Choosing a web host for your site is slightly bewildering sometimes as there is an enormous amount of choice available. If you’re a web designer, you may want to use hosting that gives you a dedicated server, rather than a shared one, although this will be more expensive.

However, the advent of cloud computing has changed slightly and it’s now possible to have a virtual private server which looks to the outside world as if it’s all yours.

What is a virtual private server?

Essentially, it’s a virtual machine that acts as if it’s a standalone computer on a shared server. The server itself might run several virtual machines but they run independently of each other and can even run separate operating systems.

 

Photo credit: Ronald Lewis

The virtual server generally runs on a network cluster of high-end servers in a data centre – very secure, usually fast and offer an increased uptime. This is because if a piece of hardware fails on one machine then it can be quickly and easily routed to another part of the network. Bear in mind that whilst there are free virtual servers available, they do not tend to be of high quality – which is the point of having one in the first place!

OK, what does this have to do with SEO?

For a start, VPS hosting is generally faster than a site hosted on a shared server. This is because with a virtual server, you are allocated your own resources such as CPU, storage and memory usage and don’t have to share with others.

In contrast, shared hosting means that you have to share resources. This can be tricky as not all websites use the same and so you may have one or two sites on the physical server that use more resources than you, slowing your site down as it has less.

This isn’t always the case, many hosting companies allocate a certain amount of resources to each site. However, if one site is using a lot, then it can be difficult to pin them down and take action.

Speed matters

Site speed and SEO work hand in hand. Whilst it’s not necessarily one of the most important aspects to the average small business SEO strategy, it does have some bearing as it’s one of the things that the algorithms look at.

Whilst of course it may not be your hosting that is slowing your site down, it could be the site architecture, it’s certainly something to check out. In order to determine how Google scores your site for speed, check out the speed test utility on the developer website.

As you can see, this is a simple utility that you can use by simply tying in the URL of the site you want to check.

 

If there’s a problem with your site, you can also opt to take the PageSpeed Report which is displayed to the left of the page towards the top. This gives you a detailed breakdown of what could be improved upon and will tell you if the problem lies with your host.

For SEO, the search engines will rank you lower if your site is slow as it’s not ideal for the user experience. In fact, faster sites also enjoy bigger conversion rates, so it’s certainly something you should look at. If it’s a site problem you can sign up for Google’s PageSpeed service which at the moment they are offering for free.

Uptime and downtime

I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen a hosting company display a high downtime percentage in their sales literature and most will be acceptable anyway. However, not all hosts are created equally, so it’s worth checking out reviews on the downtime others experience before choosing.

With a VPS, this isn’t necessary as barring a major disaster, downtimes are minimal. This is because, as I mentioned earlier, if one part of the network fails, the site can be routed to another, in most cases without you even noticing. As mentioned the free virtual servers tend to be lower quality and therefore, the downtime is going to be more frequent.

A site that has a lot of outages will be noticed by the search engines and labelled unreliable, so make sure your host offers a stable solution and further guarantee better uptime with a VPS.

Spam sites on a shared server

If you’re on a shared server and you’re unwittingly sharing it with domains that have been blacklisted for spamming, then you could be tarred with the same brush by search engines.

Whilst this isn’t something that you have to worry about extensively in general, it does happen and can be avoided with the use of a virtual server as it looks to the outside world like you have a server all to yourself. Essentially you do; a virtual server might share a physical machine, but it also runs independently to other virtual machines and is stand alone.

Google’s Matt Cutts says that there is little need to worry if you discover that you’re sharing a server with a blacklisted domain, but it’s better to be safe. He also points out that if you’re sharing a server with a number of spam domains, then you’re likely to be viewed with suspicion.

It’s not something that should be taken lightly for a business, I once had my mail server blocked due to someone sending me an email from a blacklisted domain and it took a while and a lot of placating clients to put things right.

Location, location, location

Another factor to consider for SEO is the location of the server/data centre. Search engines look at where the site/business is based and whether the host is based in the same country. If it is, then it’s likely to feature higher up in search when people search for your keywords.

Whilst it’s often cheaper to use a host situated in a different country, it’s far from ideal then.

Using a virtual server might not significantly increase SEO, but it does have a number of advantages over using shared servers.

More and more people are now signing up for an Instagram business account. It’s one the newest methodologies to hit the digital marketing arena, and businesses are arriving in their droves to take advantage of what it offers by incorporating it into their online SM strategy.

