After choosing and changing web host for a couple of times, here’s five tips for picking a good web host for your business.

1. First have a check list. Have a checklist of the essential things you want from a web host such as the amount of web space, metered traffic, level of support or free website templates or ‘fantastico’ that allows you to install plug-in and shopping carts easily etc. etc. etc.

2. Read reviews on forums from fellow online entrepreneurs for their recommendations on their favourite web host. Having a good hosting account is important as you would not want your web host to fail on you when you are rolling out a new product.

3. One you have some recommendations, chose a company from amongst the list and choose the smallest web hosting plan they have just to test the waters. You can always upgrade to a bigger and better plan as your business takes off. Read the rest of this entry »

How do I make my business grow online? If this was an easy answer I probably wouldn’t even be writing this but the truth is that it really takes a variety of search marketing efforts all working at the same time to truly grow a business online. If you are still hung up on just ranking number 1 for every keyword in your industry it takes a bit more than that to really build a web brand. Although rankings are still very important they should never be relied on for the growth of your business for the long term. I have come up with a handful of ways that should be conducted in some sort of order when trying to market yourself online.

1. Attractive Website:

Design is a very subjective thing so don’t worry about pleasing everyone because chances are you will never be able to make everyone happy with your website. What is important is that you have a cleanly laid out website with all conversion metrics in place for your visitors to utilize. If you need website leads have a lead form on every page, if you want your phone to ring make sure to have a phone number visible on each page. Have a simple and consistent layout to make sure that your website is not over cluttered and easy to navigate through.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

You are going to want some inbound traffic at some point because constantly looking for business can get frustrating. Research all the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your industry and pick 5-6 different keywords for each page of your site that are relevant to the content on that specific page. Write custom crafted meta tags and descriptions along with optimizing website content and let the changes sit in the search engines until everything re-indexes. Sometimes it could take 7-10 days for all the optimization changes on your website to reflect in the search engines.

3. Twitter:

Get a Twitter account fired up for your business and fill in the profile completely. You can even utilize some of those keywords in the SEO process right into the description of your business for your Twitter account. Start by following people who are following your competitors every few days. Over time some of them will start following you back allowing you to build up your account nicely in the search engines. Post things like tips for your industry or links to blog posts to get people’s attention but make sure you show some sort of personality in your updates. If the voice of your business is going to sound as dry as beach sand you are never going to attract any attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Context advertising is about sensing the visitor interest and reason to visit the specific web space, in order to efficiently promote relevant product-offering links. In that sense, Context advertising relates to Customer intelligence: the development of Customer insight in order to align offerings to Customer needs.

Static context advertising is an old practice. On the web static context advertising is also common practice on vertical portals, their newsletters and RSS feeds. The latest developments which have been pursued by the contextual ad providers on the Internet (like Google Adsense, YPN, MSN adCenter), present a potential for extreme growth and relate to dynamic context advertising. Dynamic context advertising relates to the examination of the content of each web screen (text mining and information extraction), in order to assess the interest of the visitor in real-time and match it with relevant advertisements (ad selection). Contextual ad providers are facilitated by spider friendly pages (pages with titles, headings, rich text).

The efficiency of context advertising in presenting ads within context on a web screen, influences the click-through rates. Ads which appear out of context shall have much lower click-through rates. Apart from the degree of relevance, the efficiency is influenced by presentation parameters: placement on the page space, combinations of colors, ad unit size, which should be tested to find the optimal page setup which yields high click-through rates (CTRs).

Balancing user experience vs advertising revenue, is important for a sustainable result. The poor User experience, when the page visited is filled with ads in the center and the remaining page content is poor, will probably lead to very limited repeat visits. Read the rest of this entry »