it being so time consuming.

Feed submitter software programs allow you to simultaneously submit your blog and RSS feeds to literally thousands of directories, and to do it all with only a couple quick clicks of your mouse. Setting up the RSS feed submission software is simple to do and the submission process takes very little time to complete. Using RSS feed submitters is much easier and quicker than attempting manual RSS submits.

If you are a blogger interested in publishing RSS feeds, XML feeds, and getting your feed out into the RSS databases of the world, I would highly suggest that you check out some of the amazing new RSS software tools available to you today on the market. Choose a tool that is easy to use and one which will allow you to reach the maximum amount of directories possible for the least amount of work.

Writing your blog posts should be the hardest part of blogging, not trying to get noticed and dealing with SEO. Thankfully, the advent of semi-automatic feed submitters allows you to spend your time doing your writing and not dealing as much with promotion.