The Meteoric Rise of Instagram

Photo credit: beta75.se

Instagram is one of the biggest online success stories of recent years. It’s taken the cyber community by storm, first appealing to the social networking side of life, when it launched its first app in October 2010. By December of that same year it had registered over 1 million users, and 6 months later, by June 2010, the number of registered users shot up to 5 million. It’s little wonder that Facebook sat up and took notice, taking Instagram over in April 2012. SM marketing campaigns are one of the last free website promotion techniques to use, so it’s no wonder it’s so popular.

The Organic Growth of Instagram for Business

It’s not Instagram themselves who anticipated this being a promotional platform for businesses. They merely recognised that many of their social users had begun to promote their businesses on their platform, and in response launched the Instagram for business blog, a platform for businesses to interact, post their blogs, and start mixing things up in the business community. It’s fast becoming an integral part efforts on social media for businesses.

Quickly out of the Starting Blocks

The online business community has always been super fast to spot any new opportunities and new ways of marketing their brands. It wasn’t long after the birth of the first major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, that the corporate world began jumping on the social media band wagon. They were quick to use these new channels for their own promotions, with LinkedIn being the most business orientated.

New Advertising Channel

Photo credit: Faruk Ateş

Getting started with using Instagram for business

At this point in time, Instagram doesn’t differentiate between private social users, and business users. In terms of the sign up procedure, they are one and the same thing. So this means that if you do decide to sign up, you need to be wearing your corporate hat, not your personal one. If your struggling to learn the ropes, there are social media training facilities online that can help you out.

You can of course decide to have both a personal account, and a separate business account, but they are to separate individual entities, and will not therefore permit any interchange between the two. So in terms of your business account, in order to promote brand awareness, you must use your business or brand name. If your planning on setting up an online business, then this is a great place to start; never miss out on a free marketing opportunity!

Creating a Great Business Profile

As with all social media websites, you have the wherewithal to create a profile. All too often (especially with their personal social media websites) people don’t use this facility to the full. But as far as your Instagram business account is concerned, it is crucial that your business profile should be as comprehensive as possible.

To capture your audience’s interest, you must go beyond just facts and figures. Include a little about your business ethics and your company’s mission, and try and link your business to things happening in the outside world.

Link your Instagram Business Account to your Other Websites

The most important thing from a business point of view is to link your Instagram business account to your business’s website. This will allow visitors to view all of the pictures and videos you have downloaded to your instrumental account, simply by clicking on the link shown on your company’s website. You can obtain badges from Instagram that contain this link. It’s also a good idea to put the badge on your company blog too, if you have one.

To further broaden your audience. You can also put this link on any other social media sites you may have, such as Facebook, and Twitter. I don’t think that you can with LinkedIn at the moment, but it would obviously be a useful tool if you could. Why not mention it to LinkedIn? – The more people who ask, the more likely they are to accede.

Uploading Photos and Videos

Whilst you can view photos and videos by simply clicking onto the Instagram website and logging into your account via your computer or laptop, you cannot actually use these devices to upload the photos or videos themselves. This must be done directly from your mobile device.

Choosing the right style photo is key. Don’t forget that it represents your business, so it needs to be relevant. However, if you can mix a little fun in with it as well, that’s all to the good. Statistics show that photos of things like puppies gain far more views than photos of a business meeting in progress, unless of course the business meeting is being chaired by puppy!

Making Best Use of Instagram’s Filters

If you browse a few of the professional business accounts on Instagram, you can’t help but notice the superb quality of the photographs. This is because many people use the advanced filters that Instagram provides. To check out how to use their special effects, simply click through to the help centre on their website.

A Picture is Worth 1000 words…but

As the saying goes, a picture is worth 1000 words. Whilst this is true, (you can depict an image that is almost impossible to describe in words), a few words to elaborate on the message in the picture always works well. It goes a long way towards helping people to engage, and fully appreciate what they are seeing. Instagram provide this facility, so make sure that you use it to best effect.

Engaging with your Audience

As all good marketers know, it is important to engage with your audience. A great way of doing this is by reciprocating the interest that your audience shows in your photos/videos by checking out their photos. By doing this you are showing a genuine interest, which they will appreciate. It will help to increase loyalty.

Monitor your Performance

Someone one said that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, which is why Instagram provide their “Simply Measured” analytics program. It tells you:

• How effectively you are engaging with your audience
• Which photos are being most viewed
• What the latest trends are

The best thing of all – it’s free to use!

Read the Blog

Instagram is still very much the new kid on the block, and despite its enormous success it’s still a work in progress. Things are changing rapidly, (like the launch of the new advertising initiative), and the best way of staying current is to read the Instagram blog regularly.

One thing that is sure, and that is that using Instagram for business is an exciting way of marketing your brand to the world and with a little creativity from you, it can be very successful too.

