On The Net Podcast

Anchor Text

Is your business using anchor texting in the best way to boost your brand and gain better search rankings?

 

 

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Host 1:                                  00:00                     Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages. We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era. From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                                  00:31                     Hello everyone. Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online marketers of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a website, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. SEO is a complex technical field laden with hard to understand industry jargon. To add to the confusion there are significant changes every few years, thanks to search engine algorithm updates. So, it is critical to remain informed because it affects any business with a web presence. Google’s Penguin algorithm, which was first introduced in 2012, changed the entire game of backlinking. And one of the most important aspects of SEO is anchor text that is used in backlinks. Let’s tackle the big question, what exactly is anchor text?

Host 2:                                  01:28                     It is the visible, clickable words that appear highlighted in a hypertext link and is used to link one page to another. So, if you created a link to a target web page with the anchor text “family dentistry” search engines will take it as an indicator that the page being linked to will match a search query on family dentists. The World Wide Web is structured around such external links that lead from one site to another site or internal links that connect one page to another page on the same site. Earlier a site’s rankings in search results were determined not just by the number of links pointing to that site, but also by the anchor text of these links. This led many black hat marketing practitioners to game the system through link exchange and artificial inflation of link popularity. Penguin algorithm devalued and penalized these spammy links to discourage websites from building links with anchor text over-optimization. But anchor text still remains a critical off-page factor in determining rankings for the search engine results pages (SERPs), in Google’s algorithms.

Host 2:                                  02:29                     Let’s talk about some of the benefits of anchor text. First, anchor text can help boost your brand.  When used correctly, anchor text can improve the online visibility of your website but taking a scattergun approach may prove costly, as search engines may view your site as spammy and hit you with a penalty. The words used within the anchor text ensures that your...

Social Media Analytics Tools

Are you using the right social media analytics tools so that you can gather and quickly organize data and extract meaningful opinions, emotions and trends about customers?

 

 

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Host 1:                         00:00               Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages. We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era. From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                         00:30               Hello everyone. Happy New Year and Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online business of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a web site, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. My name is Lisa Maier and I am the CEO at DirectiveGroup, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses dominate their market. It’s always an honor to be able to spend some time with you, so again I thank Lunarpages for inviting us back to speak. For those of you listening to our guest episode for the first time, our marketing agency has had a long and trusted partnership with Lunarpages for many, many years so it is an absolute pleasure to be here as a guest speaker.

Host 2:                         01:23               Let’s jump right in. Social media isn’t new, but some businesses are still struggling with measuring its efficacy.  Social media marketing has opened up new channels and tools to disseminate targeted messages in order to promote businesses and various offers. But do you know what’s trending or what your target audience is looking for in terms of content, what is the best time to schedule your posts for your target group or even how your content is performing in comparison to that of your competitors?  To fully reap the benefits of your social media marketing efforts, marketers have to keep a finger on the pulse of the audience so that they can focus on the right social media goals and choose the right metrics to measure success. In order to efficiently prove ROI,

Host 2:                         02:17               marketers need access to the right tools and that is where social media analytics comes in handy. Social media analytics tools can help gather and quickly organize data from your accounts and campaigns to track and discover consumer responses across numerous online sources. These analytics tools can be used to measure social media performance and extract meaningful opinions, emotions and trends about customers so that marketers can improve campaign performance. Here is a rundown on six of the most robust Social Media Analytics tools that you can use to measure your core social media metrics, KPIs and compare different strategies. Let’s start with Hootsuite.

Protect Against Hackers 2019

Protect Against Hackers: Make Website Security Your #1 Priority in 2019

 

 

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Host 1:                         00:00               Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages. We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era. From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                         00:32               Hello everyone. Welcome to “On The Net,” where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online businesses of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a website, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. Every business and individual should be vigilant about online security.  Businesses are especially vulnerable because they store an ever-increasing volume of user data on their servers.  Small to medium businesses are as likely as large enterprises to suffer from data breaches. While bigger organizations have the financial muscle, resources and skill to overcome setbacks from a cyber-attack, small businesses often lack the security personnel and expertise needed to protect sensitive data in the first place or to recover from any breach should they be targeted.

