Tag Archives: Google

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Every new website owner wants to know how he can rank high in Google so that his website sale’s take off and he can make a quick buck through his online portal. The truth is that you need to invest pots of time and money to make your website successful. You need to spend a lot of resources in understanding what your clients want and how you can cater to their needs. There is no shortcut to becoming famous or popular, although there are many companies which claim to be able to boost your online reputation. The unethical means that they use are often caught and your site maybe heavily penalized for adopting such means. This article explains why paying to become popular online is a myth and has no long term positive effect.

You Can’t Fool Google

We all want to come up in Google’s ranking for the keywords that represent our products and services. We are all willing to put in a large amount of time and money in coming up in the top 10 in Google. There are also a lot of websites which claim to do Search Engine Optimization and can guarantee tons of traffic to your website. These are all short-lived services, which will be detected by search engines and will be blocked. Google uses an unknown number of factors in determining where and why your website should be ranked in the search results. Some people estimate over 2000 factors which affect your search engine ranking for a particular keyword. Google’s algorithm to rank pages is a secret and is not publicly known. While many people claim to know it, they don’t seem to be very successful at manipulating it.

Penalty For Paid Links

All Search Engines penalize site’s with inbound paid links which try to show legitimate traffic. Google’s website says:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site…Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

As far as the penalty is concerned, Google clarifies that:

“The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results. If you receive a warning for selling links that pass PageRank in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you’ll see a notification message to look for “possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.” That’s an indication that your site has lost trust in Google’s index.”

Click Farms Can Spoil Your Reputation

Apart from the penalties that your site will be subject to by the Search Engines, Click Farms which bring in paid clicks or “likes” or “followers” to your website or social media pages can be harmful to your reputation. The fake profile pictures, abusive comments and suspicious activity can be quite a repelling force for your genuine clients and prospects. Click farms pay people to just keep clicking on links, pages and ads without application of mind. A YouTube Channel - Veritasium has also highlighted how these Click Farms can show false statistics of popularity and mislead webmasters.

Quick Fame Can Be Dangerous

Getting legitimate traffic to your website by employing unethical means may get you listed higher in search rankings in the short term, but it can also lead to your site coming up on the radar of the wrong elements. When SEO firms post your website URL on click farms and shady blogs, it can attract a lot of negative attention and cause malicious attacks to be targeted to your website.

Working hard and working the right way is the only way to get your website to rank higher. Tricks and manipulations may work temporarily but not in the long term.

3 Ways To Determine If Your Website Is Becoming Popular

3 Ways To Determine If Your Website Is Becoming Popular

Everyone knows that their ultimate aim is a popular website which will bring in money, fame and build a brand name. A newbie webmaster gets tons of feedback on what to do and how to gain popularity in Search Engines. Although the advice may not always lead to positive results, every webmaster would like to know how well his website is doing online. Among the regular visitor traffic and statistics, there are a few more indicators which are sure to point you in the right direction. This article lists some pretty sure shot benchmarks to determine whether your website has gained popularity on the internet or is still in a nascent stage.

Alexa Rank and Page Rank

Alexa Rank: 3 Ways To Determine If Your Website Is Becoming Popular

Alexa Rank: To Determine If Your Website Is Becoming Popular

Every experienced webmaster relies on Google Analytics and local website statistics to gain an insight on how and why visitors are coming to his website. Although Google Analytics gives you the micro aspect of your website’s statistics, it may not be helpful in plotting the long-term trend. To get a bird’s eye view of the macro trends on your website, Alexa and Google’s Page Rank are the most reliable. Both these ranking systems take into account a humongous amount of data and relate it to various other traffic from external websites to calculate your website’s popularity. Alexa Traffic Rank also tells you your website’s country-specific rank and helps you to focus on building up a regional market. Google’s Page Rank rates your website on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best rank. Both these ranking systems are well reputed and correctly indicate the larger picture of your website’s progress. The Alexa Rank changes on a weekly or even daily basis, depending on the activity on your website. However, the Google Page Rank is updated half yearly or sometimes even yearly. Page Rank is calculated by Google based on all the metrics and information collected through the Google Search Engine and is processed by a complex algorithm which is a closely guarded secret.

The bottom line for doing well under both the ranking systems is to provide unique content which is useful and of high quality. Regularity of updates and relevance are also major factors which will determine your success. Remember, you cannot fool these ranking tools into giving you a higher rank. Some unscrupulous SEO professionals may lure you into their net by guaranteeing a Page Rank of 5 or 6 for a large amount of money. However, the Page Rank depends on so many unrelated factors, that not even an “ex-Google Employee” (like most of them claim) who has his own SEO business will be able to guarantee you a higher Page Rank. You may see positive results for a month or two, but once Google detects mischief, your website will be penalized.

