Day: May 10, 2020

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It is also referred to as IP Telephony, Internet Telephony, and Internet Calling. It is an alternative way of making phone calls that can be very cheap or completely free. The ‘phone’ part is not always present anymore, as you can communicate without a telephone set. VoIP has been named the most successful technology of the last decade. 

VoIP has a lot of advantages over the traditional phone system. The main reason for which people are so massively turning to VoIP technology is the cost. In businesses, VoIP is a way to cut down communication cost, add more features to communication and interaction between employees and with customers so that to render the system more efficient and of better quality. For individuals, VoIP is not only the things that have revolutionized voice calling worldwide, but it is also a means to have fun communicating through computers and mobile devices for free.

Looking for a New VoIP Provider? Here Are the Best

One of the pioneering services that made VoIP so popular is Skype. It has allowed people to share instant messages and make voice and video calls for free worldwide. 

VoIP is said to be cheap, but most people use it for free. Yes, if you have a computer with a microphone and speakers, and a good Internet connection, you can communicate using VoIP for free. This can also be possible with your mobile and home phone.

There are many ways of using VoIP technology. It all depends on where and how you will be making the calls. It could be at home, at work, in your corporate network, during a travel and even on the beach. The way you make calls varies with the VoIP service you use.

The great thing about VoIP is that it taps additional value from the already existing infrastructure without additional costs. VoIP transmits the sounds you make over the standard Internet infrastructure, using the IP Protocol. This is how you can communicate without paying for more than your monthly Internet bill. Skype is the most popular example of services that allow you to make free calls on your PC. There are many computer-based VoIP services out there, so many that you will have a difficult choice. You can also make free calls using traditional phones and mobile phones. See the different flavors of VoIP service that allow you to do this.

VoIP can be used for free with computers and even, in some cases, with mobile and landline phones. However, when it is used to completely replace the PSTN service, then it has a price. But this price is way cheaper than standard phone calls. This becomes thrilling when you consider international calls. Some people have had their communication costs on international calls cut down by 90% thanks to VoIP.

What makes calls free or paid really depends on many factors, including the nature of the call and the services offered. You only have to choose one depending on the nature of your communication and needs.

VoIP is a relatively new technology and it has already achieved wide acceptance and use. There is still a lot to improve and it is expected to have major technological advances in VoIP in the future. It has so far proved to be a good candidate for replacing the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System). It, of course, has drawbacks along with the numerous advantages it brings; and its increasing use worldwide is creating new considerations surrounding its regulations and security.

The growth of VoIP today can be compared to that of the Internet in the early 90’s. The public is getting more and more conscious of the advantages they can reap from VoIP at home or in their businesses. VoIP which not only gives facilities and allows people to save​ but also generating huge income for those who ventured early into the new phenomenon.

Source

Who is this guide for?

If you own, manage, monetize, or promote online content via Google Search, this guide is meant for you. You might be the owner of a growing and thriving business, the webmaster of a dozen sites, the SEO specialist in a Web agency or a DIY SEO ninja passionate about the mechanics of Search : this guide is meant for you. If you’re interested in having a complete overview of the basics of SEO according to our best practices, you are indeed in the right place. This guide won’t provide any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), but following the best practices outlined below will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.

You should build a website to benefit your users, and any optimization should be geared toward making the user experience better. One of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content. Search Engine Optimization is about helping search engines understand and present content. Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discuss below should apply to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we’d love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Webmaster Help Forum1.

We hope you will enjoy the content and we hope to hear and integrate your feedback via our Google support Forums

Feel free to save, print off the guide responsibly and re-share it: let’s improve the quality of the web.

Happy reading!

