Website Hosting
Thought I’d talk a little bit about website hosting and how it relates to your domain name, as I get questions about it all the time. What is website hosting? Website hosting is where the public accesses your website from – the computer that has your web files, and where the internet points to when someone types your URL into their browser. Your host company is not the same as your domain company, and not the same as your web designer either.
Some points about hosting:
- Remember your host is just a computer – a beefed up computer usually, but still having similar limitations. It has a certain amount of memory, a certain speed on its processor, a certain operating system, a certain amount of space on its hard drive, etc – and what is best for your website depends on your situation.
- For most situations, I recommend going with a Unix server as it is the least expensive. If it has MySQL and PHP installed, all the better – since most of the open-source software out there is based on that so it will save you money in the long run. (I think I read somewhere that 80% of all web servers are Unix)
- You used to have to worry about how much disk space and bandwidth was needed as the hosting fees would go out the roof, but not any longer.
The cost for both are so cheap nowadays, needing lots of either is no big deal. For my own hosting packages, I don’t even bother listing any limits – I promise to provide whatever you need since adding more to an account is no big deal.
- According to a study done by 1&1 Internet, the average hosting cost is $45 per month, and 40% of small business (SMB) don’t bother to have one. Mostly because they don’t know how, think it too expensive to do, etc. (For the record, Idahowebpages.com will host your website for $25 / month and throw in some free maintenance to boot). The study also mentions that of the ones who do have websites, fully 80% of them call the website “essential” to their business.
Increasing Conversion Rates
As I always say, it is much easier to increase your website conversion rates, than to get more traffic to your site. So I get asked how to best go about it – how do you increase your CR? First thing is that you need to know what your current CR is – duh.
I would recommend going back to the basics – reduce your form fields, place your offer up top and overt, etc.
After making these initial revisions for improvement, you are likely to see dramatic improvements too. But what specifically are the “basics” you need to go back to? A good place to give you lots of ideas is Conversion Critic. Basically they ask you lots of questions about your website, then “score” you on your answers. They don’t actually evaluate your website for you – they make you look at it yourself, which is what I like about it. Also, the Conversion Critic website is ran by people who offer these type services, so beware that you may get a call from them about your site. But even so, it is one good way to go over the basic setup of your site and look for opportunities for improvement.
Now if you have already done all the basic stuff, then your site has already picked all the low-hanging fruit. What you need to do is set up a testing program, either A/B or multivariate, to find out what works best for the type customer you have coming to your site. Google offers both types for free, as usual, and are not bad to get you started.
Free Online Accounting
If you own a business, you know th
at doing the accounting is a real pain. I found out about a free online accounting service that looks pretty easy for a simple income / expense platform – that can be accessed from anywhere. Nice!
Of course, it won’t work for a real business to use – you need real accounting software for that.
Wikipedia pages
An important part of
SEO is getting good inbound links to your website. You want these links to be both relevant, and also of quality. One of the best places you can get such a link is in Wikipedia - which is probably held in higher regard than any other source by the search engines like Google and Yahoo.
I can personally attest to the value of Wikipedia and have successfully made entries for some of my clients. Alternatively I’ve also heard from people how they have tried making a Wiki entry for themselves, and then seen it be unceremoniously deleted by one of the Wikipedia editors – who at times can seem like Nazis! So here are some guidelines you can follow to increase your success rate:
- First and foremost, you need to get rid of any thoughts of “marketing” your website. Sure I know, that is why you are taking the trouble to do it in the first place, but you need to create a wikipedia page that isn’t marketing oriented. You are not there to sell anything other than the name of the company or person you are entering – not the products. The whole point is just to get the page entry – an inbound link to your website from Wikipedia.
- Not every website or company is fit to be in Wikipedia. It is a hard truth to accept sometimes, but there it is. If you are trying to put lipstick on a pig – you need to be aware of it and press harder with the lipstick (smile). But still Wikipedia may just delete your work anyways.
- Put on your best journalist hat and try to write something that gives the Who, What, When, Where, and How for the subject matter. Write it like it would look in a encyclopedia even. Write it up in your favorite word editor first. You will also need to have links in your page that will validate it – so hopefully your subject matter is written about somewhere else so it can be shown to be “worthy” of the wiki entry.
- Now go to the Wikipedia website and sign up for an account – you have to login to edit any pages.
- Take a look around at similar pages to those you want to create. Maybe you want to make a page on a song writer, so take a look at other song writer pages. Find one you like the looks of.
- Now click the Edit button at the top of the page, as if you were going to change something on it. Don’t change anything – just copy all the code that is there – paste it into Notebook.
- Do a search for the term you wish to use – for instance if I was making a wiki page for website-help-blog.com – I would type that in and search for it. You should get a page that says the term is not in the Wiki – and this is what you want to see. There is a link there that you click to create a page with that name – click it.
- Now take the code from the page you liked in step 6, and paste it into the new page. Then edit the code using the text you wrote in step 3. The wiki uses special code, and there is a tutorial there you can check if you get stuck doing something. Good luck with that though – I’ve always found it much easier to just find something on another page and copy it from there.
- Preview the results of what you have done before you save it. Make sure it is what you want – so you don’t get deleted needlessly.
- Now go into Wikipedia to some other pages and link to your page – for instance maybe there is an existing list of song writers you can add your page to. Find as many of these as you can, and link back to your newly created wiki page.
