A new study highlights the fact that blogs are usually not the best choices for positioning yourself high on page 1 of Google, primarily if you publish quality content.

WordPress would power one in three sites in the world.

The ease of installation and use of this CMS has made it the content management system of choice for many companies wishing to set up an online website. But even if WordPress allows many possibilities, many of them keep the blog format, also if it is not always adapted to their purpose. That is the observation made by Perficient Digital in its latest study, which looked at a panel of 100 blogs crawled entirely for the occasion.

First, Perficient Digital looks at the percentage of pages in these spaces that are blog posts. In 54% of cases, more than 30% of the pages are not blog posts. It can be pagination, comments, tags. But overall, content that is not very useful for indexing on search engines.

The depth of pages and the number of clicks matters.

SEO recommendations generally talk about a maximum depth of 5 clicks from home to get to the pages you want to see indexed on search engines. Beyond that, without external links, your pages will be invisible or almost invisible. On more than a million posts analyzed, less than 20% were 5 clicks or less from home when more than 30% were more than 20 clicks away.

By averaging the page depths of the various articles on the blogs, Perficient Digital indicates that 2/3 of the blogs examined have an average of more than 5.

The overall conclusion of the study highlights the wide gap between the structuring of sites, the types of content found on them, and their objectives. A vast majority of the articles concerned “evergreen” type content, in other words, cold, original, non-current, and intended to last over time.

The choice of a blog structure, therefore, makes no sense, because it reduces the weight of articles as time goes by, making them further from home and less accessible. If your objective is to create sustainable content to position yourself on Google, it is best to choose a content hub that is unique to you, whose structure you master and which will lower the page depth of the various articles that must remain visible over the long term. An essential element that you must think about before creating your site!

Imagine an iceberg. The visible part, already humongous, is the web, the “web surface” or “world wide web,” the one you use in particular by going through Google or any other popular search engines. The rest, much more extensive but immersed in darker and darker waters as we sink, is the deep web and the dark web.

What is the dark web?

Also known as darknet, the dark web is a parallel Internet. Its content is not accessible via conventional search engines such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.

The dark web does not work with a central server but thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) networks with hidden IP addresses, which allow several computers to communicate directly with each other.

Networks (Tor, I2P or Freelance) are organized into nodes, successive encrypted layers, like an onion, to make it almost impossible to track Internet users. And communication data flows randomly through these nodes located around the world.

Additional tools allow the user’s IP address and geolocation data to be changed regularly, always to preserve the user’s anonymity.

Is there a difference between dark web and deep web?

Often confused, dark web and deep web do not mean precisely the same thing. The deep web remains a mystery for many, even though it gathers about 95% of the Internet’s content.

The deep web includes unindexed content or content that requires a significant number of clicks to access it. These are invisible pages because they are not very interesting and remain very far away in the search results. But it may also be a choice of some content owners not to reference them on search engines. Thus, to access their pages, you must first know the URL and/or access them with a password.

Thus, if we can consider that deep web includes darknet, the two terms are not synonymous.

How to access the dark web?

There is nothing illegal about sailing on the dark waters of the darknet unless you want to buy humans or illegal drugs.

Tor allows you to browse the referenced web anonymously, but also to access.onion sites. You will need to use a version of Firefox configured for Tor, Tor Browser or Tails. But it is also possible to access the dark web via I2P (Invisible Internet Project) and Freenet.

Once the tools are mastered, all that remains is to access sites visible only on the dark web, and this is probably the most challenging part. Because as mentioned earlier, they are hidden. You must therefore either know the URLs in advance, consult collaborative directories or specific search engines.

Dark web users have different profiles. There are those who do not want to make their data accessible to Gafa (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, …). It is also used professionally by criminals and offenders, political dissidents, whistleblowers (such as Edward Snowden) to communicate with the media, investigative journalists (The New Yorker or The Guardian have created a SecureDrop on Tor to communicate with whistleblowers and receive documents) and investigators, of course.

Today, we propose you to discover a CMS different from any other and aimed at integrators, meet Vapid! 

Vapid, a CMS for integrators

Vapid is a very simple CMS that has the particularity of working backward: instead of creating new fields in the administration and then dynamizing the templates, the dashboard is built only around the fields you need.

This way, you can manage a complete administration to accurately manage any showcase site without having to leave your HTML and CSS files, the dream of any integrator.

In addition to this functionality, Vapid offers all the most modern features we can expect: liver loading (for active and HTML, but also for data entered into the database), the creation of miniaturized files for CSS and JS, the start of production in a straightforward operation.

Generate control panel from templates

Since this is the remarkable originality of Vapid, we will focus a little more on it.

The way it works in practice is effortless: imagine we are integrating a page of content, and we need a block of dynamic HTML content. Instead of going into the configuration of our theme, we insert the following lines into our HTML

<section>
    <p>{{intro type=html editor=markdown required=false}}</p>
</section>

From there, our control panel will manage by itself an “intro” field in the administration of our content page, with a rebate editor.

Finally, your client is not a Markdown fan and would you prefer a WYSIWYG editor? Change the HTML as follow:

<section>
    <p>{{intro type=html editor=wysiwyg required=false}}</p>
</section>

once on the board, a small message in the top right corner tells you that the files have changed and you need to regenerate the board, and a click later your board displays a WYSIWYG.

