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9 Things About SEO That You Are Scared To Believe | Print |

A content management system isn't just for your website. It's about managing digital information in all its formats: documents, graphics, audiovisual files, databases and computer programs. You can allow many people in your organization access to files they're authorized to see and even allow them to modify the content, when appropriate

There are four main types of content management systems.

Manual Content Management Systems.
If you own your own work from home business then you may be in need of some clarification. Below are nine things about internet marketing that you need to know if you want to achieve success.

1. Speak up

Its time to get heard, you may have been taught to stay in the foreground but this is the internet, and nows not the time to hide behind pages and pages of text. Get an audio up. One of the easiest ways to deliver content that will be remembered is to use an audio. Let your website do the talking.

2. Get outside the box

Every site needs traffic but not all methods of traffic generation are suitable for every business. If your getting traffic in but their not staying long enough to find why they should be doing business with you and if your website is producing a hi, oh wait, goodbye effect then you may need to adopt a different method of traffic generation instead of sticking with the conventional search engine optimization method.

3. Get a professional personality

Your website maybe focused on a hobby but it needs to have a professional voice. All the scripts, e-mails, seminars etc, should be presented in a professional and precise manner. Your presentation should always be compelling, memorable and unique.

4. Technology - Communication

Its not about technology, its about communication. You use the internet as a means to develop your business but at the end of the day its how you communicate yourself thats important. Your customers have to be able to understand you and feel connected.

This is not done with an excessive use of fancy gadgets; its done with good solid communication skills.

5. Linking out of business

Would you ever invite people to leave your website? Thats what you are doing when you have a lot of outbound links on your website. Does it make sense to get a visitor simply to have them leave seconds later?

6. Turn on your visitors, not off

A lot of websites have boring text. You want to seduce your visitors with an entertaining, imaginative, informative and memorable content. You may be the one writing it but someone else has to read it so dont waste their time with boring or self-prompting text.

7. Stop going keyword crazy

Content is one of the best ways to optimize with search engines. All your text gets indexed and search engines look for keywords. So what do people do? They repeat the same thing over and over again
because they are so focused on search engine optimization. You got your message across to the search engines but your readers are probably
confused and bored.

8. Avoid playing SEO catch up

Everyday it seems some tech wiz finds a new way to beat search engine algorithms. When search engines catch on they change their criteria. Good for the wiz kid, but not so good for you. You spend so much time playing SEO catch up that you lose focus on actually building your website.

9. Did you get rid of all your images and multimedia and replace it with pages upon pages of text because you were worried about search engine optimization and load times. Did you stop and consider who is actually going to go through all that text.

With manual content management being the easiest to get started up and running. This is good for small sites, where you can have a Web team update your site by hand. However, ongoing costs are rather high, all content has to go through the Web team first, and there are human factors to be considered for productivity such as HTML errors or sickness or turnover.

Server-based Content Management Systems.
For these systems, content creators log into the content management server to add content and then it is automatically posted to the website. This creates a rather consistent design for added content, removes the Web team as a middle man, and content can be updated quickly and efficiently. Setup is a bit costly--you'll need a good IT team and it can take 3 to 6 months to get it up and running.

Internet-based Content Management Systems.
This is a bit like the Server-based Content Management System, except that the system is hosted by a separate vendor and content is updated through the Internet, usually through a wizard-style interface. This creates consistently structured content, gives control of the content to the creators, and it has a quick setup, customizable templates and low costs with pay-as-you-go options. This is a better system for external websites.

Homegrown Content Management Systems.
These are developed by your own team, in which you hire a consulting firm and have them custom build a system for your site. This gives you all the advantages of a Server-based Content Management Systems as well as highly customized features for your company's specific needs, but there are much higher development costs, setup time is lengthy (9 to 12 months) and turnover can leave behind a void in knowledge about your particular system.

