Website Visibility – The Rules Have Changed
Gone are the days of loading up a website or web page with popular keywords (formerly known as keyword stuffing). There used to be many “black hat” tricks that people would use to lure the search engines to their websites. Using high popularity irrelevant keywords, doorway pages and hidden text on pages are all tricks of the past which will actually get you banned by Google if you try it now.
So what do you do now that you’ve got a great new website and you want people to find it? First, don’t rely entirely on keywords and search engines. Keywords are still important but must be added as relevant page content. Basically, that means you should create a page or website with meaningful content and a reasonable use of keywords…but not too many.
Reciprocal link change rules have changed too. Again, like keywords, links should be relevant and logical. If your website is travel and tourism based, it should link with websites of similar topics. Link with too many unrelated websites and you risk being seen by Google as part of a “link farm” which can also be detrimental to your search engine ranking.
Get a LinkedIn, Twitter and or Facebook account and link any or all of these with your website. Post engaging and interesting content in your social network and drive traffic to your website. Add a blog and keep it fresh with content. Add an optin e-mail newsletter option to keep in touch with your customers. All of these things will help get Google’s attention and improve your visibility.
Much better than stuffing keywords and risking a ban!
Cheap Web Hosting
These days, everyone is trying to cut back and save money. If your website is the backbone of your business though, one thing you really can’t afford is “cheap web hosting”. You can find plenty of ads all over the web advertising cheap, inexpensive and even free web hosting but just like everything else, you get what you pay for. Here are a few things to consider:
- Cheap web hosting usually results in your website being down periodically, due to the increased server load. Not good for your visitors or the search engine bots trying to index your site.
- Slow page loading. Nobody wants to wait around for a website to load up. If it doesn’t load up within a few seconds, your visitors will go elsewhere. Again, search engine bots won’t wait around either. Cheap and free hosting often results in page load delays so beware.
- Many of the inexpensive web hosting providers are in a different country. If your business is in the USA, you really should not have your websites served out of India. Search engines take note of where your hosting is being served from and generate search results accordingly.
- Technical support can be difficult or impossible to find when things go wrong. With dirt cheap web hosting there may be no one to call when your website goes down or any way of contacting someone to help. Even if they do offer a phone option, it won’t help much if the person on the other end cannot understand or clearly speak your language.
As you can see, it really isn’t worth the gamble to trust your website to companies who promise cheap web hosting. Alpine Web Media provides both Windows and Linux web hosting based in the USA, with fast, reliable service.