Host 2:                         01:28               Sadly, regardless of size, every business will suffer a consumer trust set-back as the result of a cyber hack. The good news is that there are simple measures that can be undertaken by any business owner to protect data from being compromised and to thwart attacks.  In today’s podcast episode we’re going to explore 5 things that you can do to protect against hackers.  First, Apply Encryption Software. Today, encrypting your own confidential information and your customers’ sensitive data files is an important step to protecting against hackers or theft. In fact, in order to be in compliance with various federal and state laws, businesses must encrypt confidential data to protect their customers. Modern encryption software uses algorithms to create nearly uncrackable ciphers of unintelligible, encoded characters, so that the data being transferred online is hidden.  There are many encryption software applications available for businesses.  Ideally these solutions should feature 256 bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption algorithm, on-­the-­fly encryption to enable easy working with encrypted files such as plain text files, easy cloud backup for multiple encrypted files to allow secure storage, keylogger protection for access to safes/vault container files with passwords, and a easily navigable user-friendly interface to make encoding confidential files an intuitive exercise. Online businesses should consider adding an extra layer of security through HTTPS and if using FTP software, it is advisable to switch to SFTP.

Host 2:                        

How to Optimize Apache Server Performance

General performance improvement guidelines along with helpful tips and tricks to help your apache server perform at its best.

 

 

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Host 1:                                  00:00                     Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages. We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era. From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                                  00:30                     Hello everyone. Welcome to “On the Net”, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online business of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a web site, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. This edition of “On the Net” is all about improving Apache performance. We will offer general performance improvement guidelines along with helpful tips and tricks to help your web server “Be all it can be!” Have you ever gone to a web site or utilized a web-based tool and thought to yourself, “Man, this is so slow I want to scream!”? Well you are not alone. Thankfully, for the diligent web professional, there are some easy tricks you can use to keep your web server from being one of these time-wasting annoyances.

Host 2:                                  01:18                     First let’s talk about some basics. Ultimately, great performance comes down to efficiently using the hardware provided. The single biggest hardware issue affecting webserver performance, as one might guess, is having enough RAM. Of course, you can always buy more RAM, but if not, there are some ways you can take better advantage of the RAM you have. A webserver should never have to exchange live data currently in your RAM with stored data on your hard drive as swapping dramatically increases the latency of each request. As the web server processes web requests, it spawns individual process “children” to handle each request. Each of these children is known as a “Request Worker”, and each child is given its own section of memory to handle the work. In your httpd.conf file, you will find a “MaxRequestWorkers” setting. Here is an easy trick to determine the how many max request workers you should have.

Host 2:                                  02:11                     You want to use as much of the RAM as possible without swapping. To determine the optimal amount, use the task manager of your choice to determine the average size of each webserver process. Divide this in to your total memory. Be sure to leave room for other processes! You can also increase your write buffer size. If you have never heard of a write buffer, a write buffer is a type of data buffer used by your server when the CPU is processing information to be written to memory.

Facebook Dynamic Ads

Tips on how to use Facebook dynamic ads in your prospecting strategy in 2019

 

 

 

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Host 1:                        00:00               Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages. We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era. From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered.  Let’s get started.

Host 2:                         00:31               Hello everyone. Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online business of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a web site, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. My name is Lisa Maier and I am the CEO at DirectiveGroup, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses dominate their market. For those of you listening to our guest episode for the first time, our marketing agency has had a long and trusted partnership with Lunarpages for many, many years so it is an absolute pleasure to be here as a guest speaker. With the new year just around the corner, I wanted to take time to share with you some information on how to use Facebook Dynamic Ads for prospecting in 2019. Facebook Dynamic Ads allow advertisers to locate and serve unique ads to the right audience at the right time.

Host 2:                         01:40               Traditionally dynamic remarketing campaigns have been used to target potential customers after they have completed any one of three actions:  First, if they have viewed your product page you can remarket to them.  Second, if they have added items to the shopping cart but later abandoned it, they become a great remarketing target.  Third, after they have completed a transaction such as a sale. But what if you could expand the reach of Facebook Dynamic Ads beyond masterful retargeting? Dynamic Ads do not have to be limited to the people who have interacted with you in the past.  This functionality can also be used as a compelling prospecting and engagement tool to reach new audiences and generate fresh leads. Facebook can render and display a dynamic ad with the right message, image and product, optimized for each individual user based on their previous behavior on your website, their interests or demographics.

Host 2:                         02:50               Dynamic Ads can automatically draw the relevant information– whether it be product titles, prices, product size, color, shipping fee, availability, and discount offers, etc– from your product data feed and tailor the creative elements to the user.  So what this means is that Facebook can help identify and target new prospects with optimal product recommendations based on the analysis of user behavior on your website and also the content they have interacted with on Facebook itself.

