Round Tale

(The Hosting News) – Congratulations! You are the proud owner of a web hosting business. You’ve got a great website, you’ve got great products and the only thing you’re missing is customers. There are so many businesses competing for consumer eyeballs these days that it can feel pretty overwhelming. But fear not! With a few simple techniques, and a little persistence, you can get your web hosting business the traffic it deserves.

1) Social Networks

You are probably familiar with social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. What you may not realize is that these social networks can be powerful marketing tools, when they’re used wisely. Start by setting up an account for your business on each of the major social networks. Before you start adding friends or soliciting followers, make sure you populate your profile with information about your company, images, and links to your website. As a general rule, don’t start posting promotions right away. Establish yourself as an interesting person to follow. Post links to relevant industry news articles and build a following in the tech community. This takes time but, once you’ve got loyal followers, you’d be surprised how many of them turn into customers.

2) Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a term that is bandied about all over the place these days, and for good reason.  The higher up your site appears in searches, the more customers you’ll get. It’s a one-to-one ratio. If you’re not familiar with SEO, head over to one of the many SEO forums and start reading up. It’s not complicated, but improving your SEO is a skill. A good way to start is by using a tool like Google Analytics to see what
search terms people are using to find your site. Once you know what people are looking for you can start seeding your site with those terms to boost your relevance in searches.  You can also boost your SEO by earning backlinks from other websites in your industry.

3) Backlinks

A backlink is just what it sounds like: a link back to your site from another site. Backlinks are heavily indexed by Google and a few high-profile backlinks can send you right up the search result list, fast. The more popular the site is that links back to you, the better. Consider soliciting backlinks by offering products or services, or by reviewing other providers. Backlinks grow naturally as you grow your business, so the real grunt work comes at the beginning. Don’t despair if you don’t see immediate results. Chances are, when you do start seeing results, they will snowball quickly.

4) Press Releases

Press releases will get you immediate attention, and they can be great for marketing specific products or promotions. There are many websites where you can post press releases for free, and some where you can pay for your release to be indexed faster and more comprehensively. If your release is particularly newsworthy, you can submit it to local papers and radio and television stations.

5) Email Newsletters

Email newsletters get your message out to the people who care to hear it: your opted-in subscribers. There are many email newsletter platforms you can use to manage your contacts and automate your messages. Most of these cost under $30/month and include widgets for your website. Start sending out a monthly newsletter about happenings in your company along with special promotions just for newsletter readers.

6) Ad Buys

Ad buys are a classic, tried-and-true advertising tactic that work best in conjunction with other forms of online advertising for grabbing consumer attention and driving sales. Ad buys work best on forums or magazine websites, where readers are spending a lot of time. Ad buys can be expensive, so, in order to maximize your ROI, you should wait until you have a special promotion or a new product line before purchasing them.

7) Classifieds

Classifieds are free, there are a ton of them out there, and they are thoroughly searched by consumers on a daily basis. You probably won’t be able to post a straight-up ad without getting flagged, but free giveaways, free trials and contests are all fair game for most classified sites. Work classified posting into your weekly schedule and the benefits will accumulate over time.

Articles

Well written, well researched articles may not be easy to write, but the results can be exponential. If you write something people want to read (and include a link back to your website) people will follow it just to learn more about you, the esteemed author. There are tons of free article-submission websites where you can build a following fast. A single article can continue to drive traffic for months, and it gets you noticed, both good things for your business. Writing one really good article that impresses readers is infinitely more powerful than twenty mediocre articles nobody wants to read. Take your time. Think it out. It’ll pay off.

9) Forum Participation

Forums are communities and, as such, participating in the discussion and making friends is just like networking in person. Build trust with the people you meet. Contribute interesting or helpful information. Establish yourself as an expert in your field and be sure to include a link to your website in your signature. Many no-follow forums may not get indexed directly, but if you do your job, they will get followed.

10) Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a critical part of any established business. Reviews allow current customers to express themselves and share their experiences and they allow new customers to learn about your business. As a business, you can learn a lot from the experiences of your customers. If you strive to deliver top-notch customer service, you will see it reflected in your reviews. You may want to consider partnering with a third-party review service. This lends authenticity to your reviews, so your customers know they are real and unbiased.

Web Host Boot Camp is a web hosting industry resource and news site. Featuring interviews, podcasts, articles, news and more. Visit us at www.webhostbootcamp.net

Source: Top 10 Ways to Market Your Web Hosting Business

Finding a good domain name in this day and age is nearly impossible, as each day hundreds of them are bought by people around the world. Unfortunately, most of these good domains are never even used, creating a massive database of domains that will inevitably expire and return to the open market. Instead of trying to find domains that are available through common domain registrars,  many experienced domain buyers look for recently expired or aged domains using domains auction sites.

