Optimizing expenditure on web-related services

The Internet is the cheapest place to put information and marketing materials about your products and services. Considering using the Internet, you'll save money and resources printing brochures, flyers, getting a space to display your wares or putting up banners in public places. And the basic function to do so is to put up a website.

For this article, we briefly examine a couple of hosting and email services which are FREE for users without much web based needs. What are the assumptions made?
1) you do not need a lot of space on the web: you only need a web space to display your products and services
2) you do not have secure transactions on the web: no monetary transaction is needed on your website
3) you have less than ten employees or if you do not need more than 10 email accounts for the business operations
4) you're just starting out and have a budget to meet.

Instead of doing a comparison of the endless web hosting services, we'll zoom into just weebly.com
Basically Weebly has a few plans (or tiers) of hosting packages available. What's attractive is its Free plan (which can be free for life). The downside is you'll have a weebly.com domain. But with the right SEO this shouldn't be an issue.

Superb Website Builders has done a pretty clear cut comparison of Weebly and a similar service provider, Squarespace. You can read more about it in the link below.
Comparison between Weebly and Squarespace

About emails, this article discusses about Zoho Mail. Their Free (and it's ad-free) plan covers 10 users and a reasonable amount of space.

Usually these hosting services cost between US$30 to US$60 per year, and you probably don't use more than a GB of space. The savings can be significant if you're starting out small!

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Getting ready for Google's change in search algorithm

It's official, Google has changed it's search algorithm again and websites will top Google search based on it's friendliness on the mobile platform. This is also why Business Trove is changing the webpage design.

So summary of tools which can help you.
 - Mobile Friendly Test
You can type your url into the web tool above to see if your website is friendly on the mobile platform, and make necessary changes to it.

 - Making your website mobile
If you're a blogger like us, you can check out the link above on how to convert your blog into a mobile friendly one without maintaining two sets of codes, or what is commonly called responsive websites.

These tools should have you get things moving!

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How to Optimize your Blogger Title For Search Engine

Recently I changed over from wordpress to blogger. Previously using wordpress, I was able to get my posts up on the first page of google search. However, emulating a similar style, my posts with blogger fail to make it anywhere near the first page. I suspect that there might be a few reasons behind this, but one of the most obvious was the order of the post title when it appears on google.

Previously while using wordpress, it will show For example 

3 Dos and Don'ts on your First Day of work << Business Trove

In Blogger, it shows
Business Trove: 3 Dos and Don'ts on your First Day of work

Which means, your post might get less picked up and definitely less traffic as your post title will be most relevant to your content than your blog title.


To enact this change, go to template > edit html. 
Locate the code

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>


Replace with the following code:
<b:if cond="data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;">
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> << <data:blog.title/></title> </b:else></b:if>

And you're done! Now wait a few days for the search engine to recognize the change. 

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SEO starting tips for beginners

Tips on what to do first for SEO 

A very simple advice is to do a Google search for some of the "best practices for SEO". There are about 100+ best practices but by paying attention to the top 5 maybe 10, you'll get the biggest bang.

Key areas are:

- Start with key phrases and keywords you want search engine to find the site.
- Create Content with the words/phrases has some bearing.- Create different pages for different keywords/phrases to avoid dilution i.e if a page has too many meanings, it will be demoted by search engines.- Setup proper meta-tags- Title the pages properly- Get links from other sites (e.g blogs or websites of association or affiliation orgs) using proper link text that matches those keywords.

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