Our Top Website Optimisation Tips..

Having the best looking website online is a great start but unless anyone visits it, it will remain a shell of a site that does not provide any value to you or your business other than a dormant internet presence.

So the obvious question is how to work towards getting a website that not only looks good, but gets visitors to your site with a view to getting them to covert to customers.

Well here it is, our top 5 tips for giving your website the best changes of doing well in the Search Engine Rankings.

1. Keep your website fresh & updated (on-site)
Once you have a site in place  it is important to continually keep the website fresh with material, case studies, articles, blogs, and probably most importantly great quality content. This is so that not only do you keep your audience interested and engaged at all times but so that search engines re-index and respect your website. Some of the pros and cons of updating (or not updating) your site are as follows:

 

Stale Content	Fresh Content
Outdated and uninteresting	Engaging and up to date
Lower search engine rankings	Higher search engine rankings
Low or no website traffic	Increase in website traffic
Higher Bounce Rate	Lower Bounce Rate

 

2. Establish yourself far and wide (off-site)

Don’t be afraid to shout from the proverbial rooftops about your website, your products and what you are offering. Utilise online but off-site methods to promote your site far and wide. Whether that be in the way of good quality, unique and genuinely interesting articles or content that you post to other external websites and have the content pointing back to you via descriptive anchor text through to quality links built from relevant external websites that hold some good gravitas or high page rank for you to benefit from.

3. Continually generate Quality Content

The flavour of the month term is ‘content is king’ which in essence refers to the fact that good quality, relevant and unique content has become one of the most important factors when improving rankings within search engines. The content you generate should not be duplicate, stale, uninteresting or irrelevant, it should be written to engage and to interest visitors as opposed to pleasing search engine algorithms. Quality content does not necessarily mean quantity of content either, you can have good quality content that is succinct and meaningful without needing to pad it out with an unnecessary amount of keywords.

 

4. Optimise your pages for conversions

When we say optimise your pages for conversions we basically mean break down all barriers for potential customers doing business with you, or contacting you, or buying your product online or whatever it is you need them to do on your website. You need to think like one of your perfect customers and tailor your landing pages to suit these ideal visitors so you can secure the desired action as quickly and as easily as possible.

 

5. Optimise your website structure 

The fact that you now have a great looking website with engaging content and regularly updated material you may also need to think about the fundamental way that the site is put together to ensure you are ticking all of the structural boxes. Some of the key factors here include:

• Sitemap - Sitemaps can be either HTML or XML. HTML sitemaps are visible webpages that have the structure of the webpages on so users can click on the links to get to specific pages if they need to. An XML sitemap sits on the server and is more to help search engines understand the structure of your website. You can easily create an XML sitemap by using one of the many websites out there such as www.xml-sitemaps.com to generate it for you. Once you have created your XML sitemap then you will need to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

• Descriptive URLs - the URL that a visitor gets when he or she lands on a webpage is also very important. The display URL not only helps users identify at a glance what they can expect to see on that page but also helps search engines identify the relevance of that page in conjunction with the content it contains.

• Domain Name - Even though you may have had the same domain for many years, there is no harm in understanding that a domain has a part to play in an SEO friendly structure. A domain name that is relevant to the product,  service, location or keyword you are trying to pitch at will certainly go some way to helping your ranking factors and if this domain has some ‘authority’ online already in terms of age your onto a winner.

• Canonicalization - Ensuring that your URL’s all confirm to a standard structure is very important. Preferably a structure that is meaningful as opposed to a string of characters.The URL’s below all refer to the same page but have been written and are dealt with slightly differently by the server:
• http://company.com
• http://www.company.com
• http://www.company.com/
• http://www.company.com/?source=asdf

• Site Speed - Even though there has been a remarkable improvement in internet connectivity and the ability to have image hungry sites are all the rage now, do not turn a blind eye on the loading speed of your website. There are many free diagnostic tools and freeware available that will help you not only diagnose any bottlenecks in website loading times but allow you to optimise imagery and content on the site to improve it.

• Mobile Friendly - If you haven’t heard or thought about it already, then you need to address whether your website is mobile friendly. It may not necessarily mean a total overhaul of the site but a slight restructure of the code to accommodate various resolutions or devices. If you would like to see how ‘mobile friendly’ your website is, then take a look at Googles Mobile Friendly checker: www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

We hope that this article has gone some way to help you understand the basics of website optimisation. The SEO landscape is forever changing and improving however the bottom line is, that if you want search engines to respect your website, then write and design the site for you ideal user, not for the robots and search engines that technically crawl your site.

We would love to hear from you and your experiences when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, so please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

How many IPv6 addresses are available?

 

An IP Address or an Internet Protocol Address is the unique identifier for a device either on a network or accessible the internet.

IPv4, IPv6’s protocol predecessor, was the fourth iteration of the Internet Protocol and was launched in the early 1980’s. IPv4 had the ability to supply a total of 4 billion unique IP addresses, which back then was an unthinkable number and it was far from anyone’s thoughts that we would ever run out.

Organisations and users that required IP addresses were often allocated far more than they needed and by the late 1980’s the exhaustion of the IPv4 addresses was on the horizon as being an issue.

From the early 2000’s IPv4 was nearing depletion, however, luckily, organisations had already started the transition to IPv6. The top-level exhaustion of the IPv4 actually occurred during 2011.

IPv6 of which has now superseded the IPv4 is built on a 128 bit model as opposed to the 32 bits of the older IPv4.

This means that there is a mind boggling number of available unique IPv6 addresses for organisations and networked devices to use moving forward.

So actually how many Internet Protocol addresses are there under the new IPv6

Well, the total number of IPv6 addresses is a staggering 340 Undecillion !!

That number looks like this: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.

To put that number in context, it has been said that we could assign an IPV6 address to every atom on the surface of the earth, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.

If you have any questions or are interested in having your own IPv6 address then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

POP vs IMAP

POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are both email protocols that allow users to access their emails, however due to ever changing work styles and the ability for people to access their emails via a range of different devices whilst on the move, one method has somewhat superseded the other.

The History of POP

POP was originally developed back in 1984 to allow people a simple means of accessing and download their email from a remote server.

With the POP email protocol the emails get downloaded onto the device that logs on to view them, most of the time without retaining the original message on the server, therefore potentially no other device logging on would know there was a new email.

This becomes chaotic when multiple devices are logging on to download their latest emails from a shared mailbox and not able to gain access to read emails.

The History of IMAP

IMAP came about in 1986 and allowed remote access to emails stored on a remote server. This method, unlike the POP method, allows multiple users to manage the same inbox as a copy of the email is downloaded and cached on the device but the original is still stored on the remote server (possibly for a specified amount of time, to prevent too much of an archive).

The Main Differences between POP & IMAP

The main differences between the two methods is that POP actually permanent downloads the emails from the server to a local device for storage whereas IMAP leaves the emails on the server and just temporarily caches the email messages locally on the device.
IMAP has become the chosen method of mailbox set-up as it allows the flexibility to work, download and keep track of emails on multiple devices.

The fact it’s a synchronous system makes it much easier to ensure there is no confusion as to which device has downloaded the messages as they are always accessible again via the remote server, the central location upon which they are stored.

My Hosting Bubble can provide business and personal mailboxes, whether it be IMAP or POP. Please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.