Free Links and Tips
This morning, having seen many posts about hosting and other aspects of digital marketing, we thought we would post some links and external websites we use, to ensure that we have joined up thinking in our strategy.
What is important to note is that you are actually trying to please two core elements in your online activity: search engine and viewer. If you have a recognised branding in your industry you may find that this carries you forward. If you do not, you can find it significantly more difficult to attain engagement and authority – with either the aforementioned party.
So, what is the search engine interested in primarily concerned with?
1. Speed of page load. How do we know we have a fast loading page? What does it matter anyway?
Well, I am sure that you have seen the cheap adverts for website hosting from the likes of 123-reg and GoDaddy. All looks great, but do you really know what you are getting?
Two really useful tools to assess this are:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
How to use:
When you see this page, you will see a settings button and this will give you an offering of the country closest to where your server resides. Select this, enter your URL and hit 'test' – you will see the results.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
This is Google's version of a page speed checker, and covers the difference between mobile and desktop machines. We have found this actually to be a little less accurate.
If you don't know where your site resides in the world, you can check all its information here:
This will show you all the detail surrounding your site and its hosting, and will show how many other sites are on the server yours is, and clearly if you or the other ones are looking for more traffic, if you have a push on your marketing, or they do, site speed normally takes a hit! Beware!
Typically, cheap hosting means that the site server is 'brokered' around the world. You will begin to realise that you are just a ticket, and that nobody works for £10 a month in IT, without serious negative consequences, or unless they have tens of thousands of clients – something has to give. Try contacting out of hours, or at Bank Holidays. See what level of response you receive then! The Internet is littered with horror stories from cheap hosting providers clients' and how they have bought their hosting on price!
One other tool which is really useful to monitor your website in real time and to receive notification that it is down is:
You can input the details of your website and you will see how often it goes down – prepare for a delay in getting the system running, but also (normally) prepare for a shock when you start collecting stats and receiving notifications!
Google tells us that you have approximately 2,4 seconds to capture your viewer online – from either search engine, social media or direct URL input. If you understand this, you will soon realise the issues which can surround hosting. It is critical in your success – especially with an e-commerce site. Hosting is often seen as an afterthought. However, without effective, professional, managed hosting, your site is redundant – and so is your push on SEO/digital marketing.
I am going to leave you to digest this and then I am going to post some more information. Any questions, just shout.
Chris Wheeler
Metalfrog Studios Limited
