The moment we create a website and have been round for a while, we start talking big, using “appropriate”  terminology, because everyone else is and that is the only way we are seen as knowledgeable.  But how many of us really know what all those traffic terms mean?

What is the difference between hits and page views?  I know at least some of you are stumped!!

I did not say all, so do not be offended if you are a high-flying marketer that actually understands everything.

We all know that to achieve perfection in something, we need to dig deeper and gain familiarity with all related aspects.  It is the same when it comes to assessing your traffic.

The various traffic analyzing solutions out there give you a host of details related to your website traffic, which can help you work on your SEO better.  But what good are they if you do not know how to read them?

Let “read” some of the more important stats:

Visitor: A human visitor coming from a particular IP.  We are not talking of bots here.

Unique visitor: A human visitor that has never visited any part of your site before and is visiting for the first time.

Repeat visitor: Clearly, it is someone who is not visiting for the first time and may have visited one or more times in the recent past.

Hits: A web page consists of several files; each of these files is considered a hit when the page is loaded. Hits are not necessarily loading “pages.” There may be several different elements on a page, such as pictures, images etc. Whenever a visitor opens any of the elements on a page, it is considered as a hit.  Visiting a number of elements makes it “multiple hits.”

Page views: When the visitor loads one of the pages on their browser. It is considered to be a page view when a visitor looks at a page on the web site, irrespective of the number of hits on that page.

Visits: When a human visitor or a bot visits your web site, it is counted as a “visit.” There can be a number of hits or page views in a single visit.

Multiple visits:  Made by a single visitor that visits your pages more than once.

Bounce rate: This is the rate of visitors who visit a page and leave from the same page without going further and visiting any other pages.  This helps determine the effectiveness of an entry page.  A web page that has the capacity to lead visitors to different pages on the website will show a low bounce rate.

Time on site:  This is the time visitors spend on your site and when they spend long, it could mean that they find your site interesting. However, the problem with this is that many visitors may just leave their browsers open even when they are not viewing your site, giving you misleading information.

%Exit:  This reveals the number of visitors that exit from a particular page on a website.

One of the most common myths is that the website needs lots of hits, because hits are felt to be synonymous with traffic. For example, if there are 20 images on one of your web pages and the visitor opens some or all of them, it generates hits.   There can be hundreds of hits from a single page view.  If someone tells you that they had X number of hits, you now know that it is not an indication of the number of visitors to their site. There are many webmasters who mistake the number of hits as visitors.

The most appropriate way to measure your website activity is by assessing a variety of traffic stats, such as the number of unique visitors, number of page views, search engine traffic, keywords through which your organic traffic landed on your web site, files that were downloaded the most, the way these visitors move around the site and a whole lot more.

Knowing what these stats reveal helps you, as a webmaster, in several ways.  They can come in handy even when you are buying a website, because most people selling sites show elaborated stats, which may not always reveal the exact status of a website.

Day-to-day management in the form of regular checks of a website is essential to ensure it is well optimized and shows the expected results.

Check your Website Code

While this may not always bring to the fore any issues, it is a good idea to go back and check your website code once in a while.  Whether you find a problem or not, you may want to do something to enhance or bring it up-to-date for search engine optimization.

If you look at Diagnostics under Google Webmaster tools, you will find if there are any missing title tags, duplicate title tags, long title tags or short title tags.  If you find that there are duplicate title tags, you can fix that, as that can create problems with your SEO.

Indexing of Your Site

You obviously know that your site and the pages on the site need to be indexed for the search engines to bring them up in the search results.  Tracking the indexing of your site reveals important information about the number of visitors your pages are receiving from a search engine. This shows the pages that are actually generating traffic.

Checking the indexing details is also important to see if there are any issues with duplicate content indexing or exit URLs on affiliate sites etc. You will also have to check if the number of pages indexed by Google is showing the same as what is seen through your Google analytics account.

Appropriate Keyword Usage

As the practice of SEO keeps undergoing a sea change every so often, what you have done a year ago may not be appropriate today.  Check your H1 tags, page title tags and meta description to see if they cater to the search engines today. See if the appropriate keywords are used in the post title tags.  Check the meta tag description to ensure keywords are used appropriately.  If you have not used H1 tags earlier, then it is time you did as this helps with optimization.  Search engines also love finding keywords in the url and the content of the page.  Use keywords appropriately without stuffing the pages with non-relevant keywords.  Work on this on-page optimization and see the difference it makes to your ranking.

