Greek Web Masters

Ok, you want to make your mark on the web, either as an individual or as a business. You want to influence people who stumble through the net looking for influence. However, you cannot do that until you get a website, and you have no clue as to how to get a website.

First, you need to create one. Either get a free program for website design or buy a program for website design. You can hire someone to design your webpage. If you are an individual looking to create their first website, go free. If you are an individual who has had success on their website and wants to upgrade, buy a program. If you are a business who cares more about customers than about what their website looks like, then you should hire someone.

After this get a domain name. Generally, they cost around ten dollars a year. This will be the golden ticket to your site. Then, you need a web server. There are plenty of free web hosts available for beginners, plenty of shared hosts available for economically inconvenienced small businesses, and there are numerous dedicated servers available for your big money businesses. These you pay for monthly.

Now you post your webpage to the web server. Congratulations, you have made your mark on the World Wide Web.

For small business owners looking to publicize their company, putting up a website is a great option. It gives credibility to the business and information to potential customers. However, paying for the web hosting can be a pain and you may not need all that a dedicated server can offer. A dedicated server may overwhelm you. Meanwhile, free sites have a variety of downfalls including limited bandwidth and storage options as well as low reliability. Instead, the merger of the two, shared web hosting, offers the best option to most small businesses.

Web host sharing is when users have different accounts on the same server, so there is a bunch of sites on the same server for an extremely low price, generally about a dollar a month. UK Web host sharing offers a service that requires fewer skills to use and greater reliability, much like a mutual fund. However, this offers less storage and less bandwidth because you are sharing with a bunch of other people. It is also disadvantageous to those who want more control because they have a greater amount of knowledge in the area. Larger businesses or servers that get a lot of use should opt for dedicated hosting.

Are you looking for a new logo design? If so, don’t try to design the logo yourself, especially if you don’t have any experience in the graphic design field. As you think about the logo you need, it is important that you have ideas so that you can tell a graphic design artist what exactly you need. When you are ready to get the logo designer that you need, the first thing you should do is search for the very best of the logo designers. You can look at several places to find the best logo designer for you. You can start in Google where you are going to be able to search for professional logo designers.

You can search for “professional logo designers” or some other search query that will give you listings of the logo designers available on the Internet. As you think about which of the designers to choose, you should always look at the portfolio of the designers. When you are getting the estimates from the possible logo designers, always consider what you need from the logo. In the end, be sure you are sure about the logo designer before you make a decision.

Learn how google ranks websites

How does Google rank your webpages and websites?

According to Google, there are 200 factors that Google uses to rank your webpages against the competitors. Most of other search engines like Bing and Yahoo Search also have these common factors. You cannot assume your website to rank on the first page of search results if it is new, doesn’t have good fresh content, does not follow SEO guidelines and incorporates Black Hat SEO techniques.

Let’s see some of the top ranking factors according to my research and data collected from the internet. Note: I am not explicitly mentioning Social Networking Factors since it is a very interesting factor and deserves for a separate article which I will be writing soon.

For more Viral Marketing Tricks and Free Consultation for Optimising your website so that we can rank it higher in Google Search, please come to our Free SEO site regularly http://www.howgoogleranks.com

1. Age of Domain: If your domain is newly registered and is just a few weeks or even months old, then be patience. Patience is the key. You have a long road ahead of you. A domain is like a property, the older it gets, the more value. The age of your website helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business, you have a very good network and a constant flow of visitors.

2. Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? Find out through your hosting company what continent or country your site is hosted in. This can often times play a large role in search rankings. Always use a reputable hosting company. If your company is US based then use a hosting company in the United States. Also, I always recommend a dedicated IP when you can. There are virtual dedicated and cloud hosting solutions that are more affordable. Never use the cheapest hosting. The reality is, if you cannot afford hosting you should re-consider the business…I know this is harsh but very true.

3. Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server, which sites like Godaddy usually are have been known to house hundreds of websites on one server. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not classified as spam.

4. URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is part of the onsite search engine optimization process as well.

5. Content: Content is very important. To start make sure you have text on all your important pages, then make sure it is good text consisting of your targeted keywords spread throughout naturally. Simply put, ALWAYS write your content for humans, your website visitors first and NEVER write content for the solo purpose to achieve Google search engine rankings. Chances are the content will not be user focused or provide value to your visitors.

6. Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should have easy made pathways connecting to your other pages from every page of your website. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Essentially make sure the site is clean, easy to use and interlinked to help the user experience.

7. Trust: Do you at least have a mailing address listed on your website? You should if you don’t. Google likes to see trust factors on websites so anything you can add that could help build trust for your audience will benefit your rankings. I always recommend having a phone number on each page of your website. Make it easy for people to do business with you, it all starts with establishing trust and that starts with contact information on your website.

8. Keywords: Make sure your website is optimized using your keywords. This means any alt tags for images, meta page information and existing content at the very least of things. Remember to naturally optimize your website based on the content of each page of your website.

9. Bounce Rate: Although bounce rate might not seem important if Google sees that nobody hangs out on your website for more than a few seconds before they leave this could be a ranking problem over time. Make changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things, like video, newsletter sign up, call to actions, etc will help improve your bounce rate over time. Make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics.

10. Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. If you sell animals toys but you are linking to a site that sells shoes that is not very relevant and over time could really impact your rankings. Bottom line is if it makes sense to link to another site, then do so, but remember you could be sending your visitors away from your site.

