In the “new normal” economic climate, our customers often seek to the best ways to be frugal, getting the absolute most value for any time or money invested.

Let me share with you some steps you can take on a shoestring budget that will increase the exposure you get on your web site over time.

First – Blog on a consistent basis.

Write about subjects for which you have passion, a level of experience, and tie into the goals of your web site.

If you are using WordPress, I recommend the AuthorSure plugin which helps you take advantage of how Google ranks verified authors.

The more you publish, the more you are tied to what you publish (by appropriately using rel=author, rel=publisher, and so on), your web site, your articles, and your blog will gain in popularly over time.

I strongly recommend the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin to make it easier for you to create an editorial calendar to help you keep an appropriate blogging pace (consistency over time matters more than trying to do it all at once).

Second – Tweet what you blog

Once you are happy with what you’ve blogged, then tweet about it including a link to the blog article.

Make sure that you use appropriate twitter hashtags to make it easy for what you tweet to be found.

Prior to using a hashtag, I recommend you search on the hashtag to see if your article will be a fit. You can use multiple hashtags with each tweet. However, do be careful not to overuse hashtags; typically one to three is enough.

Third – Facebook what you blog

If you are wearing multiple hats as an owner or employee of a small to medium business, then take advantage of easily publishing from your blog to FaceBook using RSS Graffiti.

Once you set it up, you walk away knowing that as you publish your blogging articles, RSS Graffiti is automatically publishing those articles on the Facebook page(s).

Fourth – Google+ what you blog

If you find an way to automate publishing your blog to Google+, especially a WordPress blog, please let me know. For now, post about your blog article on your personal and company Google+ pages.

Fifth – Post about what you blog in an appropriate LinkedIn group and other forums for which you consistently participate

Consistency matters always without exceptions is one of the phrases and practices we shared with our daughter and other family members. It applies to all areas of life.

Find groups on LinkedIn and elsewhere where you can actively participate with on a consistent basis. Consistency and the quality of your participation matters more than the quantity (volume) of groups or forums.

Share what you blog about with the group(s) and forums being careful to avoid turning a given post into a blatant advertisement.

Over the years, I’ve found the more often you do your best to serve and help people, over time those same people will come to respect you, trust you, and seek to do business with you as they are able. Focus on being a servant, and being helpful.

Lastly, almost all forums — and do this as well for your emails — allow you to have a signature line; while the number of lines you can use vary, the average tends to be around four to five lines.

Use those lines wisely including a link to your website and blog.

Take the above steps, consistently, within a frequency where you can be consistent in your quality, and over time your web site exposure will increase as well as your search engine rankings.

Contact us if you have any questions.

If you are an author of any kind — blogger, writer, content developer web site maintainer, etc — you want what you write to have the best opportunity to show as close to the top when a person uses Google with a question that covers whatever you wrote.

While there are commercial (i.e. paid) search engine optimization (SEO) companies that might be able (there’s never a guarantee) have your work listed higher, there is something you can do yourself by taking advantage of the latest change at Google regarding authorship.

Google is currently testing content tied to authorship. You can read authorship in Google search engine results on the Google Support page dealing with this subject.

The set of tasks going through the process of making sure your site and blog home page uses rel=publisher, the posts and pages you write uses rel=author or rel=me; and that you’ve properly connected this to a Google plus profile where you’ve pointed out the locations (web site areas) for which work is being published under your authorship / name.

The Google plus side is easy. Per Google’s Help article covering the Google Plus Profile contributor to area, you simply sign into your Google plus profile, click on “Edit Profile”, and then click on “Contributor to” to add as many areas for which you contribute publishing as an author.

If you are using WordPress for your site and blogging activity, the rest of the steps are very simple thanks to the developers of the free AuthorSure plugin for WordPress. Russell and Liz do a fantastic job at supporting this plugin; and there are a lot of tutorials for using it at the main AuthorSure plugin web site.

Installing the plugin, going through the settings, updating the WordPress user (aka author) profiles including the “Extended Biographical Info” if you went with the extended summary can be done in less than fifteen minutes.

The end result is your site, blog home, and blog pages are now using the appropriate rel=publisher, rel=me, and rel=author settings; AND, what you write socially will now have a greater impact on where you rank in Google.

Now that you’ve heard the ending, let me share some background to why I wrote this article.

