Tag Archives: website
Considerations for Your Website as Your Business Grows (Page 1 of 2)
It is the dream of most business owners and entrepreneurs that their business will grow over time and become a success. In the growth process, your business and web hosting needs may change. These changes can be a challenge to manage. Often expanding operations or venturing into new avenues of business is a matter of taking advantage of opportunities. Sometimes you can plan carefully and structure the timing; however, more often business find themselves thrown headlong into a situation where they suddenly have a rush of business and have to figure out a way of handling it. Planning the structure of your website and hosting package can help you cope with the changes as they happen.
Start with the Basics
As a start-up business, one of your priorities is keeping efficiency up and costs low. Your best option is to select a shared hosting package with a reputable service provider. Do an online search for different hosting providers. Read the customer reviews and find out what type of products they have to offer. It is not recommended that you select a free hosting package. Often these have limited customer service and support and they don’t allow you upgrade when needed. A good hosting provider should have entry-level packages as well as more advanced packages that you can migrate to when needed.
Key Things to Look for in a Hosting Package
One of the most important aspects of a hosting package is the customer support that is offered. A quick phone call to the support desk will quickly show how knowledgeable the support staff are. They should be able to provide you with technical information and advice regarding your web hosting package. You should then consider upgrade options. How easy is it for you to migrate from a basic starter package to a more advanced hosting option? Are there penalties involved? Are there different hosting requirements that you will need to incorporate into the design of your website? Do you have to use specific scripts? The last consideration is website security. Even on a basic hosting package, you will want to know that a level of security is maintained on the server.
When Do You Consider Upgrading?
One of the factors that determines what type of hosting package you choose is the amount of data or bandwidth that you require. Starting out, your website will probably be quite small. Unless you are going straight into e-commerce, it will probably be just a corporate or marketing-type website that profiles your company. As your business grows, you may want to add features such as a blog, forum, chat facility or various article posts. These features usually add quite significantly to the data requirements of your website. You may then need to upgrade to a larger package that can accommodate these features. If you decide to launch a full scale e-commerce site, you will probably have specific hosting requirements. Many web hosting providers have detailed e-commerce hosting packages available for businesses. If your business gets to the size where you want to have a dedicated server then you want to be with a hosting provider that can facilitate the transition without there being too much disruption to the uptime of your website. You may consider a dedicated server when you have specific hosting requirements. When you want greater control over your website and server or want to use specific scripts, a dedicated server is a good choice. You may also decide that you want improved security for your website that you can only get from a dedicated server. You can then upgrade your hosting package as needed.
Reciprocal link sharing does not work
That might sound a bit dramatic but no, it does not. I’ve been doing some research (during the early hours of the morning) and I’m amazed at the number of websites out there adopting the most insane techniques in order to climb SERPs.
I must admit, I was intrigued by the methods at first. I mean, who wouldn’t like to get a week’s work done in a few minutes? 🙂 But you know what they say, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.
The biggest monster of all is the promise of instantaneous link share with thousands of quality websites. This basically involves joining a poorly code shabby directory which is copied many times over thousands of different domains. There’s several things wrong with that:
1. These pages offer no quality content what-so-ever, so they’ll never be highly regarded by SEs.
2. The number of outgoing links on each page means your site will get a minuscule tiny small fraction of absolute nothing – it really isn’t much…
3. The same pages are duplicated over and over again around the web and are promptly ignored and penalized by SEs.
Now, if you’re a SEO expert you will know that apart from being a gross waste of time, it’s extremely unlikely that any of the above will harm your site’s reputation. A webmaster has no control over external links to his website(s), and for that reason his website(s) will not be penalized by the SEs, contrary to popular belief. In fact, these techniques may well fool small search engines* and quickly push a website up the ladder on SERPs.
Having said that, here’s the big whopper….
4. The most common requirement for these link-share wonders is that, of course, you place yet another copy of the directory and its thousands of badly coded content-less pages under your website.
This is a huge problem and is where many people go wrong. And here’s why:
* Adding thousands of pages to your website overnight will dramatically affect your content’s keyword density. SEs like Google don’t only examine an individual page, they also analyse the website as a whole in order to determine its ‘theme’.
* Whereas incoming links cannot harm your websites(s) reputation, outgoing links can destroy it – very quickly. A link to a page is seen seen as a ‘vote of confidence’ to that page and its content from the website linking into it. Linking into bad neighbourhoods and low quality websites will damage your reputation – (ie.: SERPs rankings).
This all sounds very depressing… so what can you do?
The most effect form of link sharing is and will always be one-way incoming links. And the best way to get that is by having quality content. And the best quality content should be found on your website.
Although traditional methods can be time consuming, you simply cannot go wrong. One week of quality content publishing is worth a million times more than every automatic FFA link directory that has ever existed ever.
* Small search engines – Anything other than Google, Yahoo, MSN and the likes…