Category — SEO

The annual great web hosting sale is back. Starting from 1st June 2010, all new customers sign up for Budget Hosting, Business Hosting, On-Demand Hosting, Reseller Hosting and VPS will all receive additional 3 months free for 12 months sign up or 6 months free for 24 months sign up.

Search Engine Optimization customers can also receive a 30% discount  off any of our 3 available SEO Plans.

Web Design Customers will receive 20% discount (S$440 Saving) off Milan Design standard 10 pages professional web site design.

Hurry, as this promotion ends 30th June 2010 and do not extend thereafter.

Many people don’t understand how crucial domain names are to effective search engine optimization. A domain name is capable of changing the entire fate of an online business, and this has never been more true than in today’s highly competitive keyword driven market. A good domain name could mean the difference between a page rank of 10 or a page rank of 1.

Search engine optimization can be a very complicated process to try and master, especially if you are relying entirely upon on-site optimization. Although populating your site with high quality content is definitely a good way to get a high ranking in the search engine, there is nothing more effective than good old domain name keyword targeting.

How Do Domain Names Affect Search Engine Optimization?

This question may seem basic to some, however the answer is a lot deeper than most would expect. If you want to fully understand why and how domain names affect the search engine optimization of a site then you need to understand how the search engines think. Search engines base their search results on the usefulness, relevancy and popularity of a site. Now first and foremost if your site is brand new then it cannot be very popular yet, so we can eliminate that form the equation. However, your site does not have to have any daily visitors to impact the relevancy category of search engine optimization. In other words -you can rank highly in the search engines based on just your domain name alone. By having a domain name that is similar or identical to the keyword or phrase you are targeting, you are automatically guaranteeing yourself a high ranking in the search engine for that keyword.

How to Find the Right Keyword for Your Domain

This is perhaps the most challenging part of picking your domain name. If you are searching for a domain name that targets a keyword, it can be very difficult to find one that is even similar to a valuable keyword. It is however possible, and with the right researching skills you can easily make it happen. The key to finding a good keyword for your domain name is targeting long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are basically long spin offs of the main keyword. For example, trying to register a domain name with the keyword “loans” (loans.com) would not be plausible. However you could target the keyword “bad credit car loans” (badcreditcarloans.com) and you may be able to secure this domain. If you can get a domain with that name, and place content on it that pertains to that niche, then you will find yourself at the top of the search engine for that niche in a very short period of time.

Optimizing your Keyword Targeted Domain

Once you have your keyword targeted domain, you will need to fill the site with content that is relevant to your niche, and then submit your site map to Google so that it can be indexed. Simply find a few articles that pertain to your niche and rewrite them or write a few unique articles yourself. Once you have done this you’ll being to see consistent traffic to your site on a regular basis, based on your domain name and very minimal work on your behalf.

1. Navigation Links

After planning the information structure of your site you should have some key categories in mind for the main navigation and some sub navigations to go under each.

Quiet often I see sites that do not have a landing page for their main categories but instead choosing to jump straight to a sub category. E.g. a confectionary company has “chocolate” as a main category link and “Cadbury” as a sub-category ensure that both “chocolate” and “Cadbury” has its own page and not shared that way each page can attempt to rank for its own content.
2. The 3 click rule

The general gist of the rule is to avoid having a structure that requires users to make more than 3 clicks to find your content, users naturally have a short attention span and if most of their time is spent trying to find what they are looking for on your site with confusing or overly long navigation chances are they will leave your site.
3. Allow room for textual content

Pages that are designed to showcase pictures of products should also allow room for a small textual description where possible.

Ensure that key images have an alt attribute defined, search engines are text crawlers and have no visual interpretation abilities so a picture of a donut is just the same as a picture of a cookie if no alt attribute describing the image is used. This is especially useful to differentiate pages have little textual from hundreds of other pages that share the same design template.

Example: img alt=”chocolate_donut” src=”http://www.abc.com/content/upload/images/donut.jpg”
4. Ensure crawlability

Do not use iframes to serve your content as search engines cannot read what is contained within. Opt for creating the content on separate pages instead of using iframes to dynamically populate pages.