The Advantages of Aged and Expired Domains

As mentioned good domain names are hard to come by, however they are not only difficult to find but it is also difficult to make a new website rank highly in the search engine with absolutely no backlinks, and no reputation. Search engines view age and backlinks as two of the most important factors in SEO. If you want to get a head start on your competition and dominate your niche, then buying a good domain name that is recently expired or aged will definitely help you. Many times recently expired domains still have plenty of backlinks active online that you can take advantage of for an instant boost in traffic. Aged domains also have pre-existing backlinks, and you can capitalize on the success of the previous domain owner by using these links to your advantage.

Getting Instant Traffic with Recently Expired Domain

However it is extremely important that you utilize the existence of these backlinks quickly, as they quickly become broken links if the site’s URLs are not revived and repopulated with content. The key to getting instant traffic form these backlinks is to “keep the ball rolling” by creating the impression a that the site never went anywhere. Many webmasters use tools to test their site and find any broken links, which lead to URLs that no longer exist. When they find these links they remove them form their site, and there goes your precious backlinks that are responsible for you high search engine ranking. As soon as you acquire the recently expired domain, you need to find out where the backlinks for the site are, and then optimize your site around it’s pre-existing link structure. In many cases, if this is done properly you can keep the same amount of traffic that the pre-existing owner enjoyed.

Where to Find Recently Expired or Aged Domains

The best places to find expired or aged domains are domain auction sites where webmasters frequently list their sites for sale when they are not doing well with them or need some quick cash. Many times another man;s trash will be your treasure and you will be able to take advantage of their downfall by assuming a domain that is ripe for the picking. You can place a maximum bid on these sites to establish a price that is suitable for your budget as well. You can also find sites on flippa.com or ebay.com, where many webmasters will even provide proof of income and traffic.

Finding a good domain name in this day and age is nearly impossible, as each day hundreds of them are bought by people around the world. Unfortunately, most of these good domains are never even used, creating a massive database of domains that will inevitably expire and return to the open market. Instead of trying to find domains that are available through common domain registrars,  many experienced domain buyers look for recently expired or aged domains using domains auction sites.

The Advantages of Aged and Expired Domains

As mentioned good domain names are hard to come by, however they are not only difficult to find but it is also difficult to make a new website rank highly in the search engine with absolutely no backlinks, and no reputation. Search engines view age and backlinks as two of the most important factors in SEO. If you want to get a head start on your competition and dominate your niche, then buying a good domain name that is recently expired or aged will definitely help you. Many times recently expired domains still have plenty of backlinks active online that you can take advantage of for an instant boost in traffic. Aged domains also have pre-existing backlinks, and you can capitalize on the success of the previous domain owner by using these links to your advantage.

Getting Instant Traffic with Recently Expired Domain

However it is extremely important that you utilize the existence of these backlinks quickly, as they quickly become broken links if the site’s URLs are not revived and repopulated with content. The key to getting instant traffic form these backlinks is to “keep the ball rolling” by creating the impression a that the site never went anywhere. Many webmasters use tools to test their site and find any broken links, which lead to URLs that no longer exist. When they find these links they remove them form their site, and there goes your precious backlinks that are responsible for you high search engine ranking. As soon as you acquire the recently expired domain, you need to find out where the backlinks for the site are, and then optimize your site around it’s pre-existing link structure. In many cases, if this is done properly you can keep the same amount of traffic that the pre-existing owner enjoyed.

Where to Find Recently Expired or Aged Domains

The best places to find expired or aged domains are domain auction sites where webmasters frequently list their sites for sale when they are not doing well with them or need some quick cash. Many times another man;s trash will be your treasure and you will be able to take advantage of their downfall by assuming a domain that is ripe for the picking. You can place a maximum bid on these sites to establish a price that is suitable for your budget as well. You can also find sites on flippa.com or ebay.com, where many webmasters will even provide proof of income and traffic.

One of the biggest debates in the entire search engine optimization industry is whether or not software is better than good old fashioned hard work. The answer to this question cannot be answered the same for all situation, as there are many facets to a successful search engine optimization campaign, and there are also many different types of software available that claim to help your site rank higher in the SERPs. The truth is, some of them work and some of them don’t, however all of them need to be used correctly to produce substantial results. In fact, most people that are looking for a push button solution to search engine optimization usually wind up misusing these tools and receiving penalties from the search engines, thus hurting their search engine ranking. However, this may or may not be attributed to the tool itself, but how the tool was used. The following information should shed more light on the relationship between software and successful SEO.

Could This Realistically Be Done?

That is the first question you need to ask yourself before using any tool to automate your search engine optimization campaign. If what you are about to do could not realistically be done in the amount of time you plan doing it, then chances are it will be regarded as spam by the search engines. Search engines know that people use tools to automate tedious processes, and to prevent abuse they look for unrealistic patterns when indexing pages. For example if you build 10,000 backlinks in one night, then this will obviously look suspicious. Not only is this kind of link building suspicious, but all of these links can’t possibly be indexed in one night, and in many cases the site may be thrown into the sandbox in order for Google to catch up with all of the links posted on the web.

Is this Really Beneficial?