Page Not Found Errors

Those 404 errors you encounter when visiting websites are “page not found URLs,” that can happen for a variety of reasons, such as when post slugs or permalink structures have been changed.  They are one of the worst errors that a website can encounter as it increases the bounce rate.  It can be a problem with the search engines or the internal and external links keep on sending traffic to the old URLs.

Google Webmaster Tools gives you a list of all the 404 errors found by the Googlebot and you can also use a plug-in to get notification to your email whenever such an error comes up.  Fix them immediately so that your visitors are not shown the door to your competition.

These are just a few things that you need to keep checking often to ensure you stay fully optimized and stay in the good books of the search engines. If you have too many websites to handle, forget the dud websites and go back to the pages that are actually bringing in some traffic and work on them to ensure they do better and rank higher.

Traditionally, companies had personal relationships with their customers, but this gave way to cold and impersonal management information systems. In the last few years, with the growing competition, decreasing customer interaction and changing customer attitudes, businesses have begun to realize the importance of restoring a human face to their companies.

This is precisely the reason why so many companies these days establish an online presence. Out of all the marketing strategies available for businesses, blogging is being claimed as a paradigm shift in the way companies connect to existing as well as future customers. A cover story on an issue of BusinessWeek as far back as 2005 reads, “Blogs will change your business.”

Corporate blogs are created by companies to meet their goals and marketing objectives in the most efficient manner possible.  Blogs allow the initiation of an ongoing and honest communication with the market, thus getting the customers involved and creating trust. The company enters into a conversation with an unlimited audience openly, in full view of everyone including its competitors.  Companies can fulfill customer needs as opposed to hard selling, which is an indirect way of turning them into customers.

Corporate blogs are usually of two types: Internal and external.  While internal blogs are those that are generally used by the employees to improve employee participation and discussion; external blogs are places where the company representatives post content and share their views with their audience.

Let’s look at what external corporate blogs offer companies:

Open Forum for Public Criticism

There are many corporate blogs that have high numbers of subscribers. For example, the official Google blog is among the top blogs worldwide.  Corporate blogs provide a platform for people to discuss, applaud or criticize anything related to the company openly.  This open nature of blogs gives visitors a secure feeling that there is no hidden agenda and they get what they see.  Over a period of time, this builds trust and increases the number of potential customers.

Window to Company Culture and Policies

Although, a corporate blog tries to accomplish the same goals as press releases do, this is done in the most informal manner.  This informal nature of the blogs allows companies to reveal the company culture and any changes in policies through their posts which are read by everyone that visits their blog.  These messages also spread through word-of-mouth or through back linking which is an integral part of blogging, and ensures company news reaches far.

Feedback on Products and Services

Companies look to their audience to let them know their opinion on their products and services. Some companies develop product evangelists and give them a lot of importance.  These people are asked to give feedback on product testing, the company’s marketing plans, customer services etc.  Before launching new products, companies can find out exactly what their customers are looking, what they like and what they do not like.  Blogging provides an accurate perception of customer needs.  Blog conversations offer the same effect as ads or huge surveys, but without having to spend thousands of dollars needed for traditional methods.

Increased Customer Relations

The human face of a corporate blog adds a level of credibility that is often not possible using traditional marketing methods. The informality of a blog and the timeliness of information posted, help increase transparency and build up the corporate image. Customers love the interaction, which is on a much more personal level and helps nurture long-term relationships that every company longs for.

Build a Community Around Your Blog

People look for information on companies, their products or services, and nothing is appreciated more than getting it directly from the company itself. A corporate blog can, through the content posted attract future customers.  The diverse input that is a result of inherent consumer involvement indicates trust and acts as the key to community participation. The growing visitors to a corporate blog, their comments and ideas, assist in forming a community that thrives and proves beneficial to the company monetarily and in other ways. Every bit of organizational news will echo throughout the blogosphere attracting a larger audience. Even years of traditional marketing may not yield such great results in the formation of a highly targeted community.

