by Aurelien Parment | Apr 29, 2015 | Tips
Welcome to WordPress Wednesdays, a weekly series where we will be focusing on a specific aspect of WordPress that we think administrators should be aware of. Today, we address the proliferation of social media and answer the age old question: How do I get my website to be shared out there?
In the old days, business owners often said that “if you build it, they will come”. With the proliferation of social media and websites now numbering in the billions, simply building it is no longer enough. If you want to drive traffic to your website, you not only have to create valuable content, but also foster an interesting and engaging experience while keeping your visitors coming back for more.
One of the ways you keep people coming back for more is to empower them to share content that keeps them interested. When content is shared, it not only brings eyeballs back to your website but also gives you greater credibility. In this blog post, we’ll look at WordPress plugins that will give you a more robust website and rock you up the Alexa Rankings so you can look like the celebrity you’ve always wanted to be or reach those sales figures you’ve always imagined.
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by Aurelien Parment | Apr 28, 2015 | Web Hosting
As an IT professional, you may be aware that Windows 2003 Server, released 12 years ago, will see extended support come to an end on July 14, 2015.
Windows 2003 Server has been a great product for Microsoft and was the successor to Windows 2000 Server. For IT professionals, the platform gave plenty of future-focused features like Distributed File Systems (DFS), support for storage area networks (SAN), virtual disc services like network attached storage (NAS), and RAID (multiple disk drives placed together at once), which increased the capabilities of systems and allowed more storage space.
However, upgrading from Windows 2003 Server is absolutely imperative for you and your customers. Without upgrading, the cost of managing workloads will become more expensive, email accounts will become at-risk for security breaches, computers and software will become vulnerable to malicious attacks, and outdated software will present compliance issues.
Not to worry though – just because Windows 2003 Server is going away, it does not mean that the features, abilities, and versatility of the platform are leaving. Replacing the system will be Windows Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, and Server 2012. As technologies improve, the reason for upgrading is quite clear, and in this blog post we’ll address a few key reasons for why you should upgrade.
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by Aurelien Parment | Apr 21, 2015 | Tech News, Web Hosting
Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past year, there is the likelihood that you’ve read about a security breach. The concept of cyber security, barely a blip in prior years, exploded on the news front in 2014, and the New York Times wrote more than 700 articles detailing such issues — up five times from the year before. You may have heard of some of them, as they included some of the biggest brands like PF Chang’s, Anthem Blue Cross,Apple, and perhaps the biggest one of them all – Sony – who saw the leak of everything from movie scripts to internal memos, as well as threats from the hackers themselves who wanted to see the cancellation of the North Korean comedy film The Interview.
Data breaches have become a part of our collective consciousness. As we and the products we use begin placing data in the cloud to save money and create ease of access, hackers foam at the mouth knowing that they have easy access to data. With cybersecurity technology still trying to catch up with the daily hacks, we live in the daily fear that our credit card numbers, healthcare information, and transaction history have all been seized by data-hungry thieves.
What have we learned from all these cybersecurity issues of the past year however? We dove into Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report to look at just how complex and crazy cyber threats have become. The numbers are a sobering realization as to just how fragile our technology can be.
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by Aurelien Parment | Apr 14, 2015 | Small Business, Tips
With nearly 1 billion websites online and a limited human attention span, getting anyone to look at your website can be a formidable task. Over the past decade and a half, search engines have helped solve some of the problem, but the challenge of being discovered by customers or a random web surfer is still fairly difficult. You can certainly pay for an ad to be placed at the top of a search result, or use social media to get your name out there, but both can also be very tedious. One of the suggestions that many marketing professionals make is to employ search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to get noticed by search engines.
Getting your site SEO-ready involves a great deal of work but is very doable. In today’s blog post, we’ll showcase five different ways you can employ SEO on your website to help improve your search result ranking.
1. Publish Relevant Content
Quality content is the top driver for search engine discovery. When writing for your website it’s always important to write to the reader, not to the search engine that will discover you. When writing, identify a keyword for your content and repeat this phrase strategically throughout the piece of content. Additionally, use bold, italics, heading tags, and other forms of emphasis to highlight keyword phrases, but don’t overdo it; search engines will punish you. Best practice for keyword density is 3%.
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by Aurelien Parment | Apr 13, 2015 | Small Business, Tips
For many of us the season of spring means renewal and change. The transition of the calendar from a chilly winter to a warm spring means that it’s finally time to get up and get active, alongside the flora and fauna. Many of us will do our sweeping, vacuuming, cleaning, and purging of dust and files so that we can have a more stress-free year ahead.
Spring cleaning now also applies to our technology. Over the winter it is highly likely that our website and web hosting have become cluttered with files and media, thereby causing slowdown in website load times and bandwidth. Even though we know we ought to do it, we don’t because the tasks are daunting and will involve arduous tasks like file backup, deletion, archiving, and more.
With today’s blog post however, we’ve got you covered. In this post, we’ll cover 5 ways you can clean your website this spring, so you can spend the rest of the year doing what you do best – managing it.
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