There are two different types of website hosting we will go over:

• Shared Website Hosting
• Managed Web Hosting

Shared Web Hosting

Shared website hosting by far is the most popular type of web hosting and is ideal for most websites. However, many websites with very high volume of traffic or have security of sensitive information on them would not work well in a shared website hosting environment.  In these cases managed web hosting is a much better choice.

For smaller websites, purchasing a server or paying to leasing a dedicated server would be an unnecessary and very significant expense. Shared web hosting is an inexpensive and effective web hosting solution for smaller websites. This type of hosting is referred to as shared web hosting simply because multiple websites share space on a single web hosting server.

Web host servers are large and powerful, and have sufficient room and bandwidth capacity to host multiple websites with ease. When you select a shared web hosting option, you purchase a package from a web hosting company, like eTargeting, the will include a certain amount of space and bandwidth on the server. This option allows website owners to enjoy the power of a powerful web hosting server without having to pay for more than is actually needed.

The number of other websites with which your site shares a web host depends on the size and bandwidth needs of each website along with the capacity of the server. As long as your shared web hosting agreement includes a sufficient amount of space and bandwidth for your needs, you don’t have to worry about running out of room in a shared environment.

Managed Web Hosting

Websites that deal with highly sensitive confidential information, as well as those who receive a great deal of traffic are more suited for a dedicated web hosting environment than for shared web hosting. With dedicated web hosting, your website does not share a server with other websites. One web hosting server is dedicated specifically to your website.

Most companies who need the capacity of a dedicated web host decide to go with a managed web hosting solution. This is because the actual management and administration of a dedicated host can be very time consuming. If a website owner selects an unmanaged hosting option, they are responsible for every aspect of maintaining the web hosting server. Managing a web host is very time consuming, and involves everything from day to day maintenance to security issues.

Those who operate large websites are typically busy with other activities, and it is worth setting up their web hosting agreement so that the hosting company handles most of the task associated with managing the dedicated host. Another option for managed web hosting is simply to contract with an outside organization, like eTargeting, to handle the duties associated with managing the web host server.

Making a Decision

If your website is large enough to need a dedicated web hosting, it is certainly in your best interest to go with managed hosting instead of unmanaged hosting unless you employ a server maintenance expert who has the time to handle the large task of maintaining your web server. However, before making the decision to invest in managed hosting, it is in your best interest to see if shared web hosting will meet your needs. Shared web hosting is significantly less than dedicated hosting options. Remember that shared web hosting is sufficient for most websites, so don’t take on the expense of managed hosting if it is unnecessary.

For more information on Website Hosting, please call eTargeting today. Click here to contact us today to learn more about what eTargeting can do for your company.

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Now some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one and the same. However, a site index is often used to mean an A-Z index that provides access to particular content, while a site map provides a general top-down view of the overall site contents.

The document structure and encoding are standards for Search Engine Spiders to find and parse sitemaps. There is an example of an XML sitemap below (missing link to site). The instructions to the sitemap are given to the crawler bot by a Robots Text file, an example of this is also given below. Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

Google Sitemaps Benefits:

• Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want
• Your Website is crawled more efficiently and effectively
• Web Pages are categorized and prioritized exactly How You Want
• Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery
• No Waiting and guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages
• Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update
• Notification which will extend the benefits to other Search Engines
• The Google Sitemaps service is Free.

However there are some common myths out there relating to Google SEO and how to rank for your chosen keywords. A lot of webmasters simply look at the Google Page Rank tool bar and presume the sites that rank highest are the sites with the best Page Rank.

This is something that needs clearing up, Page Rank is only an indicator of the authority a site holds and does not relate to where your site ranks for a given keyword. Ranking for a keyword needs full optimization starting off page and finishing on page, that’s right your off page factors are the first thing Google notices so these need to be heavily optimized.

Page Rank simply adds value to an already optimized site but is from the be all and end all, in my experience I would probably say it makes up around 5% of the keyword ranking equation, so how do we rank for these keywords? Well let me try and take you through the process I like to call the line of relevance.

Google wants your site to be relevant, it wants every aspect of your site to tell it exactly what the content on your site relates to, so start with your back links. They need to be from pages that are relevant to the keyword you are targeting, the title tag of the page you are getting the link from preferably needs to contain the keyword you are optimizing for, however this can be difficult. As a bare minimum the content on the page should be closely related with the niche you are involved with.

Then your link text needs to be anchored with your keyword and that anchor link then needs to be linked back to your page that is anchored for that same keyword, it should be in your title, headings and content. The final aspect is links from your site. There is to debate as to the effectiveness of outbound links but I always find it good practice to anchor a few of your outbound links using your target keyword. If Google sees relevance throughout the full crawl of your site you are going to rank highly for your keyword. If your keywords are ultra competitive, get building those links.

