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New disruptive cloud Webhosting Company challenges the Billion dollar hosting market

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page cloud hosting in the cloud

When I recently checked out Craig Fitzpatrick’s new page cloud website building service on Facebook I was surprised by the simplicity of this website building software and yet made aware of how versatile this new technology is. It’s amazing how you can just click and drag and drop and make a website just like that.

The Canadian start up scene is growing in leaps and bounds, just like the Australian start up scene here and this new ground breaking website building technology is just proof of this.In its initial raising page-cloud managed to get $6-million in seed financing from Canadian and U.S. investors – including Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke to get it all started up . Page cloud was also the finalist at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference this past spring, however they have come a long way since then.

So what is page cloud?

According to their website “PageCloud is the world’s most advanced web editor, a pro tool that brings the experience of Photoshop to the Web”.

In simple words, once you register with them, you can just log into your pagecloud website in your browser and start building your website by dragging pictures, Text etc. from your desktop or  laptop onto your browser and make a website. You can also drag an existing website template and then modify it to make a new design for your website or blog.

This technology is best experienced or seen via this introductory video made by founder Craig, which is below

It’s surprising but the team at page cloud is also listening to their new customers and making changes to improve their service every day. Check out their blog to get an update on updates to their service.

Website: http://pagecloud.com/

Their Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/pagecloudapp/

Their linked in page : https://www.linkedin.com/company/pagecloud

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pagecloud

clip_image001

[Img from pagecloud blog]

How you could benefit from this new technology ?

For People who want to be in control of their website and design it themselves or maintain it themselves this would be a good easy option. This is also an quick option for developers who don’t want to spend too much time designing new websites but want to give something good in the least possible time frame for their clients

How to get your page cloud website started?

· Purchase a membership/monthly plan with page cloud

· When you create a PageCloud site, it is automatically assigned a name and a public URL of the form: eg.  name.pagecloud.com

· Log in and create your website via drag and drop and add content.

· Point your purchased domain name to the page cloud website.

If you got a domain with — > go daddy which is my recommended domain name registrar , then you can follow their detailed domain pointing guide on their website here to point it to pagecloud.  Go daddy currently has a cheap 99 cent domain name deal going on , you can  get it here.

How does page cloud stack up against other cloud webhosting providers?

There is no doubt about the ease of use of this service, but what about the most important factor -pricing. The monthly fee for this service is priced at $24 a month for 1 site.

I really don’t like the fact that the price still stays the same even if you take a 10 website package @$24 X10 = $240 for 10 sites. We will have to wait and see if they will offer a discount for a bigger website package deal, however their website does offer discount coupons for special deals.

Their refund policy states that they don’t offer any refunds and they will inform you in most cases if they have a problem with your account and need to terminate their services with you for any specified reason.

Drag and drop website building is not really new, with popular website creation companies like www.wix.com and www.weebly.com and www.squarespace.com  who are already operating in this space, but page cloud has upped the game a bit with actually allowing you to drag n drop edit and create a website right from your browser.

These more established providers provide free trials of their service which can be a good thing to test things out. The most important bit after checking features offered  is pricing and so we will compare pricing below.

Wix Comparison

Wix offers a free trial for their service and charges $4.08 a month for their most basic “connect domain plan” which displays wix ads on your website, so this in most probably not appropriate if you are serious about your website or then starting a business. Their $8.25 Combo plan for personal use is good starter plan and you get a domain free for 1 year. Check out their updated pricing + more plans and detailed features + terms of use here.

Weebly Comparison

Weebly also offers free trial of their service, you can create unlimited pages and host your site for free. For their $8 a month starter plan, you can get a nice website and get  rid of their weebly ads on your website, get site stats and also a free bonus domain name for 1 year. Check here for updated pricing plans and more features here.

Squarespace Comparison

Squarespace offer s 14 day trial for their service. They have an $8 a month plan (billed annually) for their starter plan. They also have a monthly plan, but fees increase substantially if you take a monthly plan. They have a fully integrated ecommerce service and give you a domain free with your annual plan. Check here for updated pricing plans and more features.

