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    • Is Your Hosting Company Holding You Hostage?

    by Dan DeRoeck on January 1, 2012

    Let me start out by stating that all hosting companies are not created equal.  Far from it.  In fact, I would go so far to say good hosting strive to make themselves transparent.  The good ones, are content to exist quietly in the background, allowing webmasters and companies to advance their online presence, providing support when needed.  The good hosting companies realize that their customer’s primary goal is to scale their business online.  They exist to provide solid customer support, stellar reliability, and expanding resources when needed.  This is the business model that separates the excellent hosting companies from the wannabes.  If your hosting makes it difficult to get things done, well it’s time to find a new one.

    I recently had an experience working with a client’s hosting provider that felt compelled to offer unwanted and many times inaccurate advice, making it next to impossible to get things done in a timely manner.  I thought to myself, why would a hosting company appear difficult, even at times belligerent?  The answer became obvious.  It’s because they cannot provide the resources necessary to “keep pace” with today’s technology.  That’s why it is important to familiarize yourself with the factors that differentiate good vs. bad web hosting providers.

    Keys to Good Web Hosting

    1. Support

    This must be at the crux of selecting a web host solution.  Excellent support is what makes or breaks hosting companies, and should be a primary focus of your decision to use one.  What do I mean by support?  Nothing short of 24/7 support with an option of phone, email, and chat.  That means, when you have an issue at 2:30 in the morning, they will be there for you.  Support should be providing a solution to your goal.  I prefer chat for 95% of my technical issues, and all good hosting companies will provide this option with little or no wait time.

    good vs bad web shosting

    Click Image to Enlarge

    2. Reliability

    Uptime is another very important metric for web hosts.  What percentage of time do they guarantee servers will be available?  Even though 99.9% is the standard and may seem good, even tough to beat.  Consider that if a website that is down .1% of the time over the course of a year, that translates into more than 8 hours of downtime!  Be wary of this easily manipulative fact.

    3. Control Panel

    This may seem obvious, but make sure your selected host provides a way for you to administer your website, other than simply FTP (File Transfer Protocol).  Administering a website without a user interface can become very inefficient.  Look out for ones that force you to rely on their in-house expertise to get things done.  This is totally unacceptable in today’s hosting environment.  cPanel is one of the best out there.

    4. Expansion of Resources

    Another obvious one that can be easily overlooked, but ever so critical.  Look for the inability of your host to expand vital resources such as bandwidth and disk space at will.  When your business grows, so shall your online business.  You do not want to get stuck with a host that charges you and arm and leg, or worse yet take forever and a day, to allocate more resources.

    Conclusion

    There are a ton of good hosting companies out there.  There’s also many bad hosting companies.  My choice for the good is Host Gator.  Their customer service is superb and they offer world-class hosting.  The key takeaway from this article is do your homework and settle for nothing but the best hosting money can buy for your website.

    Hosting is a Commodity.  An important commodity at that, but nonetheless one that should not prevent your company from making massive progress.  High competition has driven prices down, which allows you to select the best hosting that money can buy.  Do not settle for hosting that has the inability to reinvest in its own growth and in the process sabotage your online growth.

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    Is Google PageRank Still Relevant?

    by Dan DeRoeck on December 25, 2011

    Google PageRank has been around seemingly forever, at least in relative terms of the Internet; it was once a very important measurement of a page’s ability to rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) and closely tied to the ultimate success of a site.  It was first made public by Larry Page and Serge Brin, and later went on to be one of the most significant marks in Internet history.

    google pagerankWe as SEO’s had come to respect PageRank, almost revere its ever-presence that had the power to seal our fate.  The toolbar was a way to measure ourselves against competitors.  And for many years, this was true.  However, as you well know, everything must come to an end.  PageRank has lost much of its credibility and appeal, due mainly to the ability to game the system.  This ultimately led to Google’s diminishing focus on it.  Nevertheless, like the mystique of the Loch Ness Monster, PageRank still carries an almost cult appeal to many that still swear it corresponds to site performance.

    But, is Google PageRank still relevant?  Does it still measure the ultimate success of a site?  The answer is yes and an astounding no.

    “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.“

    Even though Google used PageRank extensively in the early days of the search engine, it’s simply now one of hundreds of signals Google uses to rank websites.  No more, no less.  Google now has no choice but incorporate a large dose of Link Analysis and Trust Rank into the mix to offset some of the inherent weakness.

    Benefits of PageRank

    But lets not forget, there are still benefits of carrying a heavy PageRank.  Websites with a high rank still command higher advertising rates.  It’s a known fact, advertisers like to pitch websites to clients for the perceived higher value, most likely for convenience and ease to sell it to customers as a valid metric.  Another obvious advantage is sites with higher PageRank do have much higher crawl and indexation rates.  Google is much more apt to crawl a website with high PageRank more frequently than one with a low one.

