Tag Archives: advice

4 Free or Inexpensive Resources to Help You Start Your Online Business

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Hosting

The post 4 Free or Inexpensive Resources to Help You Start Your Online Business appeared first on HostGator Blog . There’s a lot to learn before (and after) you start your own business, and if you don’t have a business degree or previous experience running an online business, your exciting plans can feel a bit overwhelming. So can sorting through all the advice and information out there for new and would-be business owners. To help you get off to a strong start on a small budget, here are some reliable free and low-cost resources to help you plan, launch, and grow your new business. 1. Mentoring from Experienced Professionals Want answers to specific business questions or insights from someone who’s been there and done that? SCORE is a nonprofit supported by the US Small Business Administration that provides free, confidential mentoring for entrepreneurs in person, online, and by phone. With more than 10,000 volunteers providing advice nationwide, the odds are good that you can connect with someone in your niche. You can enter your location on SCORE’s Find a Mentor page to see all the SCORE volunteer mentors near you, search for mentors by industry or keyword, and find the closest SCORE office. The SCORE website also has a resource library full of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, and templates on thousands of topics. Some of the webinars charge a small fee but most of the resources are free.    2. Courses to Build Your Business Skills Khan Academy has a group of videos in its Careers section that feature different small business owners and freelancers talking about what they do, how much they earn, how they work, and how they got started. The range of careers covered is relatively small, but even if your niche isn’t included, there’s good advice on running a business in several of the presentations, and you can get an idea of all the tasks that go into being your own boss. If you’re ready to tackle business topics at the college level, check out OpenCourseWare from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The site provides free access to the materials for most of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate-level courses. You can search by academic department for classes on accounting, marketing, and other business topics. Or you can explore OpenCourseWare’s Entrepreneurship portal , which includes dozens of classes covering planning, pricing, finance and accounting, marketing, patents, sales, operations, and much more. The only catch? It’s up to you to download and work through the course materials on your own. Coursera also offers college-level instruction, and it provides graded assignments and feedback in courses from universities around the world. Unlike traditional distance-learning classes, Coursera courses don’t come with a traditional tuition price tag. Some courses can be audited for free, and if you want to earn a certificate or access all the course features, a subscription plan runs about $50 per month. One Coursera option for budding business owners is Michigan State University’s 6-course specialization program called How to Start Your Own Business , which is designed to walk students through the process of starting their own businesses as they launch it. The classes you may need will depend on the type of business you want to run. Planning an e-commerce business? OpenCourseWare’s undergrad-level Economics and E-Commerce course materials cover pricing, sales taxes, different types of e-commerce, advertising, and search. One recommendation from me: If you’re planning a service business like freelance design or writing, event planning, or repairs, it’s a good idea to learn as much as you can about negotiation before you begin, both to earn what you’re worth and to build good relationships with good clients. Becoming a good negotiator can help you in many areas of your business, from setting rates and writing bids to working with vendors and hammering out the fine print in contracts. Coursera offers more than 50 negotiation courses, and MIT OpenCourseWare offers materials for several negotiation classes from the Sloan School of Management’s curriculum. Whatever you decide to study now, remember that successful business owners are always learning. Free and low-cost courses are a low-stress way to keep up with trends and innovations in your niche. 3. Guidance for Building a User-Friendly eCommerce Website In late 2018, Google published its UX Playbook for Retail : Collection of best practices to delight your users. Google reviewed hundreds of retail sites to come up with its recommendations, and the result is probably the best free resource you’re going to find for learning what to include on your site and why to include it. The free-to-download playbook uses Sephora, Warby Parker, Boots, ThredUp and other best-in-class e-commerce sites to show you exactly what works for six key areas: the homepage or landing page, menus and navigation, search, products and categories, conversion, and forms. For each area, there are details on what to include and what to avoid, to help you create a site that looks professional and is frustration-free for shoppers. There are also charts showing the ease of implementation, impact, and key metrics to track for each suggestion in the playbook. Don’t let the playbook’s 108-page length discourage you from diving in. The guide’s design—lots of screenshots, checklists, and charts—makes it a fast, informative read you can consult as you plan each section of your site. 4. Easy Tools to Create Your Website DIY website design used to be reserved for hardy amateurs who enjoy coding and don’t mind spending time tinkering and consulting support forums. For the rest of us, website builders have opened up high-quality site design to anyone who can drag and drop. Site builders like Gator Website Builder make setting up a small business website or even an online store fast and easy by packaging everything you need to get started and making the design process a snap. For example, every Gator plan includes site hosting, domain name registration, an SSL certificate to protect your data and your customers, analytics to help you measure and improve your site’s performance, and support. You also get unlimited pages, storage, and bandwidth so there’s no limit to how much your site can grow as you add products, services, and testimonials from your best customers. You can also upgrade to Gator Premium for priority support or to Gator eCommerce for priority support plus online store functionality. Ready to get started? Choose your Gator Website Builder plan now . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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5 Reasons to Set Up Your Email List with Constant Contact