Signed,
The Google Search Quality team

Contents

• Getting started
• Help Google find your content
• Tell Google which pages shouldn’t be crawled
• Help Google (and users) understand your content
• Manage your appearance in Google Search results
• Organize your site hierarchy
• Optimize your content
• Optimize your images
• Make your site mobile-friendly
• Promote your website
• Analyze your search performance and user behavior
• Appendix: Link URLs used in this paper

Getting started

Glossary

Here’s a short glossary of important terms used in this guide:

• Index – Google stores all web pages that it knows about in its index. The index entry for each page describes the content and location (URL) of that page. To index is when Google fetches a page, reads it, and adds it to the index: Google indexed several pages on my site today.
• Crawl – The process of looking for new or updated web pages. Google discovers URLs by following links, by reading sitemaps, and by many other means. Google crawls the web, looking for new pages, then indexes them (when appropriate).
• Crawler – Automated software that crawls (fetches) pages from the web and indexes them.
• Googlebot – The generic name of Google’s crawler. Googlebot crawls the web constantly.
• SEO – Search engine optimization: the process of making your site better for search engines. Also the job title of a person who does this for a living: We just hired a new SEO to improve our presence on the web.

Are you on Google?

Determine whether your site is in Google’s index – Do a site: search for your site’s home URL. If you see results, you’re in the index. For example, a search for “site:wikipedia.org” returns these results2.

If your site isn’t in Google – Although Google crawls billions of pages, it’s inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our crawlers miss a site, it’s frequently for one of the following reasons:

• The site isn’t well connected from other sites on the web
• You’ve just launched a new site and Google hasn’t had time to crawl it yet
• The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively
• Google received an error when trying to crawl your site
• Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site

How do I get my site on Google?

Inclusion in Google’s search results is free and easy; you don’t even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses web crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when we crawl the web. Learn how Google discovers, crawls, and serves web pages.3

We offer webmaster guidelines4 for building a Google-friendly website. While there’s no guarantee that our crawlers will find a particular site, following these guidelines should help make your site appear in our search results.

Google Search Console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how you’re doing in Google Search. If you want, Search Console can even send you alerts on critical issues that Google encounters with your site. Sign up for Search Console5.

Here are a few basic questions to ask yourself about your website when you get started.

• Is my website showing up on Google?
• Do I serve high-quality content to users?
• Is my local business showing up on Google?
• Is my content fast and easy to access on all devices?
• Is my website secure?

You can find additional getting started information on http://g.co/webmasters6

The rest of this document provides guidance on how to improve your site for search engines, organized by topic. You can download a short, printable checklist of tips from http://g.co/WebmasterChecklist7.

Do you need an SEO expert?

An SEO (“search engine optimization”) expert is someone trained to improve your visibility on search engines. By following this guide, you should learn enough to be well on your way to an optimized site. In addition to that, you may want to consider hiring an SEO professional that can help you audit your pages.

Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time. Make sure to research the potential advantages of hiring an SEO, as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an
educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend going through the entirety of this guide and specifically these resources:

If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

For a detailed rundown on the need for hiring an SEO and what things to look out for, you can read our Help Center article “Do you need an SEO”11

Help Google find your content

The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Learn more about how to build and submit a sitemap12.

Google also finds pages through links from other pages. See Promote your site later in this document to learn how to encourage people to discover your site.

Tell Google which pages shouldn’t be crawled

Best Practices

For non-sensitive information, block unwanted crawling by using robots.txt

A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named “robots.txt”, is placed in the root directory of your site. It is possible that pages blocked by robots.txt can still be crawled, so for sensitive pages you should use a more secure method.

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine’s search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Search Console has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file. Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you’ll have to create a separate robots.txt file for that subdomain. For more information on robots.txt, we suggest this Webmaster Help Center guide on using robots.txt files13.

Read about several other ways to prevent content from appearing in search results.14

Avoid:

• Don’t let your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site.
• Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled.

For sensitive information, use more secure methods

Robots.txt is not an appropriate or effective way of blocking sensitive or confidential material. It only instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, but it does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). Also, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don’t acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard could disobey the instructions of your robots.txt. Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL of the content that you don’t want seen.

In these cases, use the noindex tag if you just want the page not to appear in Google, but don’t mind if any user with a link can reach the page. For real security, though, you should use proper authorization methods, like requiring a user password, or taking the page off your site entirely.

Help Google (and users) understand your content

Let Google see your page the same way a user does

When Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does15. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. If your site’s robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content. This can result in suboptimal rankings.

Recommended action:

• Use the URL Inspection tool16. It will allow you to see exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and it will help you identify and fix a number of indexing issues on your site.

Create unique, accurate page titles

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