11. Inbound Links: I know this was a list of my top 10, but I felt I had to mention inbound links. The key here (speaking as a white hat SEO person), don’t buy or exchange links. Market and promote your business online to build visitors to your website over time. If you do, then the relevant links will follow! **Note: As the Google (and yes there are 2 other major search engines!) algorithm changes there are always new ranking factors that come into play, such as the page load time and many others. I am sure when I re-do this list a year from now, there may be another one or two additional factors. As I told you earlier, Google looks into 200 factors when assigning a rank number to your website. Stay tuned to HowGoogleRanks.com, read all the articles and tips. It is  also very important to use the tips and optimizations in a good manner without breaking any rules of the big Gaint search engines. Make Google happy and Google will keep you happy.

Squidoo Lens is a powerful marketing tool that can easily be accessed by anyone. Everything you need to create one is the ability to write well in your niche. This interactive site calls the social pages as lenses. They work in a similar way to Hubpages. It’s easy to create a lens and an article to write with a link to your website. The main aspects are the choice of proper keywords and writing good search engine optimized content. The content must be attractive to the public and they also have the same niche as your website. Benefits of creating a Squidoo lens are many.

Creating a lens is as easy as writing an article. If you are unable to an article that has a certain standard, which is a disadvantage for you to produce. Under such circumstances, you may help of a professional writer.

Best 5 Free SEO Tools To Make Your Website Popularity Soar

Every website promoter would agree that doing SEO barehanded is a lost cause.  Good SEO software slashes SEO workload big time and lets you easily push your website to Google’s top. There are lots of free SEO tools designed to serve every purpose of website optimization. They can be used at each stage of SEO process:  from keyword research to the analysis of your SEO campaign results.  Here is the list of the most popular free SEO software:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Choosing the right keyword to bet on is the first step of any SEO campaign.  You may scratch your head and make up your own list of keywords to optimize your website for. But that is like a complete shot in the dark since your ideas may significantly differ from what the Average Joe enters in Google.

Here is where Google AdWords Keyword Tool comes in handy.  Originally this SEO tool was designed to help Google AdWords advertisers but now it can be used for keyword research as well.  Google AdWords Keyword Tool lets users figure out which keywords to target, provides the list of suggestions on popular keywords, shows the competition for the chosen keywords, displays estimated traffic volumes for exact match phrases and dozens more. This free SEO tool has a nice interface and is very easy-in-use.

At the moment there are two versions of this tool available: the old version and the new Bata one with the updated interface. Currently the Beta version of Google AdWords Keyword tool may display the wrong data on Global Monthly Searches and Local Monthly Searches. That’s because this data is based only on Google.com traffic instead of Google.com search traffic and traffic from search partners.  So for now you’d better use the old version until the new one provides correct and relevant results.

SEO Book’s Rank Checker.

To measure the fluctuations of your website’s rankings you need a good SEO tool for rank checking.  SEO Book’s Rank Checker won the popularity as one of the fastest and the most precise rank checkers. That is a Firefox plug-in that lets users run their websites’ rankings check in the Big Three: Google, Yahoo! and Bing.  In the blink of an eye it provides you with the results on your website positions for the targeted keywords.  SEO Book’s Rank Checker also lets easily export the collected data.  All that users have to do is enter the URLs of their websites and the keywords they want to check your rankings for positions.  It’s fast, easy-in-use and free.

Backlinks Watch.

Building a diverse backlink portfolio is one of the key steps in any website optimization campaign. The more good quality links are pointing to a website the higher its position in search results is.  That’s why a good SEO tool for competition research and link building is a must-have in your arsenal of anyone engaged in SEO.  Backlink Watch is a free online backlink checker that helps users see what sites have links to their pages and provides some data for analysis:  title of the linking page, the anchor text of the link, dofollow or nofollow tag, etc.. The only drawback of Backlink Watch is that it displays 1,000 backlinks per website regardless of the actual number of links a website has.

Compete (compete.com)

Compete.com is an SEO tool for monitoring and analysis of online competition. It has two kinds of services:  free Site Analytics and subscription based paid Search Analytics that lets its users take advantage of some extra features.  Compete.com is a peerless SEO tool that lets users see traffic and engagement metrics for a targeted website and find websites for affiliate and link building purposes. Compete.com can also be used for keyword analysis, since it lets you run the analysis of your on-line competitors’ keywords. Some other features to mention are export to CSV , subdomain analysis, tagging etc.

SEO PowerSuite.

SEO PowerSuite is all-in-one bundle of SEO tools that lets you cover all aspects of website promotion.  The four tools this SEO toolkit consists of let you nail all website optimization tasks. WebSite Auditor is a great tool for running all-rounded SEO site audit and shaping premium quality website content. Rank Tracker is second to none at monitoring your website positions for targeted keywords and unearthing the most traffic-generating keywords. SEO SpyGlass is powerhouse SEO tool for competition research and link building that lets you discover and analyze the maximum of backlinks per website get ready-to-implement  website optimization strategy. LinkAssistant is a feature-rich SEO tool for link building and management that let users handle the main aspects of offpage optimization campaign.

Free versions of these four tools are available. You can also buy an extended version of SEO PowerSuite with extended functionality to make your optimization campaign complete.

So there are tons of SEO tools that will never burn a hole in your pocket and let you run your website optimization campaign with the minimum of costs and efforts.   Just make the right choice.