Authority Sites

Authority sites

Authority sites (or authority site status) is what you are interested in if you are in the hunt for top position on the search engines. In search engine optimization (SEO) terms, authority sites make your job 10 times easier than a website that has not already achieved this status.

Some websites are already authority sites, but since they have not undergone search engine optimization (SEO) they are not recognized by the search engines as such. Other websites either lack content or lack the links to be considered authority sites.

On most search engines, for the highly competitive, high traffic keywords, you will notice that generally the top 10 results are loaded with authority sites. There are some exceptions of course, but in general the search engines smile favorably upon the websites they define as authority sites and reward these sites with top rankings.

What makes an authority site?
Authority sites generally have more content and more pages than other sites. The search engines feed on content-rich websites and those with many pages and much content per page will do better when going head-to-head with a smaller site.

In addition, links from other authority sites to your site will help establish your site as an authority site as well. Search engines generally give more weight to the incoming links from authority sites as long as their main keyword is the same as your own.

How do you establish your site as an authority site?
First, add more pages to your site.
Second, add more content to those pages.
Third, find some authority link partners willing to link to your site. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Before adding more pages to the website, most likely some research will have to be conducted. Get some ideas by checking out what the competition is doing and how they are doing it. You may come up with some good ideas as to why they are beating you in the search engine rankings and you may take corrective action.

Once you know what pages to add, you will either need to write some content, delegate this task to someone else, or hire a copywriter to do this for you. If you already know how to write content-rich, keyword-rich text, then you can take this task on with very little expense. If this is not your strength, then you may delegate this task or hire someone else to do it. There are even places online for article exchanges where you can pick up content by simply linking back to the author's site.

Once you have more pages with more content, you will need to solicit other authority sites to becoming link partners with you. This can be accomplished through email. Some will and some will not answer your requests and of those who answer some will and some will not link to you. The more content and better design of your website, however, the more likely others will want to link to you.

Once your site has more pages, more content and more high-ranking link partners, you will want to make sure your pages are optimized for the search engines properly.

After all of these steps have been taken, then it is time to submit your website to the major search engines and directories once again so that they may re-index the website and move your site higher up in the rankings.  

Web Hosting

Deciding where you're going to host your Web site is almost more important than deciding what HTML editor to use to build your site. But there are so many different types of Web hosting options, it can be overwhelming making the choice. If you know what the different types of hosting options are, you can make a more informed choice about what you need.

Free Web Hosting
Free Web hosting is free. Many free hosting providers support the hosting costs through advertising added automatically to Web pages through pop-ups, frames, and scripts. Free Web hosting is typically limited in some way compared to paid hosting. For example, you may not get as much space, bandwidth, or software.
Free Web hosting can be done through a hosting service like Google Sites or through your ISP. There are many free Web hosts to choose from.

Standard Web Hosting

This is the most common form of paid Web hosting. You pay for a specific amount of server space on a Web hosting system, and they provide you with high-speed servers, software, and other amenities. Most standard Web hosting providers use a shared system where you are granted say 5GB of space on a 100GB server. Your files are hosted there along with 15-20 other Web sites. You may or may not have your own domain name.


Some things to look for in a standard Web hosting package:

1. Bandwidth charges - if you expect your site to get a lot of page views, make sure that there aren't limits or extra charges.
2. Server software - most paid hosting services offer some types of software for you to use including CGI, PHP, and Weblogs.
3. Administrative access - some hosts provide you with a Web-based console, and others allow you to telnet in to the server. Both work fine, but make sure if you want one style in particular that your host provides it.
4. Operating system - the OS your Web site is on can affect what software can run.

Standard Web hosting is good for most businesses and personal sites that are behind a domain name. Paying for the service gives you more features and security than a free service, and you can find standard Web hosts for as little as $1 per month or less.

Dedicated, Virtual, and Shared Hosting

Dedicated Web hosting is where you get your own server machine for your site's exclusive use. In most dedicated hosting situations, the site owner will get root access to the server to make changes and control the site, but that depends upon the host. Some hosts provide an admin console or access through their helpdesk technicians.

Technically, unless you're paying for a "dedicated" connection or colocation, your Web site is almost certainly stored on a shared server. But, in the hosting business, most companies refer to "Shared" and "Virtual" hosting as a form of dedicated hosting where the site is on a server machine with only 1 or 2 other Web sites.

Dedicated Web hosting is good for businesses that need more space or more control over the Web site. When you're on a machine that isn't being used by any other Web site, you know what is happening on the machine - standard hosts run the risk of having one site get hacked which provides access to all the other sites on that server.

Colocation

Colocation is the next step up from dedicated hosting. It is just like dedicated where the server machine is dedicated to your site's exclusive use. But in this case, you own the hardware - not the hosting company. Instead, what you are renting is the physical space in their facility and the high-speed Internet connection.