Blog Move
I’ve moved the location of the Website Help Blog from its old location into its own URL: http://www.website-help-blog.com. Please update your bookmarks, thanks.
Disposable Email Addresses
Posted by Joe in Maintenance on June 29th, 2009
Tired of all the spam? One method to avoid the spam is to use a disposable email address in those situations where you have to give it out. Say you want to sign up to access some forum or blog, and they require an email address so that you can “opt in” to their system.
All you need is a throw-away email address to recieve their opt-in email – and you avoid the inevitable spam emails that will follow.
There is a website called 10 Minute Mail where you can get a free email account for just this purpose. Pretty slick idea.
Adding “Live Chat” to Your Site
One option available to any website owner is placing ‘live chat’ on their website. I have it on some of my websites, and there are pros and cons to having it:
Pros:
- It is inexpensive to place on the site – some nice chat software is available for about $20 / month.
- Very easy to set up – can be up and running in usually under 10 minutes (although you do have to set up how you want it to run, and do some testing / training on it)
- You can raise your over-all conversion rate by being able to communicate with those people in a hurry, or with those people who want to remain anonymous.
- The functionality for most of the chat companies is pretty high. The ‘live chat’ emblem on the site will automatically let the site visitor if you are online or not – and if not will send you an email notification someone tried contacting you.
- An excellent side benefit is that you can get some analytics on your website visitors, like where they are located, what keyword they used to get to your site, what pages they’ve viewed, how many times they’ve visited your site, all in real time. (if you are smart, you are already getting this info with real analytics software)
Cons:
- You have to have someone available
to answer questions.
- You can annoy your website visitors by being too intrusive – like if you have a pop-up that keeps asking them to chat.
Overall, the pros easily outweigh the cons. It is just another tool you can use to be more successful. Sure, having chat doesn’t make sense for every type website – but any website where a ‘conversion’ is important it only makes sense to include chat as an option.
Color Schemes
When talking about a website design, the color scheme is an important aspect to determine – more important than I think is given credit. An easy way to get a good color scheme is to simply look at a successful website on the web, and see how they are doing it. Then you just “emulate” what they have done! LOL
Another way, more personal and fun, is to use a tool like the Color Scheme Designer. It allows you to set all the different variables, number of colors, the color hues, and much more. It will even show you the color scheme in a webpage mockup, and then let you export the colors for future reference. Pretty slick, so much so that it is easy to spend an hour or two just playing around.
Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines
A fair amount of my time is spent dealing with SEO issues, so I thought it would be a good idea to give some details on what you can do to quickly “SEO” your website – to make it search engine friendly. Listed below are what I consider to be the most important aspect of your on-site SEO efforts. (not to confuse with the off-site tasks needing done) I’ve listed them in order of importance – and yes, they are all important. I’m assuming you already know what your most important keywords are.
- Title meta tag – this is in the source code for your web page, also visible at the very top of your browser w
indow. Each page should have a unique title tag, and it should clearly state what the page is about. If your web page is about the instructions for using a doohickey, then it should say something like “Doohickey Instructions”.
- H1 tag – this is the main tag (or should be) on your website, that usually displays at the top of the page. It should reinforce the main Keyword for the page, maybe even introduce some secondary ones. Like “How to Use and Operate Your Doohickey”
- Description meta tag – also in the source code, this is what the search engine is likely to display, if you are lucky enough to get listed in their search results. Keep it short, clear and concise so that people looking at the search results page know to click on your link or not. “Instructions for using a Doohickey – everything you ever might need to know.”
- Navigation text – this is the clickable text you use to navigate between the pages of your website. All other pages of your site should have link text saying something like “Doohickey Instructions”. You don’t want the link to be “click here”.
- Link text – similar to the navigation text, this is just all the other links on your site that navigate people around.
- Text content – lastly you want the content of your website to be “keyword rich” in that it reinforces the main keywords of the page. Don’t just repeat the same main keyword over and over – you want to create a keyword ‘theme’. Like this; Doohickey instructions, how to use a doohickey, operation of a doohickey, doohickey dos and donts, hints on using a doohickey, etc, etc.
If you do each of the above – you’ve just tackled maybe 90% of what is needed done on a new website.
(Want to see the “source code” for your web page? Just right click on the page, click ‘View Source’ or ‘View Page Source’)
Google Content Network
I watched a webinar today that promised to “demystify” the Google Content Network, produced by PointIt. These sorts of events are almost always pretty boring, but I go thru the pain so you don’t have to! And also to get the occasional Golden Nugget.
What is the Content Network? The content network is made up of all the websites who signed up for Google Adsense, where the Google ads appear on your website and you are promised marketing revenue in exchange. Anyways, they had some pointers for managing the Content network in Google that made some good sense, so thought I’d pass it on:
- Set up a campaign specifically just for your Content PPC – keep your regular Search PPC in a seperate campaign.
- Only use a maximum of about 25 keywords in each, keep them all ‘broad’, and make sure they are all in the same theme for where you want your ad to appear.
- Enter a bid price for each to ensure they get an ad placement into the top 4 ads
- Initially let Google decide which websites your ads should appear on. Later use the Placement Performance Report to see how each site is doing. You can then exclude those websites that are not working for you using the Google Exclusion tool.
- There is also a Keyword Grouper tool that will help you build good keyword “themes” in each campaign – which is important that they are tightly grouped, as the theme is how Google determines what site to place your ads on.