Brute Force and Hack attempts

When your website starts coming up on the first 10 pages of Google Search, for popular keywords, you will start noticing various hack attempts on your website. You may notice fake accounts being created, SQL Code injection attempts, multiple login attempts from different IP Addresses, a spike in traffic on a specific page and many similar tactics to gain access to your website. All these are part and parcel of becoming popular since everyone wants to become famous quickly by riding on the efforts of others. The hackers also would love to have a link of theirs on your website or get access to your client list so that they may promote their own product or service. What’s the easiest and cheapest way to do it? Deface your website through a vulnerability in the code or system.

Security and Convenience are always inversely proportional. More Security is Less Convenient and vice-versa. You need to maintain a balance between security and ease of use for your genuine clients and visitors. As you grow more popular, you will need to step up the security of your website and actively monitor suspicious activity. Your web host may be of help to you here. You can talk to them to find out how they can contribute to making your website more secure.

Comment and email spam

Another notorious indicator to knowing that your site is popular, is when you receive truck loads of junk comments promoting a dubious pharmacy or praising your website by linking to the commentators website. This is especially rampant in blogs which allow comments from visitors. Don’t be taken in by praises and appreciation of the website article, instead try and spot the spam links which were inserted in the comments.

A similar behavior can be seen in your email account. If you have published an email address on your website, for visitors to contact you, that email address will be harvested by spammers and will be a spam destination. As your website’s popularity and ranking increases, so will the amount of spam in your inbox. It is best to give generic email addresses or obscure the email address on your website’s contact page.

With the good, comes a bit of the bad. You will need to learn how to deal with these adverse situations so that you can maintain your website’s popularity and reputation.

How WordPress Makes Friends With Search Engines. A Look At Google, Yahoo And Bing

WordPress has always been the most preferred blogging platform and Content Management System on the internet. It does contain many out of the box features for making your website or blog easy for search engines to crawl and index. But there is a lot that can be improved too. This article explains a couple of the out of the box features and some more features which you can add using the help of plugins, to make your site truly SEO friendly for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

How WordPress Makes Friends With Search Engines. A Look At Google, Yahoo And Bing

How WordPress Makes Friends With Search Engines. A Look At Google, Yahoo And Bing

Human-Readable URLs with Keywords

On a fresh install of WordPress, you will notice that your Page URL’s or Permalinks look something like http://news.hostingxtreme.com/?p=213452098346 which obscures the true content of the article or information contained on that page. Not only do Humans find it difficult to recall a page number or URL with a number in it, but even Search Engines detest these obscure URLs which are non-descriptive. Instead Search Engines will prefer to see something with a category and a name in it. Hence, WordPress allows you to setup Permalinks which will automatically change the URLs to a modified version of the article’s Title. So an article titled “How Auto Installers Enhance Your WordPress Experience” will have a URL like “http://news.hostingxtreme.com/how-auto-installers-enhance-your-wordpress-experience/”.

This type of URL will be easily understandable by Search Engines and also contains the keywords which the author would like to promote. This allows Search Engines to retrieve that URL more easily and in a more systematic manner.

Featured Images, Categories and Tags

WordPress allows you to add a featured image in your article page or post, which can be used to identify your article and to give it a boost in image results. An article on Fire Extinguishers may have the picture of a Fire Extinguisher set as the Featured Image, so that in Image Searches, it will be given priority for those keywords.

You can also add your article to Categories and Tags. You can setup these categories and tages prior to writing the article and also add new categories and tags as you are writing the article. Adding a category for the pages and posts facilities the internal search engine and also external crawlers from understanding the structure of your website and the grouping of similar articles. This will allow the searcher to be presented with many suggestions based on the category selection of the article. The category may also influence the URL of the article, which may be rewritten to incorporate the category name as well.

Image Information

Search engines cannot see an image. They can only read the textual content of your website. Which is why we have Captcha code’s on forms, to prevent automated submission of the form by software. When inserting an image from the media library, the Alt Tags and Image title is automatically picked up from the Image Name and Image Meta Information that maybe present. This allows your image to be easily searched and indexed by search engines so that the image search results will pop up your image when the associated keywords are searched. You can alter or modify the alt tags and title tags and also add a caption to the image, to make search engines easier to find.