Page cloud vs Weebly vs Wix vs Squarspace

So to sum it up there is a big price difference between other cloud hosting companies above which are cheaper  and page cloud, but then there is also the uniqueness of the page cloud service which justifies a little bit of a higher price, but it remains to be seen if  the $24 pricing bracket is justifiable for the unique new technology and ease of use they provide.

IMHO they possibly won’t make as much inroads into the developer market, but would possibly attract a good chunk of DIY website builders  who will certainly find this  service useful.

5 FREE SEO tools and case study of your ranking and banking keywords

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There is SEO and then there is SEM, but you pretty much need both to succeed. The good thing is that most big players in the search engine optimization game offer free research tools to their punters to try/test  out their tools before buying.

These are the popular softwre companies like SEO MAJESTIC, AHREFS, SEM RUSH and MOZ.com

No prizes then for guessing which of these are my favourites

5 SEO Software tools for 2015

 

1. Ahrefs.com

2. Semrush.com

3. Moz.com

4. Seomajestic.com

5. Alexa.com (not a tool – Nielpatel – but he thinks that this also pulls the most relevant keywords from your blog)

 

 

 

Yes my likeability for them is pretty much in that same order. Now I have not been able to afford a full membership, because many of them start at a price between $69 to $150 a month which is a bit steep to me, but you on the other hand – if you have the money go ahead and try it.

I would like to try SEMRUSH if I had the chance & money as i like their interface and they are updating their indexed URL at a good pace to compete with the top guns( You know one of my wish list now – so feel free to buy me one :)

So what this post/case study  can help you with

  • Finding the Keywords Your Competitors Use
  • Checking Google Keyword Rankings and money maker keywords
  • FIND a good software SEO Tool

Anyway back to what I intended to show you today, how good is the data really on these SEO tools providers. I am going to compare them to the big daddy of data hoarders (Google webmaster tools and analytics) as google pretty much knows which website is doing what and have the most data on the internet on websites.

It’s pretty simple what I’m doing here

I go to stat counter and webmaster tools and then sync my keyword data from Google to what I have in stat counter dashboard and have a look at the merged and comparison keyword data in stat counter ( click link to see how its done).

This then will give me the keywords that are bringing in the most traffic to my blog and I can see which ones are bringing in the revenue.

NEXT….

·finding banking and rqanking keywords of your website

  • Meat lover Australia
  • Bacon and yoghurt bbq
  • Lemon and cheese special
  • Bourbon cucumber weed
  • Raw prawn chia seed pizza

Next : I do a comparison of these keywords against these SEO tools. I enter my blog url in SEM rush, Ahrefs etc and see if any of them picks up (keywords)  that i found via the data matching i did with &  found from Google and statcounter data

What I am trying to do here?

The aim of this case study is to find out – if any of the above listed seo tool providers can find out/match the ranking and banking keywords that I have got from GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS/STATCOUNTER (merged) from doing a search on their webpage without signing in on their full membership. So pretty much we are trying to gauge – how good they are with the little data they are giving out before a person signs up to their membership plan for the full data.

Now I’m not going to use my sites for this experiment, even though I have used one of them… but im replacing some keywords with say Dominos pizza kinds of site keywords to make it interesting.

So the keywords will actually reflect the actual case study I have done for actual money maker & Google ranking keywords – but replaced it with pizza keywords

So let’s say those keywords (from stat counter and GWT merged data) were

So my data tells me that this is the money maker (Google ranking) keywords and I need to check with the big guns (Ahrefs, SEM rush etc if they can find that out) with a URL check.

::::::: I did these checks without logging into any of these providers’ websites::::

( I refer to snapshot page in this post as the first results page of the SEO tool provider after I enter url an click enter for results to display )

 

SEMRUSH

I put in the URL of the website and do a search on semrush.

