Category Archives: Web Hosting
Top WordPress Plugins Suggestions
One of the most popular tools for hosting a blog is WordPress, an open-source project that is freely available for the downloading. There are at least a thousand tutorials available around the ‘net for how to set up a WordPress blog, configuring a theme, uploading it to your own hosting account, and all the rest. I am not going to re-cover that ground; it has been done more than enough. This article is more about what you can do to improve your site and enhance it for visitors — and for the search engines.
The good news is that there are any number of tools to help you improve the behavior of your website. WordPress is now such a popular framework for creating websites in general and blogs in particular, that an entire industry has grown up to create plugins for WordPress; using the top WordPress plugins can really enhance the utilization of WordPress. You should find all sorts of tools, from free plugins like HeadSpace2, All-in-One SEO, and Google XML Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or My SEO Status.
Here is a short list of the best plugins you should investigate:
- SEOPressor – automates and simplifies on-site SEO; premium (i.e. paid) plugin
- Platinum SEO Pack – simplifies some aspects of on-site SEO; free plugin
- Google XML Sitemap – auto-generates XML formatted sitemap to speed up search engine indexing; free plugin
- Google Video Sitemap – auto-generates XML sitemap of all videos on your site; free plugin
- Google Image Sitemap – auto-generates XML sitemap of all images on your site; free plugin
- All-in-One SEO Pack – similar to Platinum SEO, but with a few less features; free plugin
- Automatic SEO Links – automatic on-site keyword-based crosslinking; free plugin
- HeadSpace2 – similar to Platinum or All-in-One, a lot of people swear by this one; free plugin
- Akismet – automatically blocks comment spam; free and now built-in to WordPress
- s2Member Pro – implements membership functionality; premium plugin, but an excellent free version is available
- PHPurchase – run an eCommerce site within your blog; premium plugin
Always remember, though: put good content on your site that will provide real value for your visitors. All the bells and whistles in the world are useless if you aren’t giving your visitors value when they come to the site. Remember to treat your visitors well, and you will get your fair share of traffic; social bookmarking is a powerful tool that you leverage naturally when you have happy readers.
Leveraging WordPress SEO Plugins
Creating and publishing a website is no longer a mysterious, esoteric task that is reserved only for computer geeks. These days, just about everyone and their dog has a website. Anyone wanting a piece of the virtual pie can easily sign up for a free Blogger blog or one of the major Web 2.0 properties like HubPages or Squidoo in about five minutes. Plus, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors available that make creating a beautiful, interactive webpage a very simple process.
One of the most popular tools for hosting a blog is WordPress, an open-source project that is freely available for the downloading. There are at least a thousand tutorials available on the ‘net for how to set up a WordPress blog, configure the theme, upload it to your own hosting account, and so on. This article is not going to re-cover that ground. It has been done more than enough. The question is, what do you do once your blog is online, to get the word out so that you can get traffic?
The answer to that question is: search engine optimization. SEO is basically the process of driving traffic to your website organically (that is, not paid) from the search engines. To get the search engine “spiders” or “bots” to notice your site among the “billions and billions” of pages out on the web, and then rank it “high” in the results pages (so people will find it easily), you’ll need to work on these three general tasks:
- Make sure your content is relevant to the keywords people are searching with
- Optimizing your website and its content with keyword emphasis and linking structures
- Building inbound links to your website from others, preferably those in your same niche
This article focuses on the tools that can simplify item (2) in the list. Backlinking, the process described in (3), is a subject for a whitepaper, not just a short article. And, obviously, it is up to you to be sure your content is relevant to the keywords you are attaching to your pages as mentioned in item (1); just use your common sense.
The good news is that there are any number of tools to simplify the job to improve the optimization on your website. Owing to the popularity of WordPress, an entire industry is producing add-on capabilities in specialized themes and WordPress SEO plugins to facilitate optimizing sites built with the platform. You can dig up all sorts of tools, ranging from free plugins like Platinum SEO, HeadSpace2, and Google Video Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or SEO Booster Pro.
Here is a short list of plugins you should investigate:
- SEOPressor WordPress Plugin
- Platinum SEO Pack
- All-in-One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemap
- Google Image Sitemap
- Google Video Sitemap
- Automatic SEO Links
- HeadSpace2
Always remember, though: put good content on your site that will provide real value for your visitors. Treat your visitors well, and you will get your fair share of traffic; just be sure to do your SEO correctly, and you can speed up the process considerably!
Web Hosting Comments – What Do They Tell Us?
It is interesting to sit and read user web hosting comments about various hosting companies. Obviously there are some companies that provide a poor service and attract a lot of negative comments but looking at the top companies the key difference seems to be the quality of support and how it is delivered.
The top companies seem to receive overwhelmingly positive web hosting comments from their customers and even the ones with many negative reviews still have some very satisfied customers.
When customers get angry and post very negative web hosting comments the issue is usually not that a problem occurred but that the support team were unhelpful and unable to resolve it. It is highly likely that if the initial problem had been resolved properly the users would have written a positive review rather than a negative one.
As hosting is a long distance purchase (maybe in another country) users feel powerless if they are being ignored and vent their feelings by telling the world to avoid their appalling host.
Apart from complaints about their site being down for one reason or another many negative web hosting comments are about financial matters. This often relates to cancellations and refunds.
It would be very interesting to hear the hosting companies side of some of these web hosting comments as I can see that in some cases they were simply applying the conditions set out in their Terms of Service. These, for example, set out the process for cancellation and what refunds will be given. One particular issue seems to be cancellations where a domain name is included in the package. A host’s website may say that a money back guarantee relates to hosting costs (i.e there is a charge for the domain name) but many users think a “money back guarantee” is just that.
It is normal for users of shared hosting to be responsible for their own backups. This does not mean that hosts will not take backups but that they do it without accepting any liability for lost data. It is clear from several web hosting comments that many users do not understand this.
All this reinforces my view that the most important criteria to apply when choosing a hosting company is the quality of their support (assuming of course that they meet your technical requirements). You must expect support to be available 24/7 by telephone as well as email and probably chat and you want to see good web hosting comments about the support from existing users. It is also well worthwhile reading the Terms of Service, you will then be aware of any “hidden” charges and what the responsibilities of each party are.