Category Archives: Google

Google Apps Access

Google now provides ultra-reliable fast hosting and mail services for your business. West 4 Communications can get your site up and running with Google Apps.

Encrypted secure access to email for your domain:

https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainname

for example
https://mail.google.com/a/west4.ca

The https protocol uses encryption to protect your log-in credentials and email contents.

Encrypted secure access to cPanel dashboard for your domain:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomainname

for example:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/west4.ca

Improve your Google Ranking – Use Caching To Speed Up Your Site

Google loves fast sites. So how can you speed up your site without spending a lot of cash on a dedicated super fast server. Use caching (pardon the pun)!

Content Management Systems (CMS’s) like WordPress and Joomla are incredibly powerful. Each time someone visits your site, the CMS generates each page from scratch. It can be a lengthy process to build everything you see. First it will process the PHP code which will make numerous calls to your database and finally output HTML for your web browser to display. On some sites this could happen between 20 to 200 times per page! Multiply all that work times hundreds of users and your website can drag to a crawl.

If you enable caching each page is only generated for the first visitor. The caching mechanism then saves the data and serves every subsequent visitor the final result. When a page is added or updated the caching mechanism is triggered and a fresh page will generated for the next visitor, saved and served to all the following visitors. This speeds up WordPress by a huge factor.

Trust me, you want it, your visitors will thank you for using it and Google will be bless you. After testing a variety of caching applications West 4 Communications recommends using Hyper-cache. West 4 Communications engineers can expertly configure your site using Hypercache.

Improve Google Ranking Tip: Redirect Missing Pages

So, here’s the quick story. You start a website. You add pages and delete pages trying to hit the Google sweet spot that brings in traffic. It’s normal to delete or rename as much as half the pages on your site within the first year.

But what about those pages you deleted or renamed. Often they have been indexed by the Google search engine during it’s daily or weekly visits. And if the pages are in the index Google is sending people to those missing pages expecting to find what they are looking for. Only to get an error page. This is very disappointing. Is the person going to stay on your site looking for the missing page? Not likely. Google doesn’t like disappointing people so your site gets moved further and further down in the index. Missing pages can keep your site from improving it’s ranking or even leads to drops in your ranking.

What’s the solution? Set your site up to redirect people to another page if the page they’re looking for isn’t found. This is call a 302 redirect and can be set up using the .htaccess file on your site.

At West 4 we regularly monitor your site for missing pages and create redirects to the renamed page or an alternate page with suitable content. We build this into all the websites that we set up and can add this feature to any website.