Consider objectives and limitations. What are you trying to achieve with your content management system? Determine how much gain and benefits you expect, what kind of costs your budget can handle, what kind of IT you have on hand for installing and administrating the system, and what kind of time frame you are looking at to deploy the system. Make sure you can afford both the setup and the upkeep for the system in the long run.

 
Types Of Content Management System | Print |

A content management system isn't just for your website. It's about managing digital information in all its formats: documents, graphics, audiovisual files, databases and computer programs. You can allow many people in your organization access to files they're authorized to see and even allow them to modify the content, when appropriate

There are four main types of content management systems.

Manual Content Management Systems.
With manual content management being the easiest to get started up and running. This is good for small sites, where you can have a Web team update your site by hand. However, ongoing costs are rather high, all content has to go through the Web team first, and there are human factors to be considered for productivity such as HTML errors or sickness or turnover.

Server-based Content Management Systems.
For these systems, content creators log into the content management server to add content and then it is automatically posted to the website. This creates a rather consistent design for added content, removes the Web team as a middle man, and content can be updated quickly and efficiently. Setup is a bit costly--you'll need a good IT team and it can take 3 to 6 months to get it up and running.

Internet-based Content Management Systems.
This is a bit like the Server-based Content Management System, except that the system is hosted by a separate vendor and content is updated through the Internet, usually through a wizard-style interface. This creates consistently structured content, gives control of the content to the creators, and it has a quick setup, customizable templates and low costs with pay-as-you-go options. This is a better system for external websites.

Homegrown Content Management Systems.
These are developed by your own team, in which you hire a consulting firm and have them custom build a system for your site. This gives you all the advantages of a Server-based Content Management Systems as well as highly customized features for your company's specific needs, but there are much higher development costs, setup time is lengthy (9 to 12 months) and turnover can leave behind a void in knowledge about your particular system.

Consider objectives and limitations. What are you trying to achieve with your content management system? Determine how much gain and benefits you expect, what kind of costs your budget can handle, what kind of IT you have on hand for installing and administrating the system, and what kind of time frame you are looking at to deploy the system. Make sure you can afford both the setup and the upkeep for the system in the long run.

 
Green Hosting | Print |

Electricity can be generated from a number of sources, and Canada relies almost exclusively on power plants that are based on nuclear, natural gas, oil, coal and large hydro fuels. Some of these fuels emit significant quantities of carbon and other greenhouse gases that are linked with global warming and climate change; others have environmental concerns or are not considered sustainable.

Green energy is electricity that is generated from a renewable source, such as wind turbines or solar photovoltaic panels (some jurisdictions also designate methane from landfill gas or run-of-river hydro as eligible sources). The use of renewable energy technologies reduces GHG emissions compared with conventional power plants.

Green Hosting is an initiative of the Canadian association for renewable energies to use green energy supplied from the ENMAX program in Calgary, which relies exclusively on new wind turbines that have been installed in southern Alberta. Although the environmental mitigation is small from a small domain that is hosted on this server, the intent is to allow consumers to "walk the walk" by contracting for green energy.

ENMAX charges a monthly premium for the supply of electricity from wind turbines, which is designed to offset the higher cost of generating power from this source. This premium is reflected in the Green Hosting fee.

Green or Eco-friendly website hosting is a recent addition to the field of website hosting which involves a given website hosting company attempting to prove that they are not having any negative impact on the environment in an attempt to attract green consumers. This form of Green Marketing is becoming increasingly popular as concern about the environment increases. The most popular way hosting companies prove their green credentials is Carbon offsetting; others include planting trees and more day to day activities such as energy conservation and the use of energy saving appliances.

Greener Data Centers - Reducing Carbon Footprint
Some time ago we realized our web servers may be contributing to CO2 emissions so decided to take some time helping to reduce the effects of global warming by cutting down on our 'carbon footprint'.

 
Four Top Tips For Choosing A Hosting Company | Print |

Choosing the right web hosting company is one of the most important decisions you will make regarding your Internet business. When selecting a hosting company, there are many factors to consider. Make sure to follow these four tips for choosing a hosting company for your website.