Use flash sparingly, search engines are improving in their ability to crawl content within flash (loaded through xml) but is still second-rate compared to plain HTML link and content.

Flash should always be considered as a visual addition and not the driving force behind the operation of a website. The wow-factor of having a fully flash site complete with funky navigation and animations left right and center is not worth losing potential search engine traffic.

HostSG provides search engine optimized web site design services to more than 200 businesses. Contact us today to see what we can do for your business web site.

The times when online businesses only required a simple website and an email address are long gone. Too many countries have joined the World Wide Web and merchants all around the globe have put up shop in the world’s virtual shopping mall which emerged on the Internet.It goes without saying that, nowadays, every business needs a website. This may not be an easy task for small-business owners, who are trying to juggle their company’s start-up process, financial turmoil and everything else related to their new enterprise. For them, there is only one obvious solution; if they want to make virtual history they will have to hire a professional website designer.

As part of their consultation, website developers should feel obligated to mention SEO, or search engine optimisation, to their clients. Many of them do, others don’t. The reason why some website service providers ignore mentioning SEO services is because:

- They presume the clients know about SEO, when in fact they do not. - They assume the clients are not interested because they feel it is not a requirement to be successful on the Internet. - They want to bill the SEO applications as a separate service later on. Even if small-business owners, who are having their first website designed, knew about SEO, it is very unlikely they would ask for it. They may even assume it would automatically be included in their website order. This raises the question: should web designers discuss SEO up front, during initial consultations?

Many newcomers to e-commerce know little about search engines and how they operate. They believe that all they need is a website, and that in no time, their URL will spread like a wildfire by simple offline advertising and word-of-mouth. How little do they know, until months later when they abruptly wake up to realize their online business is in shambles!

Web crawlers are attracted to search engine friendly websites. Web designers know that quite well, and if they want to offer their clients impeccable services they should reveal that information up front. For convenience, they could even include SEO in their basic web design packages, or offer it as an affordable add-on option. By explaining the importance of SEO tools, they would not only help their customers, but also enhance their own reputation. Believe it or not, most people still respect honesty and appreciate all-around services.

Clients, who do not feel the immediate need for SEO, should be informed that the longer they wait, the longer they will be invisible to search engines. These clients should also be told that their costs may be substantially more if they want their website optimized later on. One of the reasons the fee could increase is because some of the original page lay-outs may be unsuitable for a user and search engine friendly design. For example: unattractive content may have to be rewritten, pages may need rearranging and slow-loading flash videos removed.

There is no doubt about it! Marketing strategies have changed and today, no business will reach top search engine rankings without SEO. Be it Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN or Ask, they are all hungry for keywords, link building, proper page structures, HTML, or anything else that will feed their everlasting appetite for information. So, why not give it to them?!

Singapore Web Hosting

When choosing a business web host there are a few more factors to consider than when just buying a family or personal web space, if your site is to do anything other than purely market your business or if you are setting up an E-Business your hosting plan will need to have some specific features. HostSG Singapore Web Hosting plan provides highest reliability and value for money for all businesses, whether you are a start-up or large enterprises.

Statistics, tell you who is visiting your site, when they are doing it and which pages they are looking at, it will also tell you which page they land on first, all of which help you to market you site more efficiently most even record which browser visitors to your site are using which can be invaluable information for targeting software for example.

Email, is a basic requirement of every web hosting package, but a business site will need more accounts and the ability to manage mailing lists, for communicating with your subscribers an incredibly valuable marketing tool. Another Email utility is that of an auto responder, which sends out acknowledgments to Email enquiry and also, cleverly saves the contact information automatically to your contact database. For highest reliability and redundancy, you can consider HostSG clusterred server technology email hosting services.

SSL, or Secure Socket Layer security is a must have for anyone intending to take payments over the internet; it is a way of encrypting transfers that makes paying on line safer and more attractive for your customers.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website indexed and then ranked by the top search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN, for the uninitiated this can be a very daunting and time consuming process and many good web hosts provide a Free rudimentary SEO service, in any event nearly all will submit your site to all of the top search engines for indexing. An additional incentive being offered although not really SEO is the inclusion of Free Google Ad words or similar coupons which help to get you started with one of the many pay per click ad campaign providers. HostSG is a leading Singapore SEO company that assist businesses to rank well on the search engine through proper and extensive search engine optimization techniques.

