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8 Tips for Promoting A Company Website

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Getting your website up and running smoothly is only the first half of the battle. Though getting this far certainly signifies a great deal of hard work and dedication, your new website will ultimately fail to meet its goals unless you continue working hard to promote it. Here are a few of the most important steps you can take in order to do just that.

  1. Social media. In case you haven’t noticed, social media is the place to be in today’s online world. Social media accounts are a near necessity in today’s market–and with a smart campaign, you can attract hundreds of visitors (read: potential customers) to your site.
  2. Social media advertizing. In addition to attracting “natural” social media traffic, you may wish to invest in social media ads (particularly Facebook advertising, the tried-and-true options for most industries.)
  3. Word of mouth. Connections between friends, families, professional contacts, and other acquaintances–sometimes jokingly referred to as “the original social network,” remain invaluable for promoting your new website. Be sure to recommend your site in-person to customers and clients–especially the regulars!
  4. Encourage sharing. Encouraging your customers, clients, and online contacts to share your website via internet and/or recommend it in person can also be effective–especially when a creative discount program or sweepstakes is involved!
  5. SEO. Ensuring that your website is search engine optimized with good keywords, quality content, and professional web design is the only way to ensure that those who look for you online find you.
  6. Harness the power of blogging. Speaking of SEO, a blog can boost your search engine rankings while also giving visitors a reason to keep coming back to your site. Moreover, it will open the possibility of writing guest blogs for other companies in the industry–as well as the possibility of accepting guest blogs. Both of these options are great promotional tools.
  7. Include your URL on business cards, letterheads, email signatures, promotional materials, and in any other location that could drive potential traffic to your site.
  8. Paid Advertising. Though this requires the largest investment, ROI on paid search engine advertising is generally high–especially when campaigns are well managed.

For more important tips for website owners, visit the RFE Hosting blog!

Installing WordPress on your Temporary URL

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Choosing a host for your WordPress page is one of the most important decisions you will make about your website.  After all, the host you choose will affect not only functionality, but also your SEO prospects.  This is why there is a good argument to be made that serious businesses should begin their websites on a high quality server.  Even though some companies try “cutting corners” by starting out with a bottom-of-the-barrel hosting service, they ultimately pay for this decision with sub-optimal performance.  Additionally, when these businesses do decide to upgrade, they face a bit of inconvenience when it comes to “switching over.” If you happen to be one of those business/website owners who still needs to switch over, however, there’s no need to panic.  Switching hosts doesn’t have to be a huge ordeal.  Here are a few simple steps to installing WordPress on your temporary URL–a simple action that can make the whole transitional process easier in a number of ways!

3 Steps to Installing WordPress on a temporary URL

Go to the WordPress root menu and open the WordPress configuration file (wp-config.php)

Log in to your file manager and select the WordPress configuration file and choose code edit.

There should be one line that looks something like:

define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Below this line, you will need to insert 2 new lines.  You can copy and paste them from here, if you’d like:

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://ehub##.example.com/~username’);

define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://ehub##.example.com/~username’);

Now, simply replace  http://ehub##.example.com/~username with the temporary URL of your actual website.

Moving Forward

Now that your WordPress is on a temporary URL, you will be able to make changes without it affecting your actual, live WordPress website. This will allow you to develop the page and test important changes such as a hosting switch.

Creating SEO-Friendly WordPress URLS

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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.

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