Things to consider while working with SEO firm

Based on my experience in executing SEO projects for over half a decade, I am posting a blog entry which deals with the suggestions for a client working with any SEO professional or SEO firm for optimizing his website.

·         Have complete faith in SEO professional:

Once you finalize SEO professional or SEO Company, trust their skills. Also you need to trust their knowledge and experience. Do give them freehand to work on their methodology and indulge yourself in learning basics about their methodology and approach. You can discuss the blueprints they prepare for your website, in detail with them. This will help your SEO professional in gaining your confidence and also will help you in reaching a comfort level with your SEO professional.

·         Have reasonable / realistic expectations about your SEO project:

SEO can’t work miracles irrespective of their experience and past track record. Especially if the site is new, it may take months to really see traffic building up because of SEO work. So

its quite unfair on your part to expect your website appearing in top 10 search results thin a month of SEO work done. This is the reason why a good SEO professional DO NOT guarantees any results for the SEO job.  

·         Be patient with the results and be realistic:

SEO is not a fuse wire which can trigger a chain reaction and your site will be bombarded with huge traffic in a matter of time. You need to be patient with SEO. It takes time to implement SEO as it’s a scientific approach and can be implemented after taking a series of steps, each requiring thorough analysis. The approach implemented by a SEO professional may take time to get indexed properly and it may take a little while to get appreciation by

search engines in terms of rankings.  

·         Work in detail with SEO and treat him as a partner:

You need to detail SEO about every minute thing related to functionality of your business so that he can come up with a decent research on keywords. Talk to him about the nature of business, customer behavior, product range, your competitors, target group / area. Based on the information provided by you, SEO can pick right sets of keywords and can boost your website rankings and get the right traffic.  

·         Be ready to pay for quality work:

Choose a SEO professional / SEO company based on the track record. Once zero in on any professional based on the capabilities, then be ready to pay for the quality work which you expect from him. “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. There are plenty of people who are ready to do SEO in a couple of hundred dollars. Their job is just to stuff keywords and create metas and they are done. So my advise is be cautious while picking SEO and be ready to pay for quality work as it is something which is going to bring in more MOOLAH to your business and your growth depends on this.

·        Do not hesitate taking an elementary class from SEO professional about SEO approaches and methodologies:

Learn the basics of SEO from SEO professional working on your project. It takes little efforts but the reward is quite satisfying. You will not be in dark about the SEO progress and you will attain a comfort level with your SEO professional.

·         SEO is not a one time effort:

SEO is not doing a one time job and then sit and wait for the results. You can equate it with the regular marketing and sales efforts. You need to keep refining the approach based on the results which you get crawl after crawl. You need to measure finite parameters and   make changes in your website / content / visuals accordingly so that you get better and   better visibility. After the work is done, its about putting in time & efforts to sustain rankings and continue taking actions for improve rankings.    

·         The success of your business does not depend entirely on SEO:

This is one of the most important points. Do not rely on SEO for generating more revenues and increasing your business reach among the potential buyers. A SEO can drive targeted traffic to your website, however he can not force visitors to buy from you whether its service or any product. The actual SALE entirely depends on your product line, service levels you offer, after sales service, product / service pricing and many other factors. So its unfair to hold SEO professional responsible if you are not getting desired jump in sales even after increase in traffic to your website.



web hosting forum

Difference between Bandwidth and Data Transfer

Most of the web hosting companies talk about bandwidth and data transfer same as one another but truth be known they are different although very closely related.

Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time in other words it the internet connection speed your web host server is connected to the internet.

Data transfer is how much data is being transferred in a period say month as most companies give monthly rates so I used month to help you understand better.

By Example if bandwidth were a bridge, then the bigger the bridge is the more vehicles can pass through it at the same time. While data transfer is the number of vehicles allowed on the bridge in say a month. In essence, data transfer is the consumption of bandwidth.

Question arise how it affects your site? Let me explain this in a simple manner;

The less bandwidth you have, the slower your site takes to load regardless of the visitor’s connection type. This means that your web host has a slow line that is connected to the internet. If you have more visitors, some of them will have to wait their turn.

Data transfer you have is monthly allotted by most of the web host companies, if you have purchased a bandwidth quota say 1GB/month and you have good traffic coming to your site than you’ll find your site unavailable because you’re reached the maximum allowed until a new month rolls by or you upgrade your account.

Always look into this matter before choosing a web host and purchase from a reliable hosting company like Netfirms, iPowerWeb and many others, their servers are connected to internet via premium internet lines which provide lightening speed access to your web site and visitors don’t have to wait for the page to load.

Wishing you best of luck for your successful online business.

Regards,

Yousaf FAYYAZ

http://www.hostfinders.org

http://www.pakimp3.org



Budget web hosting

BANDWIDTH ! .. What this idiom means ? It means data transfer and it’s divided to UNLIMITED and LIMITED, this is depends on the hosting plan you choose and the company which you deal with it.

But you should ask yourself how much information can be transfered from your website to your visitors?, how much graphic, images, clips and all media files are conatined in this website?

You should calculate your image sizes. Some lazy webmasters upload big image files to their site and then sort of resize them by grabbing the corner of the image in their editor and “shrink” them. Well, that’s not really making them smaller, it’s just showing them smaller. The size of the file that you uploaded to your site is the size of the file that people will be downloading - even if you’re forcing it to be shown at a different display size. If you’re seeing a lot of bandwidth usage and if the images on your website take a long time to download, then this could be why. To fix this, you need to resize each image using a photo editing program like Photoshop.

Do you know that your website will have up to 10 MB of information? including your website’s pages. I mean if one visitor is surfing your website and he browses every single page your site contains, then the transferred 10 MB of information during this visit.

Imagine if your website has 1,000 visitors browsing your website pages in one month, the total bandwidth (data transferred) for this month would reach 10,000 MB (10MB for a visitor X 1000 visitors) = (10GB).

On the other hand, if you have website smaller, you will consume less bandwidth per month. And this also depends on your traffic average, whatever your number of visitors per month was little, the less bandwidth you will consume.

Now, we can abbreviate the last in few words : To be able to calculate the amount of bandwidth you want, you need to consider :-

a) the size of your pages in your website.

b) number of the visitors to your website.

c) the kind of files you offer to your visitors.

How can you reduce bandwidth usage?

There are tow ways not to drop in the bandwidth trap :-

- The easy way is to reduce the size of the files on your site is to optimize graphics, and build cascading style sheets, call JavaScript externally if you use it instead of embedding it yourself, and don’t use streaming audio or video. You can also clean up the HTML in your page by reducing the amount of META tags, white space, and comments.

- The other way is deal with a web hosting company offers unlimited bandwidth and disk space. with this plan you won’t need to reduce your files sizes and you don’t suffer again with extra charges of bandwidth every month.

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