5 Burning Questions You Should Have Answered Before Buying a Web Hosting Plan

Buying web hosting services is an important step to successfully launching or managing a website. Be sure to include these 5 questions while you interview for the best partner.

 

 

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Host 1:    00:00    Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages. We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era. From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered.

Host 2:    00:30    Hello everyone. Welcome to “On The Net,” where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online businesses of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a website, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. Buying web hosting services is an important step to successfully launching or managing a website.  As with most any business purchase, you will want to do your homework before choosing a partner. After all, every business has different needs so it’s never a one-size-fits-all purchase. For example, some businesses will be interested in buying web hosting that allows them to have plenty of space so that they can expand your bandwidth or storage capabilities. While other businesses may feel that UX is most important for them.

Host 2:    01:21    In today’s podcast episode, we will introduce 5 burning questions you should have answered before buying web hosting.  While we will only cover 5, there are many other important things you should ask your potential hosting partner that are specific to your business needs.  Start by asking about space.  Does the company have space or storage limits. The amount of space that you have access to is important when it comes to buying web hosting services. Think through your content assets and the goal of your website.  If you have a lot of video or audio content, for example, you will need to have ample space to upload your content without worrying about having limitations to space. You may also want to host more than one website so be sure to ask if that is a possibility and if there will be space issues if you host both sites within the same plan.   There are plenty of options when buying web hosting such as shared or managed hosting plans so don’t settle for less than what you think you need.

Host 2:    02:15    Take a look at the options for each plan and look for the features that are important to you before choosing. Also, while you’re talking about storage limits and space, bring up bandwidth requirements and limits.  Bandwidth has to do with the amount of server data that you can stream from your server and includes in its calculation the amount of data that can be transmitted in a certain time frame. If you have a digital device, bandwidth is expressed in BPS or “bits per second.” In analog terms,

Best WP plugins for eCommerce

With so many options, how do you know which WordPress plug-ins are best for your ecommerce site?  We have narrowed it down with our top recommendations.

 

 

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Speaker 1:                           00:00                     Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages.  We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era.  From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Speaker 2:                           00:31                     Hello everyone. Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online marketers of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a website, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. Most of you know the value of using WordPress.  If you don’t, we have written many blog articles on the topic so feel free to jump over there for more information. Whether used for a blog or a website, WordPress offers a great, versatile platform that you can use to grow your brand and increase your engagement levels. In today’s episode we are going to take a look at 5 great plug-ins for your ecommerce site. All of these apps will work, but you need to check them out for yourself to see which one is best for you.

Speaker 2:                           01:20                     Let’s look at WordPress eCommerce first.  This plug-in for ecommerce sites is considered the original WordPress online shopping plug-in. It allows you to incorporate an attractive online store, as well as to monitor your products and inventory and much more.  WordPress eCommerce will also let you calculate taxes and it includes a great customer service option. Even though it is easy to use and great for beginners, it includes all the functionality necessary for any ecommerce site to be successful. Jigoshop eCommerce is the next WordPress plug-in that you should consider for your ecommerce site.  It is a recently-updated app that replaces the original Jigoshop plug-in. You can sell either physical or virtual products with this plug-in, and you can also use affiliate marketing and integrate it within your store. This allows you to expand your sales capabilities and customer engagement by offering more products than was possible without the plug-in.   And, if you are like many business owners who find it imperative to keep up with your website metrics, you’ll love the reporting section of this app that lets you see how your website is performing against your goals.

Speaker 2:                           02:23                     The third WordPress plug-in for ecommerce sites is MarketPress.

Critical Hosting Features for WP eCommerce

These web hosting features for your WordPress eCommerce site will be critical to your success.

 

 

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Host 1:                        00:00               Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages. We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era. From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                         00:31               Hello everyone. Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online marketers of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a website, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. New ecommerce stores are being launched online every day. In our recent podcast series ‘On The Net’ we went over some of the basic aspects of ‘Building An Online Business,’ specifically creating, launching and promoting your online site.  Of course, we think its chock full of great information so be sure to give it a listen! Online business is estimated to reach a whopping figure of $27 trillion by 2020. The backbone of such companies is a transactional website. WordPress, being the most popular Content Management System worldwide, is used frequently to create and power these sites.