SEMrush Competitive Data


So Semrush has one of the organic keywords (Raw prawn chia seed pizza) in their list that matches my GWT/statcounter keyword. But point to be noted is that they have many more organic keywords listed for the website but it can be seen only with a full SEM rush membership

[Additional note- Semrush gives you a basic snapshot of also your MAIN ORGANIC COMPETITORS  so you can also spy on your competitors for their  keywords]

 

Ahrefs

ahrefs seo tool for tracking and SEM

It gave no keyword data that matched my GWT/statcounter keywords.

I think SEM RUSH did a better job of listing my top 10 competitor’s urls, considering that the domain name I compared for this case study was a .com.au Australian domain. SEM rush returned not only Australian competitors but also relevant .com competitors in their snap shot, while the Ahrefs Top 10 competitors didn’t look relevant at all

[Additional note- Ahrefs give you a good look at the rising numbers of referring pages in their snapshot page .A steady rise in this number is good for SEO. It also gives you a good idea of how you’re US and UK organic traffic is increasing in numbers – under organic traffic heading and chart]

 

Seo Majestic

majestic seo for ranking and analysis

They didn’t provide any keywords in their snapshot page, but under pages column in snapshot the three urls/pages were present there that were the get/statcounter keywords pointing to those pages. Only somewhat helpful – not much ( and that is only because I knew what I was looking for , so wish they actually listed what keywords the website is organically ranking for in the snapshot page like the rest )

[Additional note – they do give a trust flow and citation flow ranking , but what I like is their pretty colourful charts showing backlink breakdown and anchor text breakdown – their backlink history graph can also be useful for SEO]

 

Moz.com

moz for da and pa and spam analysis

Moz did not give me any matching keywords on their open site explorer page. They did not list any keywords for website in their snapshot page

[additional note – Moz does a good job of giving you a Domain authority (DA) and Page authority (PA) score – I like the spam analysis they did on linking sites – which is sites linking to you, these can be good if you want to disavow (remove) links that are bad and linking to you]

spam analysisby moz for backlinking bad links

Moz bad links analysis

 

Alexa.com

Alexa.com didn’t give me any keywords that matched. They had five different keywords to what I got from GWT/statcounter.

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Under their headings

Top Keywords from Search Engines

Which search keywords send traffic to this site?

I did not get any matched keywords to my GWT/Statcounter Keywords for the 5 keywords that they pulled of my website, so there you go (nielpatel)

[Additional note : I like the way how alexa give s you a global rank and show you if it’s been climbing high recently and also the stats of how much time people are actually spending on your website (How engaged are visitors) which can give you an idea of bounce rate and if you should improve content + also — > Which sites did people visit immediately before this site?]

Now I do know that I could possibly get much more relevant keywords and ranking data from these SEO DATA providers after signing up for a membership, but aren’t these companies supposed to provide good free data to entice us signing up for their full membership with their free SEO snapshot. Most failed in this and so there is plenty of marketing opportunity to improve I suppose for them.

I hope you have got something useful from this case study , as you can see I prefer to use sem rush for my SEO needs and also use other tools like AHREFS, Seo majestic etc to compare results . If you think there are some good tools that can give me that data I need, do leave a comment or get in touch with me via contact page and i would be glad to add it to this research/case study page

This Guy bought Million dollar Google.com for just $12 dollars

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domains for cheap what - and not even godaddy but Google domain registration service

Domain Names Sell for as low as 0.99 cents to $35.6 million just for internet domain name. Google.com which is probably worth millions of dollars got accidentally sold to a buyer last week for a very small fee this week, possibly leaving many google employees redfaced. In fact insurance .com did sell for $35.6million (yep just for the name www.insurance.com) in 2010.

How did google lose google.com domain name for just $12

In one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever read online a guy called Sanmay Ved has detailed how he was able to use Google’s own domain service to buy Google.com for just $12.

the google.com accidental sale for $12 and purchase

Apparently Sanmay was playing around in Google Domains just to see if there was any interesting domains he could buy. He searched google.com and was surprised that it was available. He could not believe his luck and instantly just purchased the domain without thinking about it. He then decided to add it to his cart and check out and realised all he needed to pay was just the small amount of $12 to own one of the most popular names on the internet.

