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How Your Web Hosting Service Can Influence Your Website’s SEO

March 4, 2023VH AustraliaDigital Marketing, Web Hosting

If your business has a website, unless it has traffic visiting, it is of little use. Thankfully, the number of ways that you can generate traffic is significant. Some cost money, and others are free but come with a cost in terms of time and effort. Of the latter, one traffic-generating method which has created fortunes for many businesses that have benefitted from it is SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and it is how a website and its pages are optimised so that Google improves its ranking whenever someone searches using terms relating to that business. SEO is an entire industry with experts able to help a website move from obscurity to the top of page one on Google. There are countless ways they do this, but they are not the only ones who can help boost your SEO.

Your hosting service provider can also play their part, albeit not in the same hands-on way an SEO agency would. Instead, based on the quality, reliability, and performance of their hosting and their servers, a hosting company can boost your ranking on Google without so much as creating a single backlink. How do they do this, and why does it work? Here are some of the answers to those questions.

Page Load Speeds

The speed at which your website’s pages load is critical to Google rankings. Slow load times mean visitors click away and that is identified by Google which will downgrade the rankings of websites it sees has lots of ‘bounces’ and where visitors do not stay very long.

Server Locations

Whilst the location of a server might not directly impact your ranking it can influence it indirectly. If a hosting company has multiple server locations meaning your website is hosted on a server in the country you are targeting, your pages should load faster for local visitors than if the servers are on the other side of the world.

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WordPress vs Blogspot What Should I Use

December 14, 2022April 10, 2023VH AustraliaDigital Marketing, Website Development

In the modern world of the internet, more and more people are starting to write their own websites and personal blogs every single day. While WordPress remains the most popular website creation platform, with over 25% of the internet built on it, other, smaller sites like Blogger are still used by millions of people.

If you are thinking about starting your own website or blog, the question of which platform to use will come up. While there are plenty of options out there, WordPress.org (self-hosted WordPress) and Google’s Blogger are definitely two of the most popular. Discover more about them both below:

WordPress:

WordPress is the world’s largest website building platform, and is used by millions of people throughout the world. It is reported that over a quarter of the internet’s websites run on WordPress, and many of these are among the world’s largest. There are a lot of reasons why people love WordPress, including it’s customizability and full ownership:

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Affiliate Marketing With WordPress – Is It Worth It?

July 7, 2021April 10, 2023VH AustraliaDigital Marketing, Website Development

Affiliate programs are becoming increasingly popular in the digital world as businesses try and gain a majority share of their industry. Creating affiliate sites using WordPress has become a niche industry which – for some – is extremely financially rewarding. However, like everything in the digital world, affiliate marketing with WordPress isn’t for everyone. Is it worth it for you?

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Basically, affiliate marketing involves you promoting someone else’s products or services and receiving a commission on every sale or conversion that you make. Affiliate marketing has existed for decades in the physical world, but it’s very different in the digital space.

On the internet, affiliate marketing can be completed by pretty much anyone. For example:

Owners of existing websites might choose to include affiliate banners or affiliate links throughout their website, making the most of space that they would have been using anyway.
High-profile social media influencers use affiliate marketing regularly, promoting certain products or services in order to make a profit.
Dedicated affiliate marketers create affiliate-based websites designed to generate affiliate income.

For the rest of this article, we will be assuming that you want to create a dedicated affiliate website with WordPress.

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5 Tried And Tested SEO Techniques That Still Work In 2020

June 15, 2020June 20, 2020VH AustraliaDigital Marketing

Given the somewhat technical nature of SEO, it is easy to assume that to do SEO correctly all you need to do is use all the very latest tactics and techniques.

While keeping up to date with what is working is to be encouraged, you must not lose sight of the fact that tried and trusted techniques also play a huge role in boosting and maintaining rankings.

In other words, you should be looking to use an effective combination of the latest SEO, and SEO which has proven itself for many years. If you are wondering what some of the latter might be, here are 5 of them.

#1 Understand How To Measure Your Ranking Performance

This is SEO 101, but it is still shocking how many website owners spend hours implementing SEO but barely a few minutes measuring how well it is working. Always measure your results so that you can make the necessary adjustments and improvements.

#2 Mix Up Your Backlinks

Backlinking works, but only if done correctly. Too often the same types of backlinks are used which is a red flag to Google. Mix up where they come from and the keywords you use, to make them more natural. (more…)

5 Things You Could Be Claiming, But Aren’t

September 10, 2019October 15, 2019VH AustraliaBusiness Advice, Finance Advice

Tax returns are difficult, time consuming and a pain in the neck. For many people, qualified accountants are the answer, no matter how expensive they are. However, other people can’t afford to use accountants or tax agents to lodge their tax return, and this can lead to mistakes.