Host 2:                         01:30               Roughly three out of ten eCommerce sites come from the WordPress ecosystem. To ensure that your WordPress eCommerce site maintains optimal performance, you need to find a great host that meets the specific needs of your online store. In this podcast episode we will go over some of the essential hosting requirements that WordPress e-commerce site owners should look out for. Needless to say, look for a host that actually supports the WordPress CMS and makes it simple to install the application with a single click. The web host should support PHP 7.2 or later, MySQL 5.0+ or later, Apache or Nginx and HTTPS. Now, to state the obvious, the most important feature of an eCommerce store is that it is always online and easily accessible. Business never comes to a halt no matter what time of day a visitor arrives on the site or which time zone they live in. To ensure the continuous and uninterrupted availability of your WordPress ecommerce site, your hosting provider has to guarantee that your store will always be available for 99.99% of the time or more.

Host 2:                         02:35               High availability hosting means that any essential server maintenance has to be carried out by your host in a maximum of about 52- 56 minutes a year, this is about an average of a minute a week. Every minute your site is down, you will possibly be risking both customers and your online reputation.

Advertising on Twitter

This episode covers the types of ads available to businesses on Twitter and reasons why advertising on Twitter should not be so quickly dismissed.

 

 

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Host 1:                        00:00               Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages.  We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era.  From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                         00:30               Hello everyone. Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online marketers of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a website, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. You’ve heard about SSL certificates, and hopefully your website has one, but have you ever thought about why they are so important to search engines?  Popular content management systems like WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and website builders have made it relatively easy for business owners to design, create and have a website up and running quickly and efficiently. But the downside to that is that a lot of webmasters are still unsure about how to make their website secure. Web security, privacy, cybercrime, malware, phishing and so on are important issues for online users today.

Host 2:                         01:23               A website’s success truly rests on being able to protect it from security vulnerabilities through end-to-end encryption of data being transmitted between the desktop or mobile device and web servers. Now that Internet security is high on everyone’s list of priorities (even search engines), SSL certificates have become essential for anyone with a website. Before we go too much further, let’s make sure we define SSL.  SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is the foundational security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser so that all sensitive data passed between the web server and browsers remain private. SSL certificates encrypt data as it is sent and received between servers and computers to ensure that a user’s activity cannot be tracked or their information stolen as it travels across the world wide web.  SSL certificates provide privacy, security and data integrity for a website and it also secures visitors’ personal information.

Host 2:                         02:20               An SSL cert prevents files from being corrupted as they’re transferred thus maintaining data integrity. Next time you’re online, look to see if there is a green padlock to the left of the URL and if there is an HPPS (S being the important letter) at the beginning of the URL.  If there is, you’re golden because it indicates that the website is operating with SSL certificate authentication enabled.

Why are SSL certs important to SEO

Understand the impact of SSL on your search results. Google is committed to making the web a safer place so they have put strict penalties on businesses not operating with proper SSL certificates.

 

 

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Host 1:                        00:00               Podcasting from southern California, this is On The Net, your go-to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there—brought to you by Lunarpages.  We’ll help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era.  From web hosting to ecommerce to security and protection, if it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got it covered. Let’s get started.

Host 2:                         00:30               Hello everyone. Welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence. Thanks for joining us! This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online marketers of every shape and size. Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a website, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions. You’ve heard about SSL certificates, and hopefully your website has one, but have you ever thought about why they are so important to search engines?  Popular content management systems like WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and website builders have made it relatively easy for business owners to design, create and have a website up and running quickly and efficiently. But the downside to that is that a lot of webmasters are still unsure about how to make their website secure. Web security, privacy, cybercrime, malware, phishing and so on are important issues for online users today.

Host 2:                         01:23               A website’s success truly rests on being able to protect it from security vulnerabilities through end-to-end encryption of data being transmitted between the desktop or mobile device and web servers. Now that Internet security is high on everyone’s list of priorities (even search engines), SSL certificates have become essential for anyone with a website. Before we go too much further, let’s make sure we define SSL.  SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is the foundational security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser so that all sensitive data passed between the web server and browsers remain private. SSL certificates encrypt data as it is sent and received between servers and computers to ensure that a user’s activity cannot be tracked or their information stolen as it travels across the world wide web.  SSL certificates provide privacy, security and data integrity for a website and it also secures visitors’ personal information.

Host 2:                         02:20               An SSL cert prevents files from being corrupted as they’re transferred thus maintaining data integrity. Next time you’re online, look to see if there is a green padlock to the left of the URL and if there is an HPPS (S being the important letter) at the beginning of the URL.  If there is, you’re golden because it indicates that the website is operating with SSL...