Posted on February 4, 2019 by Hosting

The post 5 Reasons to Set Up Your Email List with Constant Contact appeared first on HostGator Blog . Email marketing plays a critical role in engaging your customers. It’s an opportunity to build a quality relationship beyond website visits. With the help of email, small businesses can level the playing field against their large corporate competitors. Sending a personalized message to each subscriber opens the door to more revenue. However, your team needs the right platform to facilitate the behind-the-scenes action. Constant Contact makes it possible with its powerful features and benefits. Ready to take your email marketing to the next level? Here are five reasons to use Constant Contact today. 1. Customizable Templates Small businesses run on limited resources. It’s not feasible for your team to know every aspect of email marketing. So, when it comes to designing email templates, your team may get stuck on what to do next. You all may decide to send plain-text messages or stick to the cookie-cutter templates. Constant Contact gives your small business more options with hundreds of customizable templates . Each template is easy to edit with a reliable drag-and-drop experience. Your team can personalize the colors and fonts to match your brand. Research shows that 46% of all email opens  happen on mobile devices.  Therefore, it’s imperative to build mobile-responsive email designs. But no worries, Constant Contact handles the heavy lifting for your small business. Moreover, templates should coincide with your intended message. From holiday designs to event invitations, your team can fit the right design with the right copy. No more generating templates from scratch, too. These reusable templates offer flexibility for every campaign. Forget the hassles of creating your own templates or hiring an expensive designer who can. With Constant Contact’s customizable templates, you get high-quality designs at your fingertips.   2. Targeted Campaigns In email marketing, it’s not good enough to just send any message to your subscribers. An irrelevant email gets quickly ignored, leaving your customers confused and frustrated. Personalization is important when developing your campaigns. You want every message to have a purpose and offer value to the recipient. As  Forbes contributor states: “All your email messages should offer some value to your users. That could be showing them your best content, offering discounts, or letting them in on news they won’t find elsewhere—whatever it is, it needs to mean something to your target audience.” Segmentation helps you deliver the right message to your consumers. Your segments may differ because of your marketing goals. You can send specific emails based on purchasing behavior, shopping habits, or even geographic location. Constant Contact’s click segmentation feature lets your team automatically add a subscriber to a list every time the contact clicks a link, a button, or a clickable image in your email. You then can send more targeted, behavioral messages. Avoid the trap of placing your subscribers inside a marketing box where they all receive the exact same message. Instead, your team should aim to customize the inbox experience with smart email marketing automation .   3. Contact Management As your small business begins to grow, you’ll want to keep accurate records of your contact list. Performing a regular check of your contacts ensures everyone in receiving relevant messages. A healthy email list is one free of inactive subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in a long period of time. For some companies, this period may be six months or one year. List maintenance acts a safeguard. Your goal is to connect with interested buyers desiring to hear about your products and announcements. If you already possess a list, Constant Contact offers the option to upload it from Excel, Gmail, or Outlook. Still in the list building stage? No problem, the platform also lets you add new contacts from your Facebook page and website. Contact management is essential to your small business operations. Rather than forget or neglect it, take action with Constant Contact.   4. Performance Tracking Before email became a legitimate marketing tool, companies sent out random emails to announce an upcoming sale or remind subscribers about a local event. No one really thought about measuring the effectiveness of each campaign. Over the years, tracking the performance of your emails has become a major aspect of email marketing. Teams are evaluating everything from open rates to click-through rates to bounce rates. Constant Contact provides real-time tracking to observe who’s opening, clicking, and sharing your emails. The in-depth reporting allows you to measure campaign performance over time and see who is engaged and who isn’t. Take a simple approach to improve the performance of your campaigns. John Grimshaw ,  analytics and data manager at DigitalMarketer, offers his advice: “An easy way to improve click-through rate is to avoid over-selling your products or services through email and instead focus on getting people to click your link. The body of the email only has one job: sell the click.” Performance tracking is crucial to understanding your small business’s email marketing efforts. Constant Contact makes measuring your impact easier.   5. Loyalty Incentives For small businesses, customer retention is a key part in sustainability. You want customers to stick with your brand, rather than purchasing one item and never seeing them again. Loyalty is often earned in the customer relationship. It’s unrealistic to assume if a customer buys from you once that they will repurchase. You need to offer something in return to entice them to revisit your brand. Offering loyalty incentives is one solution to maintaining your customer base. An incentive can include anything from a 10% coupon on the next purchase or a special invitation to an exclusive event. With Constant Contact’s PLUS plan , your team can create a mobile-responsive coupon within an email and track when it’s claimed, shared, and redeemed. This tactic helps boost referrals to your small business. Keep your customers coming back for more with loyalty incentives. Email is the vehicle to drive engagement and sales.   Email Marketing With Confidence Leveraging email marketing will equip small businesses to compete in today’s marketplace. With Constant Contact, your team can save time and money with customizable templates and targeted campaigns. Skip all the hassle and add  Constant Contact to your email marketing toolkit. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How Create a Successful Blog Business in 2019 in 5 Steps