Installation and use

Installing Vapid and creating your first project is not particularly complicated, but a small error creating the command line tool can cause some problems.

First, let’s start with the base proposed by the documentation:

npm install -g vapid-cli
new path/to/project/folder

Now that we are here don’t enter the line proposed by the console, and don’t follow the documentation, since this would result in a bad installation of some Javascript resources for your project (jQuery among others) which prevents the dashboard from working correctly (especially at the WYSIWYG level).

Do the following:

cd path/to/project/folder
npm install
vapid start.

After the installation of about a minute and a few lines, your project begins, and you can find your site at http://localhost:3000/

The self-generated control panel is accessible at http://localhost:3000/dashboard.

Remember to visit the control panel once to create the administrator account!

To go further, create your types of tags and others, I will redirect you to the documentation.

Some minor criticisms

Despite its extreme simplicity, Vapid cannot be a static site generator natively, and I find it unfortunate. Because of this, we are forced to host it in support that allows us to run both js nodes and SQLite.

I hope this point can evolve over time and that the tool will ultimately propose a way to generate your HTML/CSS/JS files.

Conclusion

Vapid is undoubtedly the most exciting CMS project I have seen in a long time (since Grave in fact), and I see myself integrating it into our product range. Of course, the tool is in beta and lacks some small features that are important to me, but Vapid is also open source, and nothing prevents me from adding them myself.

To conclude, I advise all those who are not CLI-refractory to the last degree to try it, and others to wait for the release of a desktop version. I’m sure Vapid will be a tool we can trust in the future.

With so many different companies offering dozens of different types of web hosting packages in the marketplace, it can sometimes be difficult to know what the best hosting solution for your website is. A hosting package that is perfect for one online business may be totally unsuitable for your own business.

If you are on a budget, there are a few different ways you can save money on hosting. To begin with, you can opt for packages that offer less disk space and monthly bandwidth allowances. However, keep in mind that if you go over the monthly bandwidth allowance, your website could be taken offline until the next month begins. Many businesses underestimate how much bandwidth they need to cope with large amounts of traffic.

Your website might not get much traffic on an average day, but if you start a social media campaign advertising your site, a large number of visitors may all attempt to visit your website in a short space of time. This increased short-term spike in traffic can use a lot of data and cause you to exceed your host’s monthly bandwidth limits. If you don’t want to have to worry about exceeding those limits, you should consider paying a bit more and opting for an unmetered bandwidth WordPress hosting package.

Remember, having access to a large amount of disk space on your web host may only be necessary if your site contains lots of media files, such as audio clips and video files. Opting for a large amount of storage space can increase the monthly cost of your web hosting quite substantially, so make sure you really need any extra space you are paying for. Many small business websites require less than 500MB of disk space.

A top tip for a business website that wants to display a lot of video content to their visitors is to upload the videos to YouTube and use HTML embed tags to integrate the videos seamlessly into the site. By doing this, a website owner can save a fortune on bandwidth and data storage costs. At the moment, YouTube does not charge users to upload video content to its platform. If you are looking for a quality web hosting, read this blog https://opportunites-digitales.tumblr.com/

Keep in mind that the cheapest web hosting company is not always the best. Many low-cost companies limit the facilities and web technology, such as SSL certificates, WordPress, PHP and MySQL databases, their clients have access to. What’s more, some cheap web hosts may not have the best security and privacy tools in place. The last thing you want is for your website to be hacked, so choosing a secure web host is very important, even if it costs you more money.

If you are not sure whether a particular web host is a good choice for your business, you should consider asking the host’s current clients about their experiences. In addition, many web hosting companies offer free trial periods that provide prospective clients with a great way to explore the hosting interface, features, and control panel without spending any money. If in doubt, start a live chat with a company’s online support to discuss your business’s needs.

A Mac can be useful if you want to boost your productivity, but you have to have the right applications. Here they are!

BusyCal

BusyCal is similar to the old iCal interface, but actually, adds a ton of new features. BusyCal has better sharing options, improved todo functionality and much more.

Wunderlist

Currently, the management of synchronized cloud tasks is up to date, and this excellent tool has fully understood and exploited it at 100% while offering advanced collaboration parameters. On top of that, it’s completely free!

If you’re looking for even more power and versatility, check out the Wunderkit beta. Wunderkit builds on the success and model of Wunderlist and adds a ton of great functionality for project management and collaboration.

Evernote

This web app/service is simply incredible. Long before the current trend of the cloud, Evernote was brilliantly invented to create, store and edit all the digital clutter that you need to remember, from any computer or Smartphone. If you have never used Evernote, stop everything and go sign up.

It’s so good, and it’s free!

Clean my mac 3

For a computer running at optimum speed. CleanMyMac is the best cleaning software on Mac. Find a comprehensive test of Clean My Mac 3 here.

Isolator

As the name suggests, this software isolates you from the various windows opened on your computer so that your attention focuses on your primary task.

The background can be more or less masked by different effects, such as blurring or desaturation.

Hope you’ll like my selection here!