    Overall, PageRank can be used to eyeball popularity of a site and gain some intrinsic benefits.  However it does not take into consideration other devaluing characteristics, such as spam and theme relevance.  This was the reason Google abandoned PageRank.

    Using MozRank as a substitute for PageRank

    So it’s true PageRank is no longer deemed the performance indicator it once was.  In fact, many have turned to “Google-like” algorithm models instead.  One such model is MozRank, a real-time, comprehensive set of metrics that can be used to guide SEO’s through the treacherous waters, giving us real-life depiction of site strength while providing us ways to improve…

    “MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank. “

    Conclusion

    Overall, Google PageRank is now a venerable indicator;  a ghost of the once baron of search engines.  As indicated, there are still benefits to having a website with a high PageRank.  But all in all, it’s simply one that now deserves respect and a nod of  unspoken greatness.  Having a website that produces strong and unique content will gain in popularity and strength and always trump PageRank.  We as SEO’s must now look to the future and continue our fight to gain respect through quality content.  This is truly the only way to success.

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    WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” Released

    by Dan DeRoeck on December 13, 2011

    The best web framework, WordPress has launched a newest version, affectionately named “Sonny,” and is now available for download.

    WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration is focused on new user experience, uploading, navigation, and imports. Check out Sonny 3.3 video from WordPress:

    This is a quiet, but slick upgrade, adding nice features from the admin perspective and designed specifically for a decent HTML5 browser (hint, don’t use IE or anything related to Microsoft for that matter, who said that?).  You will never need to use that atrocious “browse files” dialog box again!

    In addition, there’s now a single upload panel for all media — no matter what file types you want to add, WordPress has you covered: RAR, 7z archive formats, and even the new Tumblr Importer!

    If you’ve ever received the “Warning: Bob is currently editing this post” message, you’ll be pleased to hear that co-editing activity lags should be a thing of the past.

    And, there’s more!

    Version 3.3 also offers:

    • a new dashboard welcome screen for fresh installations
    • a new post-update changelog screen
    • more flexible and faster permalinks
    • an overhaul of the editor API
    • a new WP_Screen API for working with admin panels
    • a new is_main_query() for determining whether you’re in the main loop

    A nifty update from the world-beater WordPress to be sure, download it here.

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    Survey : SEO is Most Important Marketing Channel

    by Dan DeRoeck December 10, 2011

    In a recent survey of 2,500 small business owners, Merchant Circle reported search engine optimization (SEO) was considered the top marketing channel for 2011.  That statistic is good news for those that have been an evangelist, spreading the word that search must be included in overall business plans to remain and/or become more competitive. The [...]

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    How Long Does it Take to Earn Rank from Links?

    by Dan DeRoeck October 11, 2011

    When a website links to your site for the very first time, that's considered a new link.  However, some people believe that the link is given instantaneous credit.  Not so at all.  In fact, there are many links that could even go unaccounted for, or at a minimum take time to be discovered by search [...]

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    Google Gives a Boost to Local Online Advertising

    by Dan DeRoeck August 18, 2011

    Google announced the end of a short-lived era called Boost, and sparked the beginning another, already established on, called Adwords [Express].  Most everyone has heard of Google Adwords, some have even heard of Google Boost.  But very few know about the new Google Adwords Express, at least until now.  It makes total marketing sense for [...]

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    Google+ vs. Facebook – Let the Fight Begin

    by Dan DeRoeck July 19, 2011

    Google has officially launched Google+ in beta mode to early adopters, and the results are coming in quickly.  The conservative opinion has the newcomer as a strong contender in the social media space, and the more aggressive model has Google+ unseating Facebook in short order.  Right now, beta users are testing Google+ on a limited [...]

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    SEO and the Periodic Table of Ranking Factors

    by Dan DeRoeck June 22, 2011

    Every so often, something is published that minimizes the complexity, and wraps the density of a topic into a nice little neat package that stands on its own merit.  Such is the case with the Search Engine Land – Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors.  This article comes on the heels of a popular post [...]

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    5 Quintessential Elements of a Successful Business Website

    by Dan DeRoeck May 29, 2011

    As an Internet strategist and SEO , I run across many websites in my travels; some good, many fair, but most downright dismal at displaying even the most basic Internet marketing essentials.  A poorly optimized site will give any level headed business person a sour taste in their mouth, wondering why they put any money [...]

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    Local Search – Ignore Online Presence at Your Own Peril

    by Dan DeRoeck April 15, 2011

    Brightlocal.com, a provider of local search tools for SEO’s and SMB’s, released a new report called “Where do local business websites get their traffic & do consumers appreciate local search results?” The study was done to determine how valuable local search results were to consumers and marketers – the group consisted of 648 SEO’s and [...]

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