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post How Create a Successful Blog Business in 2019 in 5 Steps appeared first on HostGator Blog . With more than a billion active websites and blogs on the internet today, there are more than enough resources and guides on there on how to start a website or blog. The problem with the majority of these, is that they are either outdated, self-fulfilling and just trying to make money off a lead, or they simply don’t provide the value their audience is looking for. Today I have a wonderful reference guide for you that is different from the rest. Not only is there no fluff, it’s also loaded with great actionable content to help you build a blog, brand, and business for 2019. I previously wrote a great resource on how to turn your blog into a profitable business , but what I didn’t cover in detail was the base structure and foundation for how to get there in the first place. That is what we are going to explore today. Let’s get started and create something amazing! 1. Analyze Your Potential Niche and All Big Competitors First things first: Plan out why you are launching a new website or blog, how it’s going to provide value to your audience, and also how it will make money. These are all key metrics that you should know before getting started, as it will make the whole creation and promotion process a lot easier. To accomplish this, you need to analyze the competition and see what’s already working, how you can make it better, and discover who is the right audience. To get started, ask yourself the following: Why am I creating a blog in the first place? How can I serve better value than the competition? What are the best long tail keywords to rank for? What is the best way to monetize my content? Once you have answers to these questions, you can then start scanning through Google and searching for your competition and seeing what they are doing. You can also use tools like Google Trends, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Ubersuggest and other SEO analysis tools to give you an idea of where your blog and business idea should be headed.   2. Pick a Great Domain Name and Set Up Your Web Hosting The domain name for your blog is important. Not just from a branding and SEO aspect, but also because you are going to be stuck with it for the life of your site. With that being said, take the time to research a good domain name and don’t just pick the first one that is available. To get started, run a simple domain search and see what’s available. Anything simple and generic is going to be taken, but here are a few tips to help you out along the way. Stick with .com, .net, or .org — no one likes the other variations. Stay away from numbers and dashes in your domain name. Register your personal name if it’s available, even if just for future use. Make sure your domain is easy to spell and remember. If you keep coming up at a loss for what domain name to register, you can also perform a Google search to look for domain name generators  and  domain expiration services . You may even decide to purchase a domain from its current owner .  A decent com/net/org domain name could run up to a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars, but if it’s perfect for your business or blog idea, then it might very well be worth the initial investment. When it comes to web hosting, don’t spend too long trying to understand how the complex world of web hosting works. Something as simple as a shared hosting plan with HostGator is more than fine. Should your site grow in size and need more features or server power, you can upgrade to a better plan at anytime.   3. Go Live with 3 to 7 Initial Articles on Your Site “Content is king,” or so they say. However, you need to remember that there are now more than a billion active websites and blogs on the internet today — all of which are creating new content and flooding the search results. This means more competition, and increased time, money and effort spent on ranking. With this in mind, I want you to focus on only creating 3 to 7 different articles for your site when going live. These should be “pillar” content articles that are at least 1,800-2,000 words long and have real value. Also be sure that they are full of nice stats, authority references, data sheets or charts, and anything else you can include to make them look great. If you are really willing to put the work in, I would recommend adding a nice video, infographic, or any other custom designs you can add in. Remember, these should be relevant to whatever the purpose of your blog, brand, or business is, so you can reference them as a reliable source time and time again.  