Colocation comes in two flavors: managed and unmanaged. With managed colocation, you pay for the server space and a team from your hosting company to manage your server for you. This is great for companies that want the control of colocation but don't have an IT department to manage the server. Unmanaged is where you handle all the administration and management of the server yourself, including software updates, the Web server, and the site itself.

Colocation is perfect for companies who want something unusual in their Web software configuration or need the extra security that total control provides.

E-commerce Web Hosting

E-commerce Web hosting can be any of the above types of Web hosting, but it adds in another dimension: SSL or secure socket layer. If you're going to sell something on the Web you'll need to have a secure server to protect your customers.

Many hosting providers will authorize your domains to use their SSL certificates for an additional fee. Ecommerce hosting often includes shopping carts and other additional features useful to online stores. Ecommerce hosting is important for any business selling goods on the Web.

Other Web Hosting Alternatives

There are a couple of other Web hosting alternatives that you might come across:

• Reseller Web Hosting - this is for companies that wish to set up Web hosting businesses of their own.
• Clustered Web Hosting - multiple servers hosting the same content that are then load-balanced to provide better access. This is for companies that have extremely popular sites.
• File and Image Hosting - some hosting services offer file and image storage, but not Web sites. These are great for file access and image storage, but you can't put a Web site up on them.
• Weblog Hosting - Many companies offer Weblogs and blog hosting rather than a Web site specifically. These are typically less expensive than Standard Web hosting, but you're limited to a Web site that can be built with their blog software.

Domain Names

How to Choose a Good Domain Name?

Tips for Choosing a Domain Name that Works

Choosing a domain name can be as important to your company as choosing the company name. In fact, in several cases, companies have changed their name to their website domain because people recognized it more readily than the company name. So finding a domain name can be very important. These tips should help you choose wisely.

Branding and Your Domain Name

. Whether you are trying to sell paper clips or web design services, your website domain name will affect your brand. As I said above, some companies have even changed their company name to their website domain name. So, when you're choosing a domain name it should be something that you could live with if it were your company name.

In fact, the best domains are your company name

. Your current customers know your company name and they're comfortable with it. Some of your customers may have already typed in your name with .com at the end to see if that's your website. So if you can get a domain name that is your company name, you might have the perfect domain.

To do: Check to see if your company name is already taken

. Go to your Web browser and type http://www.YourCompanyName.com into the URL box. If the result is a competitor or something you wouldn't want to be associated with, you can try to buy the domain or you might want to consider changing your company name.

How Long Should Your Domain Name Be?

It depends upon your domain name registrar, but in general domain names can be anywhere from 26 to 67 characters long. But just because you can, doesn't mean that you should have a domain name that is over 30 or 40 characters long. Remember:

• Your customers need to type your domain in.
• Even if they're clicking a link, that link needs to be typed in by someone.
• Longer domains are often harder to remember.
• Recommend sticking with domain names that are no longer than 20 characters or so.

To do: How long is your company name? Is it more than 20 characters including spaces? What about not including spaces?

Special Characters in Domain Names There aren't a lot of special characters allowed in domain names. For the most part you can use alphabetic and numeral characters as well as hyphen (-). Some domain registrars may allow other characters, but those are the most common ones allowed.

Web Site Plan

Make a Plan Before you Begin. Your site plan should include:

1. The Site Purpose: What is the point of this website? And how is it going to fulfill that purpose better than any other site on the Web?
2. The Site Goals: SMART GOALS can help you take a mediocre site and make it great. Once you know the goals of the site, you can plan around them.
3. The Customers: Who is going to read this website? Try to be as specific as you can regarding your target audience. Include details like: age, hobbies, income, job title(s), and so on. You might envision different people coming to different parts of your site - that's fine. But know who the audience is that you want to attract. And if your site is already live, you should include data on the audience that you currently have.
4. The Content: What will be on the site? Will the content change regularly? Will you focus on selling products with product pages or focus on providing information through articles? Is your content going to be mostly text or images or multimedia? Do you have the content already created or do you still need to get it?
5. The Design: What colors will your site be? Remember that design aesthetic varies across different demographics. So if you're planning a website for cutting edge designers, it will have a different look than one designed for non designers. The design includes things like graphic elements, colors, fonts, and typography. The more you plan ahead of time, the easier the design phase will be.
6. The Timeline: Once you have the rest of the pieces of the plan together, you should decide on a schedule. Don't forget to include time for testing, revision, and user feedback.

  Write Down Your Plan: When you start planning a project, it can get very messy very quickly, so if you plan on having lots of ways to capture your ideas you'll be in better shape and write your ideas.

White Hat versus Black Hat

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

White Hat SEO is merely effective marketing, making efforts to deliver quality content to an audience that has requested the quality content. Traditional marketing means have allowed this through transparency and exposure. A search engine's algorithm takes this into account, such as Google's PageRank.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.