Online marketing is driven by  data segmentation, analysis and constant refinement. With so much data available you can easily track exactly what channels are bringing you the best conversions, sales, overall profit etc. This fact, along with natural market shifts is what is pushing businesses to invest more and more in their digital assets.

The amount of customer interaction data available varies from industry to industry. For example an ecommerce business such as Amazon which sells goods online will have a lot more data on what channels directly drive sales. The user takes a trackable action (completing an online checkout) in order to bring revenue to the company.

Other industries that are service based may find it more difficult to track ROI. The user may have to call in or arrange an appointment before committing to a purchase/transaction making the conversion process indirect. In such cases it can become a little more blurred which sources actually put money in the bank. But there are work-around techniques which can help pin-point revenue sources.

The majority of small to medium online businesses don’t look beyond the broad statistics when checking their website traffic flow. There is a large focus on vanity statistics such as overall visits or “hits” as they’re commonly referred to by non-technical staff. This type of data is good to know and it is definitely important; but by no means is it the be all and end all. In most cases only a tiny fraction of your overall traffic will convert; as a decision maker it is your job to identify that money-driving traffic amongst the noise.

If you can find common characteristics among the traffic that is converting, you can fine tune your marketing spend to get a better return on your investment.

User Tracking

So how can you do this? The best way to do so it by the use of ‘Goals’ in Google Analytics. Goals are trackable actions that can be recorded in Google Analytics when the user does something specified by yourself.

The simplest and easiest way to do this is to create a confirmation page for the action you want to track. So for example if someone purchases a product make sure the checkout process takes them to a thank you page once the transaction is complete. You can then set the URL of this thank you page as a goal. Every time a visitor reaches it a goal completion will be recorded.

Alternatively if you run a business that is not ecommerce based you can set goals for other actions that may lead to a sale. The most common one being an enquiry form submission. If you take users to a confirmation page after the enquiry has been sent then this too can be set as a Google Analytics goal. You would then have data on what type of traffic is bringing in enquiries.

What does this goal completion data mean? It means that you have conversion data that can be cross referenced with almost every other data segment in Google Analytics! This allows you to drive down as deep as you like into the data to find common characteristics among your converting visitors.

See below some of the top data segments to cross-reference with Google Analytics Goal completions:

PPC

Pay Per Click traffic is costly and demand for it is on the increase. As an advertiser you are therefore in a market where costs are soon set to rise even further. This makes it absolutely critical to opitimise your campaigns and make sure each click is best positioned to convert to a sale.

Cross referencing the incoming PPC keyword data with your goal conversions will show you exactly what keyword bids have worked for you (within the selected time period). This will allow you to compare certain campaigns or ad groups on a broad level, or go through your keyword bids with a fine toothcomb.

Paid Third Party Advertising

Paid adverts are often a grey area for businesses as to what exactly (if anything) is driving sales, what is good for brand awareness etc. Goals can help to answer some of those questions and allow you to rearrange your paid ad distribution accordingly.

It is good to be able to check the conversion rate of banner ads and the likes against each other. But what you can also do is compare entire channels against each other. For example banner ads versus PPC; but remember to factor in cost as well as % returns as we’re looking at ROI here.

Search Landing Page

The search engine landing page is one of the best replacements for the organic keyword data Google has recently (not provided). By looking at your organic search traffic and adding the secondary dimension ‘landing page’ you will be able to see what areas of the site visitors are reaching via search engines. You will not know exactly what keyword they used to get there; but it’ll give you an idea.

Having conversion data on your organic search traffic is good as you’ll know which areas of your site to promote, build links to, work on in future campaigns etc.

Email Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns can be one of the most costly ventures that provide little return. If you ever pay for one of those mail blasts you’ll certainly want to use it as a learning experience to pick up some data. In general unless you’ve approached the mail provider to get a paid slot in one of their newsletters the return figures won’t likely make good reading.

If you have managed to build up your own email list then by all means send them regular interesting updates. The goal data you’ll want to set for this will probably not be conversion based (seen as how these people are probably already your customers). Engagement is a more reasonable goal to go for with email campaigns. This can be done by setting a certain time on site, pages per visit or something similar. That way you will know what email content is keeping the visitors on your site once they click through.

Device

We’ve all heard that mobile and tablet browsing is on the increase; but do you know how it performs against your desktop traffic? Most people will not, and looking at the data can give some insights as to why. Perhaps you site isn’t responsive or mobile optimised? Maybe the enquiry form is difficult to fill out on devices with smaller screens? These are all questions you should be asking yourself if you mobile traffic is performing poorly.

