Archive for the ‘Content Management System’ Category
Three Reasons Your Business Website Hosting Could Affect Your Search Engine Rankings
Thursday, January 5th, 2012As search engine optimization concerns go, business website hosting is usually pretty far down the list. After all, Google, Yahoo, and Bing care what’s on your site and who they can see linking to it rather than the server it lives on… don’t they?
While it’s true that your on-page SEO and inbound linking strategy is likely to have the biggest direct effect on your search engine position, your choice for web hosting may factor into the mix more than you think. Here are three reasons finding the right post could affect your search engine rankings:
A good hosting plan will load your site quickly and keep it online. All other things being equal, the major search engines seem to prefer websites that load quickly for users. They also place a preference on sites that don’t experience a lot of downtime. In other words, Google and the other engines don’t want to send searchers to a destination that’s likely to frustrate them, or not be there when they need it – both good reasons to choose a quality business website hosting plan.
Your business website could share server space with a blacklisted site. If another webmaster or business owner has been using the same server as you, and using it to spam people or run a shady online company, then there’s a small chance that you could be penalized for their indiscretions. Keeping good company, and staying in the right neighborhoods, is important to your SEO campaign.
Having the right hosting company makes it easy to add new content. The easier it is for you to go into your site’s file manager or CMS, the fewer reasons you’ll have to put it off. You want it to be a simple process to update and optimize the content on your pages, which is an area where a good business website hosting plan can be worth its weight in gold. Fresh content is the cornerstone of any sustainable SEO plan, so choose a hosting plan with that in mind.
Finding a business website hosting provider might not be your first SEO consideration, but it’s one that matters more than you might think. Given that the top spots on Google are more competitive than ever, doesn’t it make sense to have every possible advantage on your side?
With all of the different ways Design Extensions can help your business be seen, isn’t it about time to give us a call?
Editing Your Own Website: Pros & Cons
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011One of the most common questions that we hear from new client is: “Can I edit my own website?” The answer is yes, but there are some important things to consider in this decision.
We live in a do it yourself culture. Most of us like to feel like we have full control over something and that goes for our company websites as well.
When we started building websites (over 12 years ago), it was very difficult to give a customer access to editing their website without them having some advanced coding knowledge and lots of training. Times have changed and there are lots of great systems out there that make it much easier to update a website directly. There are even many great free and open source products like Word Press (our favorite), Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine (not free), and others. Each of these products have their own advantages and disadvantages.
One of the key questions I often ask new clients is, “how often do you expect to change the majority of the content on your site?” If the answer to that is less than once a month, it usually does not make sense to spend the extra setup costs and go through training on how to manage and update content yourself. If you only plan to update information every few months, it makes more sense to send it to us (or your web development team) to take care of it for you. It’s kind of like me with my car, I COULD change my own oil and rotate my own tires, but it doesn’t make sense for me to do that with the time and cost involved. I’d rather just take it to a professional.
If you plan to make regular updates to your site on a weekly basis, it usually makes more sense to have control over the content of your website.
Another key point to consider is that you may not need control over ALL of the content on your site. Focusing in on the areas that really need regular updates like a news section, calendar of events, or blog, can help keep the setup costs down but give you the control you need to keep information fresh on the site.
Keep in mind too, that whoever does your website maintenance does not need to be in your area. We are located in St. Augustine, Florida and service many clients in Jacksonville, but we also have clients all over the country from Key West to Seattle. We can provide quick updates to any website (even ones we didn’t build) via e-mail, phone, or fax (yes, we still have a fax machine… although it just forwards to our e-mail).
Hopefully this has been helpful in the decision process of installing a content manamgenet system to edit your own website or not.
If you have any questions, we’d love to help. Just give us a call at 877-378-6101 or e-mail [email protected]