That is the second question you need to ask yourself before using any tool to automate a process. Many of the tools used to build links quickly do so by posting links on sites with low PR. Every site that links back to yours affects the PR of your site, depending upon the PR. So if you build 1000 backlinks from a bunch of PR 0 and PR 1 pages in a week, then you may actually be hurting your page rank! On the other hand, just 20 backlinks from PR 5,6, and 7 sites could bring you pages ahead of your competitors in a very short period of time. The point is, it is not always a number game and this is an important factor to consider when using any tool.

Will it Help Me Learn?

Perhaps the best way to use tools for search engine optimization is to use market research tools which give you insight on your industry and competition. Keyword research/market analysis tools are the best tools to use in search engine optimization, as they will ultimately help you perfect your craft and advance your site to the front page of the search engines.

Anchor text is one of the most fundamental yet misunderstood aspects of search engine optimization, in that most people view it as a way to simply improve the appearance of their links. While anchor texts do shorten your links and make them look more attractive, they also serve an even deeper purpose for search engine optimization. An anchor text is a piece of text that is used to describe a link. Thus, instead of distributing a long and unattractive text link that contains an entire URL, you can use anchor text to name the link whatever you’d like. The average site visitor is much more likely to click on a piece of anchor text, rather than a 50 character long unattractive URL.

What Does Anchor Text Have to Do with SEO?

Based on the above information you may be confused as to why anchor text would even matter in regards to SEO. The answer is (like so many other questions related to SEO) – backlinks! When you link back to your site on the Internet, you are creating a backlink for your site. Backlinks let the search engines know that your site is valuable. However a regular backlink that does not contain anchor text will not give the search engine a quick and reliable way of knowing what keyword that page is targeting. For example, if you have created a page that pertains to the keyword “web pages” and you link back to this page with a regular URL, you can see that this link does not really reveal a lot about the destination of the link. However if you were to use anchor text to disguise the link as the clickable words “web pages” then you would make it easy for the search engines to index that page as pertaining to that keyword.

Creating an Anchor Text Link

It is important to note that all online services will not let you post anchor text links. For example, Twitter will not let you post anchor text links. However you should be able to post an anchor text link on any standard web page online. The following is the proper way to create an anchor text -

<a href= “websiteurl.com”>Anchor Text</a>

Using that simple string of code you can make a link appear as any word you’d like, thus boosting your search engine ranking for targeted keywords.

The Importance of Relevant Anchor Text

Although having a lot of anchor text links online that point back to your site will help your overall search engine ranking for specific keywords, it is important to remember that the anchor text used to represent your links need to be relevant to the page they are pointing to. For example, if your page targets the keyword “dog collars” then you wouldn’t want to make your anchor text “dog bones.” Trying to abuse anchor text in this manner can negatively impact your search engine ranking. Thus anchor text should only be used to point to URLs that are relevant to the topic of the anchor text itself.

After building a nice looking website, you are ready to market your amazing products and services to the world.  With everything seemingly in place, you are still missing the one ingredient needed to make your business a success – traffic. Without traffic, your venture with an online business is destined to fail quickly.  Luckily, there are quite a few ways you can go about bringing traffic to your site.  Everyone claims to have the secret that unlocks the magical fountain of traffic, but one method that has been tried and proven involves site optimization.  There are many tools available to help you along the way and below are five of the very best.

1.) SEO Book – Founded by Aaron Wall, one of the true SEO experts, this site makes a great resource for learning about optimization and moving your site in the right direction.  Here you can find all the tools need to help you become familiar with virtually every aspect of the game.  As a member of SeoBook.com, you are a part of a tight-knit community that will mold you into a better search engine marketer.

2.) Submit Ease – This is a powerful software tool that bundles article directory submission and website directory submission into a single user-friendly package.  With Submit Ease, article syndication is easy, and you can submit your site to more than 600 article directories. 

3.) Bookmarking Demon – This is a tool every internet marker should have in their bag of tricks.  It is a fully automated pinging and social bookmarking software program that can help you create an unlimited number of backlinks.  With the free upgrades and all the advantages it offers, many users find Bookmarking Demon to be worth every penny.

4.) Animoto - When it comes to the web, you don’t have to be a expert with a video camera just to incorporate video into your site.  Animoto is a great tool that gives you the power to create movie style trailers from the photos you upload to your site.  You have the option to choose from various default music themes or upload your own.  This is all made simple through an easy to use interface.  Simply upload your photos, choose the music, enter some text and the system does the rest.

5.) Tube Mogul – Video sharing has become one of the most effective ways to attract targeted traffic in fast and cost efficient manner.  Tube Mogul makes an ideal tool as it allows you to distribute your video content to several sharing platforms, including YouTube, Meta Café and MySpace.  Best of all, this tool is absolutely free to use.

6.) Keyword Elite - This is a great research tool that can help you save a lot of time when looking for keywords.  Keyword Elite also integrates with other tools such as Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker, allowing you to truly maximize your researching efforts.  It lets you find out which keywords your Google Awords competitors are using and where their sites rank in terms of optimization.  The Keyword Elite tool is like having your very own virtual researcher.