We’ll get to the importance of all of this in the next section.   4. Start Promoting Your Content to the Masses This is actually going to be the most important part of this whole process—and the potential deciding factor in the eventual success of your blog. Most people think it’s the content creation that will make your site, but it’s actually the promotion . As I mentioned earlier, it’s best to go live with your site when you have around 3-7 articles live. Just make sure these are really great articles that you can reference to time and time again. Now, when it comes to the actual promotion of the content on your site, you have a few options. I recommend you take a look at this content promotion expert roundup , that’s loaded up with a ton of ideas on how to effectively promote your content, many of which are free! Some of the most effective methods include: Guest blogging on other relevant websites and blogs Using social profiles and platforms to grow backlinks Starting a podcast and interviewing other experts Creating custom infographics and submitting to directories Analyzing competitor sites and creating better content 404 broken link building and outreach to sites As you can see, each of these methods are very unique, but also free. More than anything else, they will simply take your time and effort.   5. Further Explore Your Industry and Monetization Options Jump forward a few weeks or months, and you should have everything above in place. Your site will likely also have some nice organic and social media traffic flowing to your site. With the focus on promoting just a handful of articles on your site, these should be creeping up in the search results daily as well. Now it’s time to take a look at everything you have in place, and how to make it even better. Beyond exploring different topics and reference guides you can create for your site, you should also be exploring new media mentions and link building options as well. Here are 70+ more ideas to start scaling in different directions. Monetization is also a big focus now as well. With traffic flowing through your site, you can start testing different call to actions, affiliate offers, sales copy, and how your audience is reacting to your content. To truly master the art of making money online with a website or blog, you need to put in the time to split test and find new improvements and opportunities daily. This is something that will take place during the life of your site.   Ready, Set… GO! Exciting stuff, right? I always love creating new sites and projects, as you never know what they might lead to in the coming months and years. No matter what your expertise is, how many sites you’ve created, or even if you’re a complete newbie… this is a simple five step formula that results in success time and time again. Enough about me and my advice for creating something potentially life-changing and amazing. Now it’s time for YOU to take action and make things happen! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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The 7 Best Video Tools for Bloggers

Posted on October 9, 2018 by Hosting

The post The 7 Best Video Tools for Bloggers appeared first on HostGator Blog . Video offers bloggers the opportunity to engage more with their audiences. Research shows that “viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.” To create the perfect clip, you’ll want to use the right video tools. You may want options to customize your footage, add an upbeat tune, or even include special effects. Get started with your video strategy today. Here are seven tools to check out now. 1. Animoto Animoto’s drag-and-drop editor makes it painless to create impressive videos for your editorial content, promotional campaigns, and social ads . Now, you can share what matters most to your fans. The platform lets you choose pre-built storyboards, or you can start from scratch.  Animoto teamed up with Getty Images to offer users access to a high-quality stock library. You’ll gain inspiration to turn your footage into a creative masterpiece. There’s also the benefit of developing slideshow videos. