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What Is A Webmaster? How Do I Choose One For My Website?
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Category Archives: Webmaster
How To Integrate Non-Invasive Advertising Into Your Website
It’s no secret that online marketing has been suffering in recent years. The use of ad blockers is on the rise, fueled primarily by poor advertising practices. That’s bad news for webmasters who draw most of their revenue from advertising partnerships – and even worse news for marketers.
“The majority of feedback from readers is that they block because of the nuisance of ads,” Destructoid founder Niero Gonzalez told Forbes in 2013, after finding out that over half of his visitors used ad-blocking software. “People are fed up with ads that expand and blow up in their face. If I wasn’t in the publishing industry, I would definitely use it.” Continue reading
Five Tips For Making Your Site More Navigable
I’ve said it before, and it bears mentioning again: search engine optimization has changed. Back in its early days, when the Internet was still in its infancy, SEO was all about manipulating search algorithms; it was all about nailing down the most successful ranking tactics. Content was often a secondary concern.
In other words, the early days of SEO were about the engine rather than the user.
That’s no longer the case. With every update to its algorithms, Google’s making its search engine a little bit smarter and a little bit more capable of determining what a user will find interesting. On top of that, social media comprises a huge chunk of most web traffic – if someone finds a page interesting, they’re probably going to share it with their friends over Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. Continue reading
What’s The Big Secret To WordPress SEO?
Since it first exploded onto the scene back in 2003, WordPress has established itself as one of the best content management systems in the world. It’s not terribly difficult to see why, either. It’s got one of the most user-friendly interfaces around, and is equipped with excellent features and functionality for both free and paying users. Because of this immense popularity, there exists a staggering amount of plugins with which writers can optimize their blogs.
One thing I (and many others) love about the platform is that much of the SEO is already built into the blog design. Using a tool such as All-In-One SEO should truthfully be enough for even the biggest SEO newbie to properly optimize their blog posts. However, that doesn’t mean proper optimization is a cakewalk. If you aren’t taking the necessary steps to write SEO-friendly posts to begin with, you’re not tapping into the full potential of the platform. Continue reading
Structure Corporate Blog Guest Posts Like A Pro
Guest posting and corporate blogging have become an essential part of SEO and inbound marketing. If you’ve not written blog posts regularly, it can seem like a straightforward exercise, but when you’re looking at a blank page and a pile of notes, it’s not quite so simple to pull it together into a effective SEO package that is maximally sharable and readable for the intended audience.
We’re going to have a look at a few actionable tips and techniques for structuring a blog post to help marketers and SEOs create great content. We’ll be drawing a few lessons from journalists, who are masters at conveying information concisely and succinctly, but we’ll be modifying that advice to make it more applicable for SEOs and marketers generally.
We’re going to assume that you’re on top of the research, have your market personas in order, and know what you want to say, but just need a little help organizing and structuring it on the page.
Why Does Web Hosting Cost Money?
Web hosting can range in cost from free to pennies a month to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. If you’re contemplating setting up a website, you may wonder exactly what you get for your money. The services that web hosting companies offer vary, but all of them share a basic set of costs that enable them to get your site up and running on the net. We’re going to have a look at those costs and think about how free web hosting and very cheap web hosting companies pay for them.
The Costs
Infrastructure
For a company to offer web hosting, they need servers. Servers are usually high-power computers that are capable of processing lots of data and delivering it to web clients. Your average home computer can do much the same thing at a less efficient level, but hosting companies need specialist hardware that has lots of RAM, disk space, and processing power.
Penguin 2.0: SEO Lessons We Should Learn
A little over a year after its introduction, the Penguin algorithm was given a major update. As many have discovered, Penguin has had sweeping effects on the way Google deals with sites it considers to be trying to game the system with over-optimization.
Since Penguin first hit the servers, there have been two significant updates, both of which were largely tweaks or minor data refreshes. Penguin 4 brings a major update to the core algorithm and is expected to delve far deeper into sites in search of spammy tactics.
In case you’re confused by the versioning numbers. This is the 3rd revision of the Penguin web spam program, so we’re on Penguin 4. However, it’s the first major revision of the algorithm that underlies the Penguin program, so that’s being called Penguin 2.0. Continue reading
Google Improves Real-Time Analytics
image(Flickr/Helga Weber)
Capturing real-time analytics is all the rage at the moment. Knowing exactly what’s going on at every moment is deemed an important part of site management. If you often find yourself wasting the hours away staring at Google Analytics as your site visitor numbers wax and wane, you’re probably over stressing yourself, too much information can be harmful as too little, but you’ll be pleased to know that Google has recently released a raft of improvements to their real-time features.
The productivity killing aspects of real-time data aside, it can, on occasion, be very useful to track exactly what’s happening on a site at a particular moment, rather than relying on aggregate data where useful information often falls between the cracks of statistical agglomeration. Continue reading
Java Is A Security Risk: Here’s How To Deactivate It
(image:flickr/StudioRedChile)
The Problem
For those who aren’t aware, Java is a programming language that requires a piece of software called the Java Runtime Environment to be installed on machines that run Java code. Many people use Java to create applications that run in browsers, and to do so browsers need to have a plugin installed.
Unfortunately, over recent months there have been numerous security problems discovered in Java, some of which will allow malicious third parties to infect machines running Java with malware via the browser.
Java’s owners, Oracle, have been slow to issue patches that will fix the security vulnerabilities, and new zero-day exploits are being discovered with alarming frequency. Continue reading
Backing Up Your WordPress Site To Amazon
(Image: Adrian Limani)
There’s nothing more heartbreaking for a website owner than having put dozens or hundreds of hours of work into perfecting their WordPress site, only to have it trashed by hackers, hardware failure, or a simple administrative mistake.
WordPress is enormously popular, with good reason, but as with any complex software it’s susceptible to malicious individuals and user errors. Your WordPress database and other assets should always be backed up so that, in the event of a catastrophe, you can simply reinstall, import your data, and be back where you were before disaster struck.
Most decent hosting companies will keep a backup for you, but as the saying goes, if your data doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist at all. Having a backup available that you fully control can be very useful.
There are many services and extensions that will help you with backing-up, but we’re going to take a look at how to back up to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Continue reading