IT Technology and Services

It has been FAR too long since I’ve written here and for that I apologize.  I’m glad to be back!  There are A LOT of SEO companies out there and each one has its own process, standards, results, etc.  If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO company or consultant, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

1. Beware of Promises:  There is not an SEO company in the world that can promise you “the number one spot on Google in 10 days!”  SEO takes time.  It takes time to build up keyword-focused content, backlinks, a social media presence, etc.  Sure, with hard work and good content, you may very well be the #1 search result on Google.  But your position in the search engines will invariably fluxuate depending on your output, your competition’s SEO efforts, Google’s algorithm changes, etc.
2. Ask Questions:  Don’t be afraid to ask questions!  SEOs are nice and we certainly don’t bite, in fact, we love when people are interested and want to understand what we do.  When hiring an SEO consultant, you need to make sure that you’re comfortable with them, as they’ll have access to your website, hosting info., etc.  If you’re unable to ask questions or don’t like the way they are answered, keep looking.
3. Ask for Results:  Again, no SEO company can gaurantee you the top spot in the search engines but that doesn’t mean you won’t get there if they know what they’re doing.  Before hiring any SEO consultants, ask to see results from some of their current clients.  Ask for client references, as well.  The good guys will be more than happy to supply you with satisfied client referrals. You can see one of our client’s results with the graph below – this graph measures the website visitor’s per week.

The above are just a few pointers to keep in mind when you’re shopping about for an SEO consultant.  If you have questions about SEO or EBS IT Solutions’ SEO services, give us a call at 713-522-3480.  It’s time to put your website to work for your business!  Feel free to shoot us an email too.

Cloud computing, cloud IT, hosted cloud servers –we hear the word cloud everywhere we turn in IT.  EBS has actually been providing what are cloud services for some time in that we resell and support hosted Exchange services and have provided limited hosted server services. However, EBS is moving more emphatically to support cloud computing with a EBS rack now at a secure data center that is  SAS70 Type II compliant with Tier I POPS. We now offer colocation services in Houston in our secured rack space. You can colo a server or use a shared virtual server on our hardware.  Server hosting, collocation,  colo it all involves server hosting in an offsite rack. Backup in the cloud, cloud computing, cloud it services all refer in general to sharing a hosted server  by using virtualization.  A virtualized physical box can host many separated virtual servers.

 EBS now offers both possibilities – colo your physical server in our rack for backup, storage or for a hosted application OR place your backup data or IT operations on our physical servers in a hosted environment.

So you have your website in a CMS tool.  We discussed that you do not really have a website and it is thus very hard to impossible to move your site  or recreate it.

SEO is another issue with CMS sites – many of the tools do not have sufficient provision for needed SEO site changes such as separate page descriptions and keyword tags for each page. CMS tools can also cause issues with search engine spiders indexing your pages.

Flexibility is also a serious issue with CMS tools. You can only display data that is in the CMS database and it can only be displayed the way the CMS template allows. When you want to display extra information, different navigation, a different arrangement you will run into the tool limits.

While these are significant issues, they do not rise to the level of a near scam. However, some CMS providers sell the tool for the ease of making changes and then control the CMS tool and make all changes come through them. Now you have paid a significant fee to be able to make changes and they are making the changes for you and you are paying double. On top of that, some firms then make it difficult to get the access you need to be able to make your own changes.

What is the bottom line on the claim that you need a CMS to make website page edits?  We suggest buying a copy of Dreamweaver for $399  and get your website designer to show you how to make edits to your web pages. It is easy to make simple page edits and most office personnel will have no difficulty picking it up. If you want professional maintenance of your site great and you can also have some maintenance and upgrades done and easily do some yourself, but there is no need to pay to make it “easy”  to update your site while paying more to have it maintained!  

For that part of a website that has a product catalog or lots of structured data – home listings, etc., a CMS is a great tool, but for your informational core website – think twice and weigh ongoing costs.  Some tools that you control can help simple template based content pages quickly – but check CMS approaches out carefully for total cost, control, flexibility, SEO friendliness and compare total cost to  a simple HTML CSS site + Dreamweaver.

They will  ask you to post a code in your blog – to confirm you do in fact control the blog you claim. Like this:

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