Plugins for everything

For all the SEO optimization features that are not built-in to WordPress, you can always install plugins to do the job for you. XML Sitemaps generation is one such SEO feature which you must have, and can be easily created using a simple WordPress Plugin which is free. You can also tweak page URLs and customize them further using other plugins for that purpose. There are numerous plugins which help you to optimize your site for Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, in a step-by-step manner. You could also try Plugins like All in One SEO Pack for WordPress and WordPress SEO by Yoast which are popular and recommended by the champions of the industry. Don’t forget that SEO is hard work and needs your time and patience to produce quality results.

Social Media Marketing

 

If you run a business in the world, you will have an idea of the importance social media plays in marketing as well as promoting a business. A local company needs to develop its presence online to improve upon and make better its visibility increase. Today, there is no where advertising through social media has not reached and what has made it more popular is the fact that, it is inexpensive. If you have an idea or want to find out what the internet has to say regarding your business, you just need to type in the name of your business into a popular search engine and you will be able to see exactly where you stand and also where your business is going especially where social media rankings is concerned.

The only way you can have social media attention is when you are signed up to any of the many social media sites. They include;

  1. Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular and also the largest social media networks available all over the world today. If you have an account with Facebook, there is so much that you can do where marketing is concerned especially. All you need is to open a page for your business on Facebook and after you do that, you will need to have all information or details filled up. After you fill everything, you will need to update all your business portfolios as well as add some regular content. You can post exciting statements ad ads about your business to make sure the whole world knows what your business is all about.

The more interesting your business page is, the more they click the like pages of your Facebook business page. If you have a business website or blog, you can link it to this account so that, your friends on Facebook will be able to connect from the Facebook page to the website or blog and find out more about the services of the business. What makes Facebook loved is the fact that it has its very own following and a platform with so many people who are always ready to embrace the market.

  1. Twitter

Twitter is another social media platform that has the market for every business to market any business he or she wants. When you connect your website to Twitter, you will have all your followers have easy access to the website. This makes it very easy for you to share all information on your website to your Twitter followers and also have a great time viewing their various comments. With Twitter, you can also interact personally with followers and give them more understanding into your brand and business.

  1. Google +

There are so many people who are connecting to the world on a wider scale through Google + and you can do the same too. You can connect this link to your website and you will appreciate the following you have.

Reach out to your local following or audience with the many social media platforms available today.

10 Myths about SEO

5 Common Mistakes on WebsitesSince SEO is considered one of the best ways for visibility in search engines, there are so many myths associated with them that you should beware of. Below are 10 myths you need to be careful of:

 

 

  1. Ranking first is the only thing that matters

There are so many resources that place great importance of websites being the first in search engine results. This is not true. Although being the first on the page helps to build traffic, it does not assure that visitors will want to visit your website. Apart from search engines, there are other important features that are used to give rankings. This means, you need to be careful and consider other methods of advertising like social media, as you wait for search engine rankings to be the best.

  1. Outside aid is not important for SEO success

This is a mistake no one should consider. This is because the SEO process can be very tiring. This is why you will need the best SEO experts to aid you in ensuring your rankings are the best. Going about the process on your own will only break you and be a complete waste of time.

  1. META tags are most vital

Some years ago, almost every page on most websites where designed with content filled with META tags. So, the question here is why other methods of search engine visibility came in if META tags were perfect. This should show you how versatile SEO is and that it has been designed to be all over the place and not follow one particular style.

  1. Keyword rich domain names are better ranked

This is another myth that used to be true in the 90’s. However; they are simply not used today. To be ranked higher, you need to have pages with the best content that are human readable and understandable. It is however still necessary to have your domain name being your company name in order to make it easy for visitors to get to you.

  1. Submitting your website to search engines is very important

This is simply unnecessary to go through with especially if you are not doing so for a specific purpose. Whether you submit your website or not, you will be located by search engines if you have the right SEO implementations, the best social status and also the very best content for human reading and understanding.

  1. SEO and social media have nothing in common

This is never true. SEO and social media platforms work perfectly well together and with the best social media platform following, your website can be ranked higher.

  1. SEO is not affected by usability

The main aim of SEO is to increase traffic and also get people to want to read and know more about your company through the website which can lead to them buying some products. This means, SEO and usability work well perfectly and one can affect the other both negatively and positively.

  1. Update your home page every time

This is not something that should be done compulsorily. You will not rank high simply by doing this at all times.

  1. The only thing that matters is PageRank

This is very false. You need to have your visitors appreciate the content you give them. This is why although PageRank matters, having great content does too.

  1. Content is not as important as backlinks

This is simply not true. There is no way content will be important more than backlinks.

At hostingxtreme.com, we do not worry about myths because; we deal with quality.