It started with asking a question in one of LinkedIn‘s WordPress groups, ” Question on Social media replacing SEO as Google makes search results personal http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/159102/social-media-seo-google-makes-search-results-personal/“

I received the following answers from respected people in the know:

I did verify what was being said and written with my own tests; and at least for now, properly using Google Plus authorship settings does make a very nice difference to how your articles are ranked.

In the days before this was published, Google Analytics Update Connects Social Marketing With The Bottom Line was just released. So yes, Google is tying it all together; be sure to get in the game by using the authorship tools available to you.

Contact us if you have any questions.

P.S. If you are a managed hosting customer, and want us to install and setup AuthorSure for you, just call or put in a support ticket; we will perform the work at no charge.

These changes sometimes means the web page address changes; and, now you have a problem with search engines leading people to the old web page address (that no longer exists, and results in a 404 page not found error), or a long time customer / friend / visitor has the old web page bookmarked.

How can you help those who bookmarked areas of your site as well as the search engines find the new pages?

On our managed Linux hosting, which supports the Apache rewrite engine, you can make easy modifications to your .htaccess file to redirect visitors from old pages and even old folders (directories & sub directories) to the new pages and new areas of your site. You can download the existing .htaccess file — if you are using WordPress, see our starter .htaccess file — or create one in notepad or your favorite text editor (just remember to save the file as “.htaccess” — no extension — as plain text with no formatting). Typically you will have this file in the root of your document directory (on our Linux servers, this is in your domain name folder).

Somewhere before you start the statements to redirect visitors from old areas and pages to new areas and pages, within your .htaccess file you will have two lines to turn on the Apache rewrite engine, and to let the rewrite engine know the starting point (typically this is the root of the document directory which is referenced by “/”).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

If you are using our starter .htaccess file, or one based on it, the above statements will already be present in the file; do not create duplicates of those statements, you only need them once.

Now you are ready to enter the statements which will help your visitors and search engines find the new pages and new areas of your site. You have several choices, and I will deal with three of them in this article:

1. Redirecting from an old machine name (subdomain name) such as wp.dynamicnet.net to www.dynamicnet.net
2. Redirecting individual pages to new pages.
3. Redirecting folders to a new page or new folder structure.

The first type is handled by using the RewriteCond and RewriteRule statements which look like the following:

# machine name redirects
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^wp.dynamicnet.net$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.wp.dynamicnet.net$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.dynamicnet.net/ [R=301,L]

The above tells the web server that if a visitor or search engine is trying to visit or send the visitor to http://www.dynamicnet.net/ (home page) instead.

The second type of redirect, from page to page, is very straight forward taking only one statement per page you want to redirect (please note the below may word wrap in your browser, but each redirect should be one line with no line breaks).

# page redirects
redirect 301 /services/domain_name_registration_prices.htm http://www.dynamicnet.net/managed-hosting/shared-web-hosting/domain-name-registration/
redirect 301 /services/webrates.htm http://www.dynamicnet.net/managed-hosting/shared-web-hosting/shared-hosting-addons-optional-features/
redirect 301 /services/hsphere_server_hardening.htm http://www.dynamicnet.net/managed-services/managed-server-security/server-hardening/

The third type of redirect, from a folder to a folder or page is also done one statement as a time using the redirectmatch command (please note the below may word wrap in your browser, but each redirect should be one line with no line breaks).

# folder redirects
RedirectMatch 301 /customer/help/(.*)$ http://www.dynamicnet.net/customer-support/
RedirectMatch 301 /customer/h-sphere/security/(.*)$ http://oldsite.dynamicnet.net/customer/h-sphere/security/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /customer/h-sphere/reseller/(.*)$ http://www.dynamicnet.net/customer-support/reseller-control-panel-documentation/

The first and last of the RedirectMatch statements above redirect the request from any page within an older folder structure to a specific page on the new site. The middle statement will redirect visitors from a specific folder / page of their choice to a the same page on a different address (the $1 at the end keeps the page name the visitor or search engine was using).

One of the questions our customer support team is asked from time to time what are the ways to find out which pages and folders you should redirect. You have a number of options to chose from to find out what pages are no longer found on your site that are generating 404 errors:

• You can use Google webmaster tools
• If you use WordPress, the SEO Ultimate plugin has a 404 monitor
• If you use WordPress, another good plugin to check for broken links (which lead to 404 page not found errors) is using the Broken Link Checker plugin.
• You can review your site’s error log for 404 page not found errors.

Since we take our managed hosting seriously, if you don’t have time for the above steps or you find the above steps a little daunting, contact our customer support department letting us know you need help.