Where to host a web site?
What hosting company?
What country to host a web site?
What hosting platform to choose?
Microsoft Hosting? Linux Hosting?
What hosting package to choose?
What optional add-ons like backup, secure server, domain name,. …. do I need?

All those are the questions you will need to answer when you decide to publish your web site. Some of those answers will have an impact on your SEO as well, like the location, and the domain name.

The most important thing you have to read is the small print from your hosting company! Here is the real life example, how you can get seriously scr…d up by a hosting company. And we are not talking about any ‘Two Boys in the Shed’ company, but one of the largest if not the largest hosting company in Ireland – Register365, purchased last year by even bigger player in the UK Namesco.

Register365 decided to ‘Upgrade’ their services, and the result is that the prices are drastically higher, and they also included a handy feature of not letting you send the outgoing mail. So if you are like the most of us, but also use the email, Register365 will kindly let you receive your email on your PC. But not send any mail yourself!? They will kindly explain that you can send mail via their provided web mail, or use some other mail server to send your email. Or,… yes there is also an option to ‘Purchase’ the ‘Email sending option’ that costs roughly just about the same as your hosting package.

Almost every hosting package or every hosting company has its benefits and drawbacks. There probably is no perfect hosting package. You need to decide what do you really need, how will you use it, and then talk to the customers of the company you are considering to use for your hosting needs. The best people to talk to is the ones who have various accounts with many different hosting companies. Search blogs for reviews, search forums and any social media for the honest reviews and discussions.

When you make a shortlist of the hosting companies you are considering – get into their small print. Hosting365 was really a great company, and probably a largest shared hosting company at the time they have been purchased by Namesco and rebranded as Register365. It was great! But obviously not so great if you also intend to send email…

Sounds like a dream?

In most cases it is not really free as advertised. In most cases it is a free SEO package offered to the clients who purchase a web site from a web development company. Another approach that web development companies take is to offer a free SEO service as a ‘Draw’. To enter a draw, they will ask you to send them an email, or fill a questionnaire online where they will ask you all about your company, and your marketing and SEO budget. A bit like the shops ask you to reveal a bit of your privacy, and take their shopping card so that they can understand your shopping habits, usually for a bunch of vouchers worth up to 1% of your purchases.

It is a nice way of collecting leads for the web development companies selling SEO services, and if marketed properly it generates good leads and business as a result.

Here is an example of Irish web development ICAN giving away a free SEO service and advertising it currently via Google AdWords in IIA web site Blog.

Free SEO anyone?

To market yourself you can use a number of online tools. Here are just the main ones:

1. Your web site
2. Your blog
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIN
5. Facebook

The list is endless. What will work for you might not be the best for everyone else. You need to understand where your target market ‘hangs out’, and use those sites.

Your Web site

Using one of those tools by itself is good. The true success in social media marketing is when you start combining them. Years ago, having a web site was enough. Then the search engines came and it was important that your web site is search engine optimised. Otherwise no one has seen it! Today, the number of optimised sites is so huge, and the size of the data published online that SEO itself is not enough anymore.

What become the powerful tool is the subscriptions to ezines and newsletters. You captured the web site visitor and he agreed to get an email whenever you decided to send one. It’s all great but we all started getting far too much mail we really wanted. As a publisher of a web site you always wanted to ‘talk’ to your visitors. Here comes ‘The Blog’…

Your Blog

Blogs are a bit magical from a number of aspects:
1. Interaction with the visitors via the blog comments is unique. The web site visitors can have their say on your web site! Unique.
2. RSS feed subscription enables everyone to subscribe to your updates and read them where and when they like, in a very manageable format.
3. From the search engine optimization perspective blogs are almost always performing better than your own web site. In majority of the cases a blog will attract a multiplication of the total number your own web site can attract.

Twitter

So what do you do with all your blog visitors now? You get them subscribed to your feed or at least on Twitter. The best exit path from your blog after the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Subscribe’ (or whatever is a conversion on your site) is ‘Follow me on Twitter’.

LinkedIN

Let your visitors connect to you via LinkedIN. There you capture their name, phone, email and actually their whole professional life is logged there. It is quite easy to export your LinkedIN Contacts, and here is your perfect marketing list.

Facebook

Similar to Twitter as it is another permission based (marketing) message broadcasting channel. Facebook is more ‘feature rich’ compared to Twitter. Get your web and blog visitors to Connect to your on Facebook.