As you are no doubt aware it can take months of careful marketing for your website to start to rank in the search engines, this is all time when your site it not making you any money, so you may be loath to shell out for a top of the range business plan for this period. Fear not help is at hand in the form of upgradeable packages or packages that enable you to bolt on extras, these plans enable your site to grow as required, and allow you to had more space, e commerce options and addition domains as necessary.

In summary choose well, and don’t be afraid to pay for what you get, check out our great business web hosting solutions. For Singapore Web Design services, HostSG expert in creating a unique professional web site that scores well in search engine using latest SEO technology that boost your web site ranking attracting more leads and sales conversion.

An Internet marketing strategy is not only a good idea, it is vital to business marketing - particularly small business marketing. Having, maintaining, updating, and promoting a website is now a major factor in the success of any business, regardless of size.Creating a website, and then sitting back and waiting for people to find it is not enough. Because of the billions of web pages, you must promote your website every chance you have. This is a critical part of not only your Internet marketing strategy, but also your overall marketing strategy. Customers are very willing to visit websites and learn about new products and services, but they need a little help getting there.

Most online articles, ebooks, webinars, and online courses about promoting a website rely on the web itself. While this is necessary, it isn’t enough, because your business may have many people who are not enthusiastic web surfers, but who would, nonetheless be interested in either shopping online, or learning more about your business there.

These people, the ones who are only lukewarm in their enthusiasm for the Internet, need to be reached in other ways. They may well “convert” to online shopping, or at least comparison shopping online, but they need a little push to try new things online. This is particularly true for very localized businesses, such as farmers’ markets or day care services. There are inexpensive and effective ways for you to reach these people online.

Ways in which you can use offline strategies to market your business and build enthusiasm for your website include: television and print advertising; business cards and business stationery; billboards, fliers, and catalogs; direct mail; telemarketing with website info included in the scripts; and news releases to all forms of local media.

Internet marketing strategy cannot depend solely on the Internet. Your Internet marketing strategy should include every means of promoting your website and building traffic from targeted customers. Television, radio, and classified advertising can be expensive, but if you do invest in these forms of media, make sure that your website is mentioned everywhere, and ask if those media can link to your site from theirs.

Direct mail postcards should feature your website prominently. That way interested people can easily visit your website when they see your web address prominently displayed on the postcard.

While every little bit does help, some advertising media are more cost effective and efficient than others. While your billboard ads should feature the address of your website, a person would most likely have to see the billboard many times before finally deciding to look up the website.

The problem with newspapers, aside from rapidly declining circulation levels, is that newspapers are large, and not neat, and if your ad is buried on an inside page, it may not get much notice. Radio ads must spell out the address of your website, and that is not a very accurate way of promoting it. On the other hand, direct mail postcards are small, convenient, and portable.

Trade journals are another good way to get the name of your website known while at the same time making it easier for interested parties to copy your URL and visit your site. If a trade journal offers to put a link to your website on theirs, this would help even more. Other methods do work and should be at least considered, but in many cases, people will have to see your newspaper or billboard ad multiple times before remembering your address.

Direct mail postcards are small enough to hang onto and perhaps place in a shirt pocket, making it easier to have your website address handy. It is more likely that potential customers will still have a direct mail postcard handy when he or she is on a computer. While many forms of offline advertising can help promote your website, direct mail postcards are an often overlooked advertising medium that is very easy for customers to use to find out about and visit your website.

Whether you are a new start-up or large enterprise corporation, HostSG has the expertise to launch a professional web site that focus on generating sales lead through effective internet marketing and search engine optimization. Contact us to see what we can do for your business today.

HostSG average close to a million page view per month. Many average web site owner receives less than 100 visitors in a month. This article outlines some basic tips for building a high traffic web site. After all, having a traffic booster could means more revenue for businesses.

Key words

This is important for every web site,  find out what keywords are the most popular possibly by subscribing to a site that provides keyword popularity information. Gear some pages to these keywords so long as they are relevent to your material. Write some pages that would contain these keywords (In headers and other text) but don’t overdue it and keep the material useful.