While this story is as unbelievable as it is, like hitting a gold mine, the joy didn’t last for long. The domain was for a short time was actually registered to Sanmay Ved, as it showed in his Google Webmaster Tools with his existing domain and he also received a set of emails from Google accounts, the details of which he hasn’t disclosed.

Surprisingly he did say that that he had not received similar emails for previous domain purchases.THE domain at THE price! $.99 .COM Domains from GoDaddy!

What happened next was expected, Google managed to reverse the transaction and sanmay was refunded the $12 he spent for the domain and the domain name went back to google.

It is said that this obviously could be done easily because google domains owns the registration service, however had another big registrar like godaddy.com ( which sells domains names for currently as low as 0.99 cents ) or Bing.com or yahoo.com had laid their hands on such a nice prize it would have been another story altogether.

 

You can read the whole post that sanmay ved posted on his linked in account over here.

Here are some pics from his Linked in account

His linked in profile

sanmay ved in linked in domain hunter

His google.com purchase

the sanmay ved cheap google.com domain name purchase

This news story has rocked the internet going viral  and has been reported by many tops technology news giants like Cnet, Forbes and many more (including us)

New Domains now available from GoDaddy! Get your .GURU, .UNO, .LUXURY and more! Click here

[Read more…] about This Guy bought Million dollar Google.com for just $12 dollars

The Near-Future Role of A SEO

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seo in perth sydney melbourne victoria australia

A SEO’s role is always changing and adapting ever since webmasters were optimizing sites in the mid-1990’s. With every technological change and every Google algorithm update, a SEO’s job changes little by little. In the near future, a SEO’s role will not become more specialized, but broader. SEO’s will need to widen their scope of skills in order to stay competitive. A SEO’s job will revolve around these three main roles:

1. Search Engine Compliance Officer

The Search Engine Compliance Officer’s primarily responsible will be overseeing and managing Search Engine compliance issues within an organization. This is the role that will be most important for corporations and enterprises to have. The job will be much similar to what it is now, knowing all of Google and Bing’s Webmaster guidelines, and making sure that all things on a site are compliant to those guidelines.

The Search Engine Compliance Officer would be the “first line of defense” against Search Engine penalties. Any new additions to the site must pass the SEO before being pushed live (new pages, new content, tools, categories, sections, tagging, etc), moreover, a SEO should also be present during any meetings of new additions to a site to make sure that that integration is being completed well within a Search Engine’s guidelines and best preferred practices.

The SEO will also need to make sure that all incoming backlinks are compliant with a Search Engine’s policies. SEOs will need to monitor and investigate:

· How the backlink was obtained to make sure that it was not purchased

· The anchor text of the link and comparing it to the anchor text breakdown of the entire link profile

· The “spamminess” of a link

· Whether a banner ad or sponsored link has been nofollowed

· The top level IP’s of links to make sure that they are not apart of a link farm or link scheme

How To Prepare Yourself:

· Read Google and Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines

· Read Google Webmaster Blog

· Become Proficient in Google Webmaster Tools

· Learn To Use Google Analytics

· Learn To Use Screaming Frog

· Stay Up To Date With On SEO Blogs, such as:

o Moz.com

o SearchEngineLand.com

o SERoundTable.com

· Learn To Use Link Monitoring Tools, like:

o Open Site Explorer

o MonitorBacklinks.com

o Majestic SEO

o Ahrefs

· Learn to Decipher The Site Speed Recommendations From Pingdom

2. Creative Director

Since Wil Reynold’s gave his amazing RCS presentation at Mozcon 2012, content marketing has been on every marketing/SEO department checklist. Developing great content has been and is the key to sustainable online growth. That will not soon change with the ongoing rise of social media, which are essentially content sharing networks.