So why getting your web site visitors to the social networking sites to connect to you? Simply to capture their details, and enable them to start and engage in the conversation with you. You then use the social networks to advertise your new products, special offers, services… and back they come to your web site and your blog. The big red ‘Buy now’ button is jet again in front of them. And again, and again…

Any of the online marketing tools alone cannot achieve anything similar by itself. Your offering will determine what will you use, but you have to use either a web site or a blog, and you have to use at least one social network. The choice what to use will not be based on what you like, but based on what your target market is using .

Is there money to be made by posting links of other websites on your own website? Do you need a middle man to accomplish something like this? How can you find out the going rates?

And my LinkedIn Answer:

Google will not like you really much if they find out that you are selling or renting links from your web site. So do not display the advertisement for such a service on your front page, since Google will not send you much traffic, and we all know that the vast majority of the web sites have the majority of their traffic directly from Google.

How to find the rates?

Rates depend on the traffic volume, traffic quality, geographical market, industry, or niche and if your traffic is from Google – what keywords is your web site found for.

The easiest way to find out what is the going rate is to ask a large number of similar sites to yours – in the same market, industry, and with the similar number of the Google PR and Alexa ranking – what would they charge to link to your site (or a fictitious site). Or even better, send them an email and say, I offer €XXX for the link to our site on your front page. From their responses you will quickly establish what would they agree to sell it for – and that is what the going price is.

The majority of this link trading is done by the third party companies, that try to do it all ‘under the radar’ for Google not to notice. Google on the other hand encourages the webmasters to report paid links. Unfortunately they do not offer any of their cash as a reward.

Other third parties like Google AdSense and Text Ads,… offer a far smaller revenue then the direct link sales.

For more of my LinkedIN Answers in the Internet Marketing visit: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanstojanovic.

1. Blog about your work
Choose a blog topic, and a perspective to the topic that is closely related to your day to day work. You cannot really blog about what you do exactly, since it is quite likely going to reveal the company secrets. You need to find and angle or the perspective that will allow you to completely open and express yourself, in writing about the topic.

2. Make Blogging a Part of Your Work
To me able to continue publishing your blog post constantly, you need to allocate time for it. You need to schedule a time when you will not be distracted by your phone, email, instant messaging, Skype, colleague inviting you for a cup of coffee. Blogging for Business has to be treated as a serious business. If you allow blogging to be low on the list of your priorities, your blog will suffer from irregularity of posting. If you do not devote your time to it, it will most likely simply… wilt.

Business success is a blog killer!

If you business blog is not about your own business, you are likely to quit blogging quickly! I just noticed I did not post a single blog post to my blog for a full 10 days. I was simply too busy. Clients ringing, requesting, demanding,… and you just do not have the time. Well it is all wrong. You need to plan, and manage the changes the blogging brings:
1. Allocate the time required for blogging
2. Allocate the additional time (resources) required to manage the increase of the new business that came as a result of blogging
3. Make sure the increased volume of your primary work does not eat up the time you allocated for blogging initially!

WordPress is easy
WordPress is designed so that no technical knowledge is required to install it and use it. It doesn’t even ask you to many stupid question during the install but what do you want to call your web site and what your email is. And most of us can answer that. The amount of the customization that is available is as well quite impressive, and the interface is intuitive. So really, anyone can use it.

WordPress is constantly upgraded
The last WordPress update made available is about two weeks ago only. It gets better and better every few weeks. The amount of plugins growing exponentially as well, so it is unlikely you will find a web site functionality that is not ‘developed’ before.

WordPress is a SEO Killer!
And here we get to the interesting part now. The applications of WordPress are really numerous even in the business use, not only as a blogging tool. Imagine the following scenario:

You are the used car salesman. You have a garage with 50 to 100 cars in it. 20 to 40 cars are sold each month and the same number of new ones come in. It is 21 century and you know you need to advertise on the Internet. Those lazy white collar people will not just walk in trough the front door. They will use the web to find their new car. What will they search for? What is the keyword they will type?

Car –to many results – all irrelevant.
Used cars – better but I am looking for a Saab!
Used cars Saab – good results, but it is the Automatic I am looking for
Used cars Saab automatic – ah, here we are… but let me try….
Used car Saab Automatic Black Leather 2l low mileage – Got it!

If you are a car salesman the only thing you need to sell that Saab is to place a link to the YOUR advertisement on the web that will display on top of the search for the exact phrase that describes that car. That is the buyer you want, you do not need his wife who has an idea about the Estate version!

Here is where WordPress comes into play. WordPress is a tool that can if set up properly and used properly place your advertisement on top of the exact search your buyers are looking for. You will get more relevant phone enquiries as well. There will be less:

Do you sell good Volvos?

And will be more like:

That Saab that you have advertised, the automatic 2 litre Petrol one. Do you still have it?

WordPress is a SEO springboard for almost any business.