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Websites that Changed the World

Preparing to start a website for your company or organization? The odds are good that you are more interested in brand building, marketing, and ROI more than changing the world–but still, a little inspiration can go a long way toward achieving any goal. In the spirit of starting a new website, here are a few websites that have changed the world forever!

Google. The most obvious pick of all. A search engine that truly can find the highest-quality, most relevant results on the web really makes the web a lot more useful!

Amazon. E-commerce owes a lot of its success to Amazon.com. Founded back in 1994 as Cadabra, Amazon remains the largest e-commerce site on the web today.

Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia is often criticized for a perceived lack of oversight, accountability, and accuracy, the truth is that the idea to compile all human knowledge into one multilingual, easily accessible source was quite important.

Hotmail. What’s so special about Hotmail? It certainly isn’t the biggest email provider, and it wasn’t the first. However, Hotmail did change the world forever: they were the first web-based email provider to gain widespread popularity. Before hotmail, email accounts were tethered to specific computers–meaning an email sent to your work computer would be completely inaccessible unless you were at work, and a home email would be inaccessible unless you were at home.

Facebook. Another no brainer. Once again: Facebook was not the first website to do what it did, it just did it so well that it became the standard bearer.

Youtube. Hosting video used to be rather cost prohibitive, and YouTube was the first company to truly allow its users to upload video freely and free of charge. This obviously had a very profound affect on the way that we all use the internet.

Getting Started. If you’re ready to embark on your own website adventure–whatever your goals may be–then one of the first issues you will need to address is hosting. Visit RFE Hosting online to learn more about what hosting options may be right for your needs.

Creating SEO-Friendly WordPress URLS

If you’re reading this article, the odds are good that you take SEO seriously. Perhaps you’ve even created some great content, done some research on Google Analytics, and used your social media accounts to promote it all. If so, then congratulations! You’re well on your way to great search engine rankings! However, even if you’ve done all of this, there is still one very simple problem that could be holding you back a great deal–your URL. In this article, we’ll explain how URL can affect search engine rankings, discuss the best URLs to choose for your website, and the provide simple instructions on how to create such a URL for your WordPress content.

URL and SEO

Contrary to what some web developers may tell you, not all URLs are created equal. Sure–no matter what URL you choose for your website, it’s not going to affect your pages crawlability, its speed, or any other technical matter. What it will affect, though, is the ability of web users and search engines to determine what topics each page deals with. It’s anyone’s guess what:

example.com/rygn39_eue_569

is going to feature, and this hurts SEO. On the other hand, you can probably guess what

example.com/Improve-your-SEO

is going to be about. Search engines appreciate this, and they will reward you for it!

Choosing the best URL

As mentioned above, a URL that is genuinely descriptive of a page’s content will produce better rankings. Apart from being descriptive, however, it’s also important that your URLs be “pretty.” What exactly does this mean?

Use-hyphens-between-words, instead_of_underscores.

Don’t include unnecessary numbers or symbols. (They’re&really^^annoying.656666)

Keep it short!

Creating a URL for your WordPress

WordPress URLs are better nowadays than they were in the past, as the site now the title of each post in that post’s URL. However, these URLs are generally not pretty. Thankfully, this problem is easy to fix–and, in fact, you can even standardize the format for all of your posts in order to make SEO-friendly URLS easy! Here’s how to do it:

In the admin menu, go to settings and click on permalink. From there, you’ll be offered a list of “common settings,” as well as the option to choose a custom setting. Under “common settings,” you’ll notice that the first option is “plain,” and this is the default option for wordpress users. After that you will see “day and name,” as well as “month and name.” These options are worth considering if you are a news blog, however for most users they add an unnecessary length to the URLs without contributing anything meaningful. “Numeric” adds the number of each post, which is also unnecessary. For most users, “post name” is the best option, as it structures the URL around the post name without including any other data. Though some “custom” options may be worth pursuing for advanced users, the simplicity and length of “post name” is difficult to beat, and we recommend it for most users.