Google PageRank and Getting Links

Google being the largest search engine in the world matters a lot when it comes to getting your web site listed. They use a computerized page rank system based on links and link structure to compute the “value” of pages. This value combined with the relevance or a search (or how closely your page matches the search phrase in terms of exact matches and number of matches) determines where your page link will appear when a search is done. Getting other webmasters to link to your site is a very important part of getting a good page rank.

Create Useful Content

When you focus on providing real value instead of churning out disposable content, your readers will notice. And they’ll refer others to your site - in droves.  Having a lot of content on your site will not only help improve your page rank, but will provide a better chance of getting page hits when internet users search for information. Also good quality content will keep them coming back It may be worth your while to give some useful content away for no charge to help build traffic to your site.

Focus on Helping People

One of the great benefits of focusing on helping others is that it gets fear out of the way. Without fear you become free to just be yourself. You’re able to take intelligent risks and remain detached from any specific outcome because the journey is more important to you than the specific stops along the way.  Visitors who benefit after visiting your web site is highly going to recommend through word of mouth.

Site Map

Create a site map - This will make sure all your pages can be crawled. Some webcrawlers only crawl a site a limited number of links deep such as 3 or 4 links deep. If you create a site map which is available from a link on your home page it will allow webcrewlers to see all your pages within a depth of two links. Having a sitemap is especially important if you use framed HTML pages on your site.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content on multiple sites can get your page rank penalized. Submitting your site to search engines too often (more than once per three months) could get you banned with little hope of a reprieve.

Business owners with their web site hosted in Singapore technically will enjoy the following:

1.  Faster network connection for customer audiences that is based in Singapore
2. You get access to a Singapore based company for technical support without having to call internationally (if you host your web site out of Singapore)
3. Google bots are smart to check if the hosting server that you are on resides on a Singapore IP address or network. Singapore web searcher who use the search engine usually get to see Singapore based company who is hosted on a Singapore web server listed within the first 30 results.
4. Having a .COM.SG or .SG domain may suggest you are a Singapore-based company, but hosted on a Singapore server will boost your exposure within the search engine further.
5. Your business operates in the same time-zone as of the hosting company and not vice versa.

1. Collin LaHay’s Blog Marketing Tips
2. Link Building Bible
3. Google Analytics
4. How to promote your website
5. SEOBook SEO Tools and Information [Read more →]

If you run any Google AdWords campaign, particularly for competitive keywords, you are probably somewhat familiar with the quality score ranking algorithm for all web sites running AdWords campaigns. It is yet to take place, but it is believed that Google will soon factor page load time into its quality score for AdWords campaigns.
[Read more →]

At the recent Ad-Tech Conference in San Francisco, panelists discussed the impact of social media in aiding companies and their market brand. It has been three years since a poll found that 55% of all companies polled had setup blogging initiatives. Since that time one thing has been proven correct, social media has redefined the definition of branding. [Read more →]

When it comes to keyword optimization there are a number of opportunities out there especially in niche areas. We’ll show you how to optimize for keywords successfully.

Search for the right keyword to optimize for

Thousands of people optimize the keywords in what THEY THINK people are searching on, which in most cases are simply useless. You can score #1 for keywords that nobody is searching on. To know what are the actual keyword that work for your industries, you can use Wordtracker. [Read more →]

The more links you have to your site (AKA backlinks), the higher listing you have with search engines. It also brings you more traffic. You can also exchange links with another site. This in known as a 2 way link. A one way link is better though. You can submit your link to directories to get one way links. People can go to these thousands of directories and add their link to it.

[Read more →]

What is Google sandbox?

Google Sandbox is about new websites, it determines the date of the recording site, as well as placement in the Google search results (SERPS). This process may take up to 6-8 months, which opposes the plans are causing frustration for webmasters. The question is, what can be done during the time in which sites are in Google’s sandbox?

Do not waste time to examine your site listings in search results emphasize instead of SEO methods to accelerate and improve your ranking status offers results. Even the efforts of other major search engines such as MSN and Yahoo, as it is not like Google sandbox, it will help drive traffic to your site while he waits for Googlebot your pages to be indexed.

[Read more →]