The Viral Effect of Blogs

Once you have developed a loyal base of customers through your customers, the viral effect takes over. Your existing visitors will bring many more to your blog, through track backs and back links. If a blogger likes the content of your blog, they will link back to you.  This way, the visitors to their blog will be shown the way to your corporate blog.

These are just a few ways how corporate blogs help businesses build their image, brand, community and help them come up with better products and services.  The perception of your brand increases multifold, giving you an edge over competition. Your company gains the benefit of public relations, customer relations, sales generation and every other marketing aspect that a business needs to be successful.

LEARN HOW TO BLOG

Building your first website can be an exciting (yet challenging) task.  This article deals with how to get your website online once you have it created.  However, if you have not yet created a website, you can check out our article on how to use wordpress to create your own site easily OR you can purchase web design from one of our professional partners.

How to Get Your Website Online in 3 Easy Steps:

Step 1: The two things you will need to get your website online is a domain name and web hosting.  A lot of place like godaddy want to charge you an arm and a leg for each of these items separately.  However, there are a few web hosting providers that will give you a free domain name when you purchase web hosting with them.  With this in mind we have listed a few hosts that will give you a free domain name.

• Hostmonster – $3.95 a month
• Bluehost – $3.95 a month
• Justhost – $3.45 a month

* You will need to sign up for one of these web hosting accounts before moving to step 2.

Step 2: If you have designed your website you will need to upload your files to your new web hosting account.  You will do this by using a FTP program.  FileZilla is a great FREE ftp program.  After you sign up for web hosting with one of the three hosts above you will receive an email with your account FTP information, you will simply plug this information into FileZilla. If you need additional help, we have a great (and detailed) article that discusses how to upload your website using FTP.

Step 3: By this step your website is actually online and visible to you; however, you now will need to market your website.  Depending on what type of site you have you can do this in many different ways.  If you are looking to create a profitable online business you will want to create a SEO Friendly website.  I have also found it very rewarding to advertise using Google Adwords. There are a lot of web hosting providers that will give you free Google Adwords credit when you get your website online with them.  Local businesses, churches, and personal sites can typically rely on word-of-mouth advertising.  Be sure to place your website address on all of your literature (brochures, business cards, signs, etc.)

As always feel free to contact us if you need any additional help!

]]> http://www.alreadyhosting.com/blog/2010/02/getting-first-website-online/feed/ 0 http://www.alreadyhosting.com/blog/2009/12/the-horrors-of-a-hacked-website-how-to-repair-and-secure-your-website/ http://www.alreadyhosting.com/blog/2009/12/the-horrors-of-a-hacked-website-how-to-repair-and-secure-your-website/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:33:36 +0000 admin http://www.alreadyhosting.com/blog/?p=579 Many a website security is compromised because of lack of proper monitoring systems in place.  Websites can be infected with all sorts of viruses, Trojans, iframe injections and a zillion other forms of attacks.

If your website has already been hacked, you need to take instant action in regaining control. The first thing that needs to be done is to check for problems on your computer. It could be happening from your computer itself.

Scan Your Computer

Towards this end, it is essential to first scan your PC with an anti-Malware program and an anti-Virus program.  After checking with the anti-virus program that is installed on your computer, you can double check with a variety of free online anti-virus programs available.

Some of the free programs available are:

• ABG Free anti-virus scanner
• AdAware Free anti-malware scanner
• Microsoft Windows Defender, which is a free anti-malware program
• Spybot Search and Destroy, a free anti-malware program

There are several others, but these are a few of the more popular scanners.

Take Your Website Offline

If your pages are infected with viruses, any visitor to your website will also be attacked. It is your duty to protect your visitors and this is the only way to ensure your reputation is intact.  The first thing that needs to be done is to take the website offline, which involves adding a few lines to your .htaccess.  If done right, a warning saying that the site may harm their computers will flash in Google and other search engine results.

If you think that this will harm your reputation, you must consider the fact that most visitors who find your site may not even notice this and there is a greater chance of them returning later; whereas, if they suffer from a virus attack because of your website, you would be losing them forever.

