SEO Blog

Nobody is perfect. Online, accidents do happen and sometimes servers malfunction. However, if you find your site’s host is faultier than most, it could be time to move on.

Unreliability is a pet hate for visitors and webmasters everywhere. Whether you’re already on the site or just trying to visit it, server failure will ensure that you go no further. This unexpected downtime can have a dramatic effect on your site’s performance and could well undermine the hard work you’ve been doing behind the scenes.

SEO takes time and effort to implement. If you’ve managed to get your site to rank up near the top of the search engines for all your key phrases and have experienced a major rise in traffic, the last thing you want is for unexpected downtime to send visitors packing.
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There’s a myth going around that the Internet is a pathway to untold treasures. If anything was learnt from the last online crash a decade ago, then surely it has to be that you can’t simply get money for old rope these days. Success is possible, but it takes time, innovation and high standards to achieve it.

The Internet as it stands is overburdened with websites. Everybody thinks that they’re offering something new and original, but more often than not, it’s got more than a passing similarity to another. This could be in terms of the products they offer, or their overall business, it may just be site content; whatever it is, having a wholly unique website is not easy to achieve.
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There are, believe it or not, still thousands of businesses who are yet to create a website or, for that matter, any kind of online presence. Of course the Internet isn’t for everybody; if you’ve got a good local base of customers or don’t have the resources to manage a website then it probably won’t add much value to your business. But for everybody else, there’s no excuse.

The Internet has become a modern day pastime. It has outgrown its original existence as just another communication medium in a sea of media to become vital to many people’s everyday existence.  When we seek information it is often the first place we turn to, the same too can be said when we are looking to find products and services.
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When you’re looking to create a website, what should come first? Design, content, architecture, SEO? There’s so much to do, how do you fit it all in?

Well, SEO is largely a marketing tool. It’s designed to get good websites to rank where they deserve within the search engines. It’s a way of communicating with their crawlers and saying “hey, this is what my site is all about, these are the services we offer and the keywords that describe what we do”.
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It sounds almost ridiculous; having an online presence but not actively selling anything. Some businesses might see it as a luxury too far, but before you write it off completely, just think of the potential positives.

Firstly, how often do you find yourself going online looking for offline information? For example to locate a restaurant, find cinema times or just to get a map of your route. It’s a virtual Yellow Pages where all companies compete for visibility, not through size of adverts or alphabetical supremacy, but through search engines.
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The search engines love fresh, up to date and unique content. Are you giving it to them?

Now if you have a conventional business website that has the normal service pages and about us section your probably not going to find it a viable option to keep changing that content. Once you have got it right you will want to keep it that way.

So how do you keep the search engines happy? Well there are plenty of ways of filling your site with new unique content including:

• Blogging
• Resources section
• White papers
• Articles
• Forum
• News section

The above are all great ways of getting fresh content onto your website regularly and I would advise your website have at least one of them to ensure your content doesn’t go mouldy.

Do you spam the search engines?

Now before you say no consider this. Many companies will have a UK and US presence and so have a .com and .co.uk website address. This is fine and a good idea but now is when it normally goes wrong.

Instead of having the website hosted on one of the website addresses and then redirecting the other to it using a 301 redirect they go and put the content on both sites. Bad move and thus you are spamming the search engines and will likely have one of them removed as this is classed as duplicate content.

Now as i said the best way to do this is to use a 301 redirect to redirect the domain you are not going to use at the one you are. Which one you use is down to you and there arguments for both that I wont go into here but just ensue you don’t have sites that are a carbon copy of each other online as it will do you no good.

Are you like the many businesses that don’t backup their websites? what would you do if your web host had a critical server outage and lost your files?

This is a rare occurrence but a very possible one especially with the cheaper hosts. It is a very wise move to ensure that you are taking regular snap shots of your web files and backing them up to a safe location.

Just think of the problems and cost to your business if your website suddenly vanished!