1. Know Your Needs
You need to have some idea of what your web hosting needs are before you start shopping around for a web hosting company. The cost of different web hosting packages will vary based on size requirements and bandwidth capacity, so a web hosting company won’t be able to give you a price estimate without this information.

2. Reliability of the Hosting Company
Before you select a hosting company, you need to know how reliable that company is. If you ask any web hosting company whether or not it is reliable, the answer will of course be yes.

The question you need to ask is about downtime. You need to know how much downtime the web hosting company experiences. You also need to find out if the quoted expectation for downtime includes regularly scheduled maintenance or not.

Remember that when the web host is down, the Internet component of your business is down time. If prospective customers can’t find you online when they are ready to buy, they will find what they need from someone else. When it comes to Internet business, downtime is money lost.

3. Reputation of the Hosting Company
One of the great things about the Internet is how easy it is to access information online. There are a number of forums online that appeal to webmasters and website owners. When you are searching for a web hosting company, visiting these forums can be an invaluable source for information about web hosting companies.

When you find an active forum where those who are knowledgeable about web hosting are posting, look for threads that are related to web hosting. If you don’t see recent posts on the topic, post a question yourself. You may get some ideas about which web hosting companies are the best. You’ll definitely learn about some of the ones you want to avoid!

4. Customer Service
You will want to go with a web hosting company that has available and responsive customer service. The first thing you should do is look at the website of a hosting company you are considering. Check out the options for customer service. If you have a difficult time finding customer service information posted on the website, that is a good sign that you are going to have trouble getting help when you need it.

Ideally, you want to select a web hosting company that offers 24 hour customer service with multiple ways of requesting help. Many of the best hosting companies offer live chat help, e-mail technical support, and a toll-free technical support phone number.

However, just because a web hosting company has customer service contact information posted does not mean that the company actually provides customer service. Before you make your final decision, use the customer service contact methods to see what kind of response you actually get. If you don’t get a live person, or a quick response, keep looking for another company.

 
Choosing Among Your Web Hosting Options | Print |

Selecting a web hosting provider can be a confusing and overwhelming decision. There are so many different types of hosting, and so many different providers that you can get really frustrated when trying to make the best decision.

The first thing you need to get straight is all of the different types of hosting. For most websites, shared hosting is the best solution. Depending on the complexity and security needs of your site, as well as the nature of your business, this solution might also be ideal for you.

Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is the most effective and economical solution for the hosting needs of most small to medium company websites. When you use a shared hosting solution, your website shares a large and powerful server with other small to medium websites.

The number of sites that reside on the shared server is a function of the capacity of the server and the space requirements specified in each websites hosting agreement.

Reseller Web Hosting
Host provider companies allow those who want to become resellers to open a reseller account on their shared web host servers. When you purchase space for your own site on a shared host, you are utilizing shared hosting. When you purchase space on a shared web host that you intend to resell, in its entirety or in part, to web hosting clients of your own, you are utilizing reseller hosting.

Virtual Private Server Web Hosting
Virtual Private Server (VPS) web hosting is the step between a shared hosting solution and having your own dedicated web host. With VPS, your website is still sharing a server with other websites, but your site is located within its own partitioned area of the server. Each tenant occupies its own segment of the server, so there is added security with this option.

Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated web hosting is a step about VPS. With a dedicated web host server, your site is no longer stored in a shared environment. You occupy an entire server. Dedicated server hosting is expensive. For some particularly complex and high traffic websites, and those that deal with highly sensitive information, dedicated hosting is a necessity.

Colocated Web Hosting
In terms of web hosting, colocation refers to a solution in which you own a server that is located in a datacenter. You purchase your own server, and then pay a fee to the datacenter that houses if for you. The datacenter provides bandwidth and IP addresses for you.

No matter what type of hosting solution that you select, the reliability and responsiveness of the company you work with will have a major impact on the success of your website. Make sure to select a reputable hosting provider that offers quick and responsive technical support and knowledgeable, friendly customer service.

 


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