Another reason for taking it offline is because there may be a security hole that caused the site to be hacked in the first place.  You don’t want that to happen again until you fix all the issues and secure your website.  The hackers may also have installed a script to access the site.  Closing your site for a while will block them out and no script can help them get in.

Report To Your Web Host

Open a support ticket letting your web hosting company know what happened.  Try and explain clearly whatever you know.  There are many web hosts out there that will help you clean your site; of course not everybody does, but then it is always better to find out if they can help or give you some advice.  If you are using shared hosting, there is a possibility that the web host may know of other websites that are affected too.

Change Passwords

Once the PC is free of viruses, it is crucial to change the cPanel, email, FTP and database and all other passwords.  Make sure the new passwords are very strong and difficult for people to decipher. Try and use different passwords for each and everything.

Once you’ve repaired the damage done, it is time to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  You will have to manage your website properly keeping it safe and secure.

Here are a few tips:

• Install a good antivirus software program on your PC. You will need real-time continuous protection as scanning it once a day is not good enough. Malware has the ability to delete itself after causing the damage.

• Install all the latest security patches on Windows systems as well as all other internet-related software.

• Use strong passwords using upper and lower case letters, numeric as well as punctuations in the password.  Do not use the same password for everything.

• You must make sure it is safe before downloading anything from the internet; whether it is a script or something else.

You must give your website the same importance you would give the house you live in. Just as you would secure it properly to make sure nobody gets in, you must ensure your website is locked for all bad elements.

You are at the top of the search results and getting great search traffic; all a result of your search engine optimization and promotion.  Your visitors are increasing by the day and your business is flourishing.

In this scenario, what happens when your servers and site stop functioning or issues start cropping up?  Your being on top of the search results is not going to help if your visitors cannot get to your site or have other issues.

A website needs to be protected from hackers, viruses, worms, hardware failures and several other problems that could put your business at risk; especially for medium and big businesses.  Internet connectivity and database management is crucial to the success of your business.

This is where the Website monitoring companies prove to be useful.  They specialize in server, site and email monitoring.   They take up the responsibility of website monitoring and ensure that the website is functional at all times and the performance is not affected. Email monitoring is done through ensuring the SMTP servers are in order to process emails in a perfect manner.  Where server monitoring is concerned, it is the performance and functioning of servers such as FTP etc. that is maintained.

These monitoring services follow different ways of ensuring their clients’ websites are performing fine.  They themselves connect to the server or site frequently to verify the operational status.  Some of them use ping to check for a response from the server.  Others use different methods such as checking the database connectivity, web page code etc.

When hiring a monitoring service, site owners have to first understand how the service is going to monitor the website.  If they are only using ping to check for the status, this may not be the perfect way as ping does not always guarantee that a server or website is operational.  A good monitoring service also has to provide statistics to website owners to reassure them that everything is being done as per the agreement.

When you hire a monitoring service, some of them install software on your server. This is done very rarely these days as most services have the capability of checking sites and servers from their end.

You should also find out the “monitoring interval.”  This is the gap between every site check or how often the site is checked. The packages can range anywhere from two minutes to one hour.  If you have a site which needs to be checked every two minutes as it is crucial that there are no problems, you will need to subscribe for that package.

But for any monitoring service is be used most efficiently, it is important that you are in contact at all times.  For example, if you pay for monitoring every two minutes and you set up things to be sent via email notification, and you only check your emails once a day, the purpose is lost.  So you have to carefully understand how you are going to be notified and then decide based on that.

The rates of these monitoring services usually depend on the monitoring interval.  They are usually in the range of $50 or $60 per month, which is not too bad for the security of your company.

Monitoring can be valuable to businesses where their websites are important for the business. Having a monitoring service from outside your office is a great idea and ensures you have everything in place, such as firewalls and other security aspects of your website.

For professional web hosting check out AlreadyHosting.com!

Designing an internet business is important and it entails far more than just creating a website and promoting products or services.  If you look around, you will find hundreds of websites that do nothing to retain their visitors’ interest, making them leave.

While the look of the website and the products/services that deliver value is important, it is also important for your site to communicate that value effectively.

Here are some essentials that will spell the difference between success and failure of your online business:

Professional Website Design

Here I’m not talking about using flash or other visual effects that will slow down the loading of your web pages.  Your website needs to be considered genuine, and people should get a feeling that there is a concerned individual behind the site who cares enough for the visitors to ensure the website is presented well.