SEOs will have to become more like Creative Directors – birthing an interesting and captivating idea, leading the communication for design and copy, and developing the ways for it to gain visibility. The SEO must guide teams with skills and experience related to graphic design, fine arts, motion graphics, content, social media, and development. It would be beneficial for any SEO to study up on and receive certification in any tools that designers, developers, and project manager’s use. The key is to not only be able to speak their language for optimal communication, but also be able to get hands-on in every project.

From the beginning of an idea to the point where it is generating a company traffic, mentions, and backlinks, a SEO has to be the point person, directing his or her creative vision to lead to content that will be a success online or off.

How To Prepare Yourself:

· Take Courses in the Adobe Creative Suite

· Study and Get Certified in Project Management

· Start Reading Any of These Books

· Brush Up on Advertising

· Learn to Use Social Media Tools, like:

o Sprout Social

o HootSuite

o Facebook Ads

· Ingratiate Yourself into Social Communities Like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Vine, etc To Learn What Is On the Cusp of Social Popularity

3. New Technology Optimizer

Technology is ever changing and there is always going to be a new channel to advertise through. At the moment, it is social and mobile. In the near future, it will probably be voice search especially with the growth of businesses like Wolfram Alpha, Viv, and of course, Siri. The goal of these three technologies is to serve you the best information, with the least amount of barriers. Even though search will be done through voice, there will still need to be a database, a place to pull information from, and that will still be web properties like websites or social pages that they can crawl and serve data.

A SEO is the near future will need to be able to optimize for all these channels. They will need to on the cusp of technology and know how to gain visibility through every new platform that arises – whether it is search engines, app stores, voice search, or even information or ads brought to you during your Google self-driving taxi ride.

How To Prepare Yourself:

· Research and Read the Latest News in Technology

· Learn About Viv AI Through this article and this article

· Stay Up To Date On What Google is Working on

In conclusion, things are not getting more specialized for SEOs, they are getting a bit broader. A SEO in the near future will need to be a jack-of-all-trades, in a sense. Moreover, a SEO in the near future will need to know how any why a search engines ranks a site and make sure that companies are compliant with those guidelines, be creative that can not only come up with an idea, but work with teams to execute and find success, and lastly will stay up to date with all technologies and be able to optimize for every platform.

And then there was The google sandbox .. lo and behold

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the google new domain website blog sandbox

What is the Google sandbox

You just launched a new website with a new domain and its links are still not showing up in Google search engine. You probably are experiencing the Google sandbox. Here are some of the symptoms of Google sandbox

I just bough domain and no backlinks are showing for website

I just made a new website and no links are showing

My new website is not ranking on Google

Google Sandbox 2.0 a.k.a. “Google Waiting Period”

When a brand new site on a brand new domain is launched, it gets put into what SEO professionals have dubbed the Google Sandbox. The Google Sandbox effect is theory that exists among webmasters on the Internet that web pages on new domain names rank poorly in the SERP (search engine result page) even though they have a high page rank. The sandbox will be on new domain names for a period from 3-8 months. The months in sandbox is just speculation and could be anywhere from 3 months to 6 months from reports by seo researchers.

The Google Sandbox is for new domains, not new sites

Check out Google’s Matt Cutts discussing the relevance of domain age.

How to get a Cheap domain from godaddy

In that video Cutts said:

matt cutts on twitter with seo block for new domain

“The difference between a domain that’s six months old vs one year old is really not that big at all. As long as you’ve been around for at least a couple of months, you should be able make sure that you can show up in search results.”

Matt Cutts said, there is some difference between a domain that’s six months old and one that’s 12 months old, but the difference at that point is incredibly small. The important thing is to wait out those first few month.

How to rank, even in the Google Sandbox

You can still rank your website even is Google is punishing your new site by placing it in the Sandbox. You can absolutely build a brand new site on a brand new domain and still rank well in Google — but you’ll have to likely target keywords for which there is relatively low competition.