Even if you have lodged your tax return correctly, and have fulfilled all of your legal requirements under Australian law, you still might be losing a lot of money due to an incorrect tax return. You may have forgotten to claim certain work related expenses, or you may have forgotten that you could claim some things altogether. Our top 5 things that people could be claiming on their tax returns, but aren’t, include:

Travel expenses

If you or your employees travel for work, you can claim any travel related expenses. This includes things like aeroplane or bus tickets, accommodation and food. Make sure that you keep any receipts, and note that you can only claim these things if the sole purpose of the trip is business.

Charity donations

A lot of people either don’t realise that they can claim charitable donations on their tax return, or they simply forget to do so. For someone who donates even small amounts to charity every year, it is definitely worth claiming your donations as a tax deduction. Sure, it might not save you a whole lot, but it will lower your taxable income, and it will reduce the amount of tax you have to pay.

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5 Ways to Protect Your Personal Assets When Starting a Business

February 14, 2017October 15, 2019VH AustraliaLegal Advice

It’s important to consider the way you treat your personal assets when you’re starting a new business. If you do things right, you should be able to separate your personal and business assets, protecting yourself, even if your business goes broke.

It’s always a good idea to speak with a decent commercial lawyer or account before taking any drastic financial management steps, but it’s also a good idea to know what options are available to you before you speak to anyone.

With this in mind, we’ve put together a short list of the top 5 things you can do to protect your personal assets when you’re starting a new business. They include:

Structure yourself as a company

Structuring your business as a company, rather than as a small business or sole trader, can help protect your personal assets. Companies are seen as separate entities, and only the company’s assets will be at risk if something goes wrong.

A business planner or commercial lawyer will be able to help you decide what the best business structure for your financial needs is.

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Innovative Web Designing Ideas For Beginners

May 8, 2016October 15, 2019VH AustraliaWebsite Development

If you are new to web designing, you should know that web designing is not about flashing images and loads of irrelevant material in varying fonts and colours. A website design with text swooping from all sides can actually distract your visitors. You need to keep your website design as simple as you can without losing sight of what you want your subscribers and online communities to see when they access your website.

Having said that, make sure that you use graphics in your website to spruce it up. You can add life to just about any website by adding images. Images play a major role in breaking the monotony of your text, though proper use of graphics is crucial. With graphics, you can greatly enhance the appeal of your web pages and thus impress your visitors. Outlined below are some quick web page layout ideas to incorporate graphics effectively in your web design.

Use JavaScript to swap images
Swapping images is a simple but powerful technique that can be done using JavaScript. With this technique, you can swap graphics if the cursor passes over any web object. For instance, if you are into interior decorating business and you wish to include some of your latest designs in your website, this technique would be of great use to you. So, if your visitor passes over a button that says ‘living room’ while the current graphic is a bed room design, then a living room design would be displayed in place of the bedroom design until the cursor remains over the living room button.

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Common Elements In Website Layout

January 19, 2015October 15, 2019VH AustraliaWebsite Development

Whenever you want to have a winner website, then you must follow winning formulas that are used by thousands of websites all around the world. This is absolutely essential, as this is the only way in which you can make sure that your website will be interesting and appealing. There is no simple way to design a website, but some common elements must be in your website layout in order to be considered successful.

One common element that is found on all website layouts is of course a “user friendly” navigation menu. This is actually the backbone of many successful web sites as your users must be able to navigate through your website with ease. You can find many websites all over the Internet, with problematic user menus, which often leave the visitors stranded at a certain page. This can turn off many people and they will leave your site right away instead of trying to find the right way to get back to the main page. Time is an important commodity on the Internet and it is important for you to minimize the use of time with smart menus that allow for simple navigation. Slinky Web Design believe Your visitors must be able to go to their interests really fast within your website or chances are that you will lose them.

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The 18 Mistakes That Kill Start Ups

November 1, 2006November 8, 2019VH AustraliaDigital Marketing

In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It’s equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that’s too big a question to answer on the fly.

Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn’t do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It’s easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn’t than always to remember to do something you should.

In a sense there’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you’ll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don’t do. And if you don’t make something users want, then you’re dead, whatever else you do or don’t do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want. Nearly all failure funnels through that.

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