The website should be designed using appropriate colors and graphics that blend well together. The content on the site should be professional with useful information and without grammatical errors or typos, which reflect the carelessness of the webmaster. Images should only be used where necessary and should not distract the visitors from the main purpose of their visit.

Sales Page

This is where you are actually selling to your visitors.  You will have to list all the good things that your product offers; the money that can be saved, the money they can make, how it offers more freedom or security for them and their families, the time saved, the convenience factor etc.

In this section, give your visitors what they want and the way they want it, which is enough to get them to buy from you.

Easy Navigation

Navigation is very important as it allows visitors to go from page to page on your website with ease.  All the internal pages should be connected to the home page.  Your visitors should be able to find all the different sections of your site with a glance.  Ensuring that the navigation is similar in all the pages helps visitors.

Index Page

This page should tell your visitors everything about your product or services.  They should be given a clear picture of the purpose of your site.  If needed, you can add images of the products to make things clearer.

Logo

While many people may not pay attention to this aspect of a website design, it reflects professionalism.  You can add that “trust” factor with a good business logo design.  Just make sure the logo goes well with the color and theme of your website.

FAQ

This is important to be able to answer any questions your visitors may have; especially so if you are selling products. You can add every question that may not have been cleared in the main sales page.  This helps increase sales as your visitors will find all their questions answered and take a decision for the purchase.

Opt-Ins

“The money is in the list!”  These oft spoken wise words are the result of many an experienced marketer’s research that revealed the importance of building a list of email prospects.  Collecting the emails of your visitors will help you sell easily in the future, by contacting them.  The subscription area should be clearly shown on the web page, and it does help with getting more opt-ins if you offer an incentive of some sort.

Contact Us

The “Contact Us” page helps maintain a close relationship with your visitors. If there are any questions your visitors want answered, they have the option to contact you.  You will be able to reinforce the fact that the person behind the site actually cares for the visitors.  But make sure to respond as early and as clearly as possible when you receive a query.

Privacy Policy

Every visitor making a purchase online needs to either give their credit card details or other personal details, which can be actually scary for them because of the nature of the internet.  This page gives them the assurance that their information will only be used for the intended purpose and nothing else.

About Us

It helps to reveal a little information about yourself and the intention of your online business.  This is a psychological trigger that gives your visitors the confidence to deal with you.

Refund Policy

Sometimes, after buying the product or service, your customers may not be happy and ask for a refund or return.  You will have to make this clear in this section. Even if refunds and returns are not allowed, you will have to let them know.

Seeing real success is possible if you ensure you do things right; and these are just small things that need to be taken care of when designing your website.

Need a place to host your website?  Check out AlreadyHosting.com!

Why did I say web pages and not website?  Usually, we talk in terms of websites, but for the search engine bots that prowl around the Web, it is web pages they are after.  This must give you an idea as to how important it is to make sure all the pages of your website are given equal importance.

This requires good market and keyword research focused on each of the pages.  The only way to get web pages listed in the search engines is for the spider to find and index them.

Although, for most of us, using a search engine means “Googling,” there are other search engines that can be used for driving more traffic to your web pages.  Yes, Google is the top search engine, but MSN and Yahoo have been around for a while and can be great contributors of traffic, when used correctly.

All the search engines are not the same and each one works differently.  If you’re using MSN, keep in mind that it gives importance to fresh inbound links.  Google respects unique content and “aged” domains.  While MSN is the first you may see results from, Yahoo is the next and Google does takes time to index your site.

The important thing is to please them by doing what they want and you will soon see traffic coming in from all these search engines.

But what do you need to do to drive traffic to your web pages?

Keyword research

If you’re looking for a good web host, you should by now be aware that keyword research plays a crucial role in the success or failure of a website.  Keywords are nothing but words or phrases typed by the visitors to find information or products.  They usually click on the first few results on the first page returned by the search engines.  Based on your niche and content, you will have to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The idea is to rank high for a particular keyword.  This is possible if you use a good keyword-rich domain name and related content.