2nd method

Get a existing domain that has already had a website for some time, but make sure its relevant o your niche not penalised or has a spam link profile. You can quickly do this by a quick check in google search engine like this , search for Site:http://www.thedomain.com where the domain is the site which you are checking, it will show up all the backlinks for that website.

moz ope site explorer

Or you can also check it here https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

Acquire links from authoritative sites.

Plan ahead– contrary to the general practice of launching a site when it is absolutely complete, launch a couple of pages, when you have them. This will start the clock and time will be running parallel to your site development efforts.

Try to gain some social shares to validate the links that your site has recently got.

Google is still indexing your site, even while you’re in the Google Sandbox. You’re still a part of their index. In addition to the number and quality of links pointing to your website, the age of those links is also important in determining your site’s TrustRank. On the day a link to your website is published, Google awards your site only a portion of the total TrustRank that link possesses

Why your website or blog might not be ranking

If you were ranking well and suddenly vanished from the rankings, that usually indicates either: you had low quality backlinks and those backlinks have been removed from the link index (and indeed open site explorer shows zero quality backlinks for your site); that your site has duplicate content, spun content, shallow content, or too many ads and has run afoul of Panda, or is suffering a manual penalty.

corporate guy

To conclude its best to build authority links and links in a natural manner over a period of time. If your blog backlink profile is a gradual steady rise as most authorative blogs would be, with a mix of social shares etc . then it should slowly rise out of the sandbox and climbing the slippery mountain called google search engine

5 Dangers of Using an Inexperienced Web Designer for Your Business

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In an effort to cut the costs of your business, you may be tempted to use a web designer who offers services at a lower price than their competitors. Chances are, a web designer who offers their services cheaply lacks experience and effectiveness in their work.

Industry experts, such as The Print Group, advises that inexperienced and/or under-qualified web designers can inflict incredible harm on a business and suggest tips for getting it right. Be aware of the following dangers that come with using inexperienced web designers

.nice web design template wordpress

1. They Are Rarely ‘Cheap’

While you may feel tempted by a reduced price on a quote, take great care. Cheap tends to mean that you may not pay as much from the outset but will pay significantly more in the future to cover problems that arise.

Trying to repair mistakes made by an inexperienced designer can be incredibly costly. In this situation, you will probably end up paying more than you would have spent in the first place had you opted for the services of the best web designer you could afford.

2. Your Website May Repel Customers

Your business’ website should really serve as an employee of your company – and an employee that works constantly, is always available and responds promptly and efficiently with everything that the customer needs. Your business’ website must be professional, attentive and focused, and be able to provide the customer with the information and experience that they want.

An inexperienced web designer may lack the skills, knowledge and insight necessary to provide your customers with an excellent website, one that inspires confidence and convinces your customers to engage with your business. Do not risk having a website that does just the opposite and turns customers away.

3. You Won’t Get the Best Features

If you use an inexperienced web designer, you also run the risk of them using cheap plug-ins that ultimately cause a raft of stability and security issues. If your business’ website is to be of outstanding quality and provide customers with a great experience, there is no place for these issues. The use of cheap plug-ins and other features that fail and compromise stability are likely to cause customer frustration.

4. Your Site Might Be Exposed to Security Threats

Use a web designer that has the industry experience and skills needed to keep abreast of and respond to security threats, trends and alerts. With an inexperienced designer, there is a far greater chance of your website, resources, customers and information being at the mercy of hackers.

5. No Help is Available

If you opt for an inexperienced or cheaply priced web designer, do not expect that help will necessarily be available when you need it. As time progresses, you will probably need to update information, post new content, alter information and overcome problems such as site crashes or security threats. A web designer that can provide maintenance support is important, but you’re unlikely to receive this service, or the level of maintenance expertise required to solve problems, if you engage with an inexperienced web designer.

Devote time and resources to find the most effective and experienced web designer that you can possibly afford for your business’ website. Working with an experienced web designer is a very wise investment.