Google Analytics helps millions of website owners to make sense of data that relates to the movement of traffic to, from, and round their website(s). This information can then be used to review and improve the performance of their websites.

Google Analytics “Standard”

What most website owners are looking for of course, (if their website sells or promotes a product or service), is anything that will present them with the opportunity of increasing their site’s conversion rate.

Websites that fulfil a different function, (providing information only – like HM Revenue and Customs for example), would use the data for something different; something like monitoring visitor behaviour to see which web-pages they frequent the most, and how they navigate their way there. But whatever the purpose of the website, Google Analytics provides owners with the measurements that enable them to modify their websites to maximise their performance

Enter – Google Analytics Premium

For the majority of online businesses, Google Analytics provides them with more than enough data. But for other, much larger, businesses (those websites that receive more than 10 million hits per annum), the standard release of Google Analytics doesn’t quite cut the mustard. So Google have developed Google Analytics Premium, a new toy for the “big boys” to play with. However, having used the words “new toy”, that’s not strictly true, because the Premium release of Google Analytics was in actual fact launched back in September 2011, over 2 years ago.

For Those with Larger Pockets

These so called “big boys” are those that we refer to as being large enterprise businesses, and they include the likes of Wall-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Samsung, and Apple. These companies, and many more like them, have multi-million £ turnovers, and to them, paying the price of $150,000 per annum (which is what it costs to obtain Google Analytics Premium), is not much more than pocket money, although admittedly they have pretty large pockets.

The truth of the matter is that for companies operating on this sort of scale, with the huge volumes of traffic that their websites get, small changes to the website’s infrastructure can result in significant changes when multiplied up by so many visitors. So what sort of new features does Google Analytics Premium bring into the mix?

The Exciting New Feature of Google Analysis Premium

Before Premium was rolled out to the online business community, it was beta tested by a number of Google’s largest customers.

The features under trial were:

• Additional processing power
• Enhanced analysis, reporting
• Improved levels of service and technical support
• Performance guarantees

Additional Processing Power

The real key to Google Analytics Premium lies in its ability to process greater volumes of data. The standard Analytics program provides support for up to 20 different custom dimensions, and 20 different custom metrics, whereas the premium version caters for up to 200 custom dimensions, and 200 custom metrics.

It’s worth mentioning at this juncture that users do not have the ability to delete any dimensions. They can however be disabled, which is what you will need to do if you have reached the 200 limit but then need to enter more. There is however a word of warning. Once disabled, a dimension cannot be reinstated. Instead, you would have to create a new version.

Enhanced Analysis and Reporting

Having drastically expanded the processing power, Google have provided enhanced analysis and reporting facilities to interpret the data in a more micro-managed way.

Improved Real-time Reporting

In the standard release of Analytics, measurements were taken every 30 minutes. With Google Analytics Premium, measurements are taken every 5 minutes. Bearing in mind the huge amount of traffic we’re talking about, this improved measurement interval means that any changes in trends can in effect be spotted, reported, and acted upon in real time.

Categorising Visitors

Every website has a different cross-section of new visitors and returning visitors. Premium allows users to differentiate in terms of client category, but more importantly, to also use this information in conjunction with other statistics, and dimensions. So, this means that the behaviour of the new, first time visitors to the website can be compared to existing, returning visitors, to see how their use and navigation of the site differs.

Visitor Behaviour

This function enables users to monitor the behaviour of visitors to the website. For example, you can determine exactly how many visitors only come to the website once, or how many make several visits without ever making an enquiry or completing a purchase.

Landing Patterns

Another aspect of the enhanced reporting facilities is the ability to measure how many times a particular visitor lands on the website in a specific period of time. But bearing in mind the vagaries of mobile phone signal strength across the nation, these statistics have to be viewed with care, as some mobile device users simply find that their signal strength inexplicably gives out from time to time forcing them to call again.

Visitor Engagement

Visitor engagement is one of the most talked about aspects of visitor behaviour when it comes down to analysing website performance. The consequences of publishing new content on a website can have a significant effect on engagement. If visitors merely skip from page to page, or article to article, they are showing minimal engagement and are less likely to become a client. The fact of the matter is that the more a visitor engages with your site, the more likely he or she is to eventually either make an enquiry, or complete a purchase.

Improved Levels of Service and Technical Support

Google Analytics Premium is a complex and powerful tool and in order to help users to get the most out of it, Google have created an excellent 24/7 support network to help with both the installation and utilisation of the new package.

Service Level Guarantees

Google offer a full performance guarantee with regard to a service level agreements, data collection, processing and reporting.