Answers for your common WebSite Design Questions
Hosting simply makes your website visible to the traffic on the world wide web (www). To be a server on the Internet, it requires special equipment and a high speed connection, in order to provide reliable high speed access to the websites. You could think of hosting to your website as the telephone company is to your phone; they provide the dial tone for your telephone to connect to other telephones. Without a telephone company, your telephone could not connect to the telephone network; and without a hosting service, your website could not be visible to the world wide web. The hosting fee is much like your monthly telephone bill; it is based on the amount of storage (or space) your website requires, and the amount of bandwidth (how much traffic to your website) is requires. Typically; the more storage and bandwidth, the higher the price.
A domain name; ie, www.domainname.com, is simply a more human friendly way for people to be able to find your website. Each website can also be addressed by a unique I.P. (Internet Proticol) address. You have to purchase a domain name that you wish to use for your website. Your domain name will then be pointed to your unique I.P. address. Domain names are managed by name servers on the Internet. There is usually a short period of time for a new domain name to properly point to your website. This is referred to a propagation period and can take up to 48 hours to complete.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internets unique identifiers. You can visit and learn more at www.icann.org.
Ecommerce is generally referred to selling on the Internet. It is basically an on-line shopping cart that allows people (traffic) to go to a secure place, view your products and services, add them to a shopping cart, and checkout (purchase) using their credit card. A shopping cart is a specialized website that provides the tools needed to be able to open an on-line store. A shopping cart should not be confused with a website although there are similarities. A website is generally used to provide information about you, your company, your products and services, and/or general information. A potential customer would visit your website to learn about you, and then possibly visit your on-line store to make a purchase.
Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) is the process of improving the search engine results, or the visibility of your website. In short, it will help your website become more relevant to your target audience and improve the natural or organic traffic to your website.
There are billions of web pages competing with the billions of daily searches. In the blink of an eye, search engines strive to provide the most relevant information. I like to think of a search engine as being a very good match maker.
A search engine is simply an on-line tool to help you find the information you are looking for. You have to remember that search engine websites such as Google®, are in business to make a profit. They make their profit by providing a service to the volume of people who use their service. You could think of them as a sort of "match maker".
"Sites' positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. These factors are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html.
In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website."
The simple answer is - YES. I don't generally recommend a client to edit their own website because there are so many things that can go wrong. Without knowing HTML, you could mess up your website, and in the long end up costing yourself more money to repair it. I would recommend taking a look at my Maintenance Plans and choosing an affordable option to fit your needs.
Incoming, inbound, or inward links to a website or web page.
A free tool from Google® that allows you to track the traffic to your website and analyze the information to help you improve the return on investment of your website.
The percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. It is important to maintain a proper balance of keyword density on a web page: too low means not relevant and too high means spamming.
The mathematical ratio between the popularity of the keyword search phrase and the competitiveness of the search phrase. In other words, a search phrase with a high K.E.I. would have the greatest potential to make progress.
HTML codes that are embedded into the header of a web page that are mainly used to instruct search engines and robots how to index and list your website pages.
Off page optimization refers to factors outside of your website to improve traffic; mainly inbound and outbound linking. Search engines use complicated algorithyms to determin the popularity of your website. Backlinks to your website are a major factor in determining this popularity. Each link to your website from another website (backlink) is like a "vote" to your popularity.
On page optimization has mostly to do with your website; content, meta tags, alt tags, headings, keyword density, etc. The purpose of on page optimization is to synchronize your keywords in order to gain organic search engine traffic. By optimizing your website, search engines will find your website to be more relevant to the keyword search phrases.
Refers to natural or unpaid traffic to your website, originated from a search engine, where the visitor typed a search phrase or keyword and clicked on a link to your website from the search engine results page.
A numeric value of 0-10 assigned to a web page based on a complicated algorithm used by Google®. The page rank represents the quality, importance, relevance and/or popularity the web page.
The results of a search, listing the web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.