For more information on SEO or if you would like to start a SEO program for your site, please call eTargeting today. Click here to contact us today to learn more about what eTargeting can do for your company.

With this in mind, let us take a look at the 4 deadly SEO mistakes that you must avoid at all cost. These are the mistakes that many optimizers made that prevent them from getting successful results:

1. You optimize the wrong keywords. If you are trying to optimize keywords that are too generic, it is very hard for you to achieve success from your SEO effort. This is because you will get yourself into a more competitive battlefield with other optimizers. So, spend some time to do your research and look for key phrases with lesser competition but relevant to your business. Remember that if you optimize keywords that are not relevant or too generic, even if you achieve high rankings for them, there will be no conversion.
2. You do not tag your pages with relevant key phrases. This is the most common mistake that many webmasters made. I believe you have seen websites that place only their company names in their Title tags. Title tags are words that appear on the top left hand side of your Internet browser. You must place keywords in your Title tag because search engines give a lot of weight to it. The title tag is like the Title of a book. It tells readers what the book is about. Likewise, the title tag tells search engines what your website is about. If you are trying to get higher rankings for a keyword but it is not present in your title tag, it is very hard for search engines to award you with high rankings. Therefore, make sure that your title tag describes the content of your page and place important keywords right at the front of it.
3. You do not have enough content or your content is outdated. SEO is more than just tagging your pages. You need to have enough content for search engines to read. To rank high on search engine listings, you must place keywords in your content. Moreover, if your website content is outdated, search engines will visit your site less often, and thus view it as less important. This also prevents your site from getting higher rankings in search engine listings.
4. You do not build link consistently. Link building is a process of getting more incoming links to your website. Quality inbound links will help your website to achieve higher rankings for competitive keywords. But link building is a continuous process. If you never do it consistently, you will not achieve good result from SEO. So, always build links consistently by using article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions, and other common strategies that optimizers are using.

For more information on SEO or if you would like to start a SEO program for your site, please call eTargeting today. Click here to contact us today to learn more about what eTargeting can do for your company.

When looking at real estate, it’s “location, location, location”, but in social marketing, it’s metrics, metrics, metrics. You won’t know if you succeed unless you have established a way to get metrics What are the metrics and how are you going to obtain them? The final, crucial step – measurement – can’t succeed unless you know what you are measuring against

2. Keeping it Social

Your social campaigns run on social content, not news energy. Keep it light, fun and engaging. Do it right – conversationally – and your point won’t get lost, it will get shared.

3. Use Simple Email Social Templates

Often, the best way to launch your social campaign is with email and as technology has progressed, they have become better and better launch pads. So you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you start a campaign, you’ll want templates so that you can easily produce Facebook landing pages, create engagement and deliver messages with professional-looking “Like” pages. Approaches already proven effective can be easily uploaded to email, share and post.

4. Keep the Content Light on Sales and Heavy on Value

Okay, you are trying to sell; that’s no secret. But your content balance needs to be heavily tipped to the value you are offering your community. The best campaigns are thoughtfully prospect-centric – you know them – and the call to action seems more like a way to keep the conversation going.

5. Choose the Appropriate Channels

Businesses can use email to automatically share campaigns and messages to Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Linked-In connections, Google+ and email subscribers. Not to mention fan pages and blog embeds, two critical forums you should not overlook. Many messages can run the gamut, but let the nature of your message help determine which channels are most appropriate.

6. Get Your Video’s Going

Explore using video. The stats are in: viewers respond more enthusiastically and are more likely to share your message. Industry researchers such as Marketing Sherpa have reported that video in an email can lift conversion rates by 50%. Using email + video to kick off the conversation lets you show benefits instead of telling about them, and viewers respond to that. Meanwhile, technology has progressed so that everyone can afford to do it right.

7. Get to the Point

Sounds simple to set up parameters, goals and objectives for what is, ideally, a conversation, but never forget this is a campaign. And campaigns are based on their destination. What do you want out of this? Awareness? Directly drive sales? Drive page traffic? Or to tap into how your audiences feel about your organization – good or bad?

8. Use Creative Email Techniques

You want the ability to engage viewers directly from the email, rather than leaving the email to follow a link where it will play. This key feature keeps communication direct with customers and aligned with the accompanying email message. It will also let you look at all of their behavior – stats on what they clicked, how often and much more – so you fine-tune your future messages according to their likes and dislikes.

9. Look Back and Go Forward

Reporting, well integrated with Google Analytics, will show how campaigns drive page visits, shares, new Facebook fans and email subscribers so that you can not only track it all, you can exactly measure your success to fine-tune future campaigns.

For more information on Social Marketing or if you would like to start a Social Marketing program for company, please call eTargeting today. Click here to contact us today to learn more about what eTargeting can do for your company.