Content

You would have heard the popular line, “Content is King.”  This has been seen to be true to a large extent, especially so with Google.  Websites with unique content and relevant keywords always tend to fare better than others.  If you want a particular web page to be found by people, the appropriate keywords should be incorporated in the titles, sub titles, image titles as well as the content of that page, giving great importance to relevancy.

Linking

Another way to increase traffic to your web pages is to have inbound links, which means other websites or blogs linking to your page.  The perfect situation would be if these links also contain the keyword you’re targeting.  Factors such as the website linking to yours, the link text and the relevancy of the website to yours – all become important in your web pages showing up in the search engine results.

This remains constant even when using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. The keywords or keyword phrases incorporated in your ads should be what people search for.

This is the guiding principle behind search engine optimization (SEO) and this is what gets traffic to your web site.  Just focus on getting high quality links from authority websites, making sure the links use different keywords within your niche.

This is just the basics of SEO, but crucial for your website, as the right keyword phrases give you an unlimited traffic potential.  As you go along, you will learn many more techniques that will help you rank higher in search engines, getting hundreds or thousands of visitors to your web pages.

If you are looking for a web host for your web pages, please take a look at our top 10 hosting reviews.

In this guide I will outline two different methods of building a professional web site with ease for only $3.95 a month!  If you follow these simple steps you will be on your way to building your first web page.

Method #1 – Using WordPress To Create Your Site – **Editor Suggested**

WordPress is by far the easiest way to create a web page for the first time. In fact, this very blog is created in wordpress and is very easy to maintain.  Most web hosting providers make wordpress installations very easy all you have to do is follow these steps to create your first web site.

1. Register for web hosting at HostMonster.  Web hosting with Hostmonster typically cost $6.95 a month; however, we have worked out a deal with them and can offer you the same hosting for only $3.95 a month!  To get this special rate all you need to do is click on our exclusive link above.
2. After signing up for web hosting you will need to go to HostMonster.com and log in your account.  After logging into your account CPANEL you will see a button toward the bottom of the page called, “SimpleScripts”, simply click this button.
3. From this screen you can select WordPress and follow the on screen directions to install wordpress on your server FOR FREE.  HostMonster makes the WordPress install super easy in comparrison to other hosting sites.
4. After installing wordpress you will be able to log into your new account (instructions will be emailed to you). Once logged in you can eaily install any free wordpress theme , AlreadyHosting.com offers a few free wordpress themes; however, if you Google wordpress themes you will find thousands more!
5. WordPress takes all of the design out of web design and all you have to do is sign up for web hosting at HostMonster and the rest is free, including your domain name.  There are custom wordpress themes for every type of website including: blogs, real estate, churches, schools, business, and so much more!
6. Congratulations you just built your first professional website in a matter of minutes and the best part is it will only cost you $3.95 a month!

Method #2 – Using SiteBuilder Programs

Many web hosting providers will include free sitebuilder software with the purchase of web hosting.  HostMonster, Bluehost, and JustHost all offer great and easy to use sitebuilder programs.

1. Register for a web hosting account at: Hostmonster, Bluehost, or Justhost (only $3.95 a month)
2. Login to your hosting account CPANEL (Instructions will be emailed to you after step 1)
3. Click the button that says sitebuilder
4. Follow on screen directions
5. Congrats, in only 4 steps and less that $4 a month you will have your very first professional web page.

Don’t let other companies fool you into spending hundreds of dollars on web design because in reality all you will need is a web hosting account (see above).  Follow the easy instructions in our guide to building your first web page above and you will be on your way to creating you first web site.

Have you ever wondered how to setup your own blog, install forums to your site, add an ecommerce section or fancy webmail interface? Have you waited around for weeks until the most recent version of WordPress or another script is available on your hosting platform? The peoples shouts for an installation system that can work on virtually any host and provide fast upgrades has been heard.

Now there is a way to manage your scripts and website tools in a very simple way. SimpleScripts is the fastest and easiest to use installation system available on the web. With over 35 free programs to choose from you can get your website started in no time. For a limited time you can sign up for a free trial account and enjoy 3 free installs. We highly recommend you take advantage of the super low $15/year licensing that is currently available as prices are sure to increase as the product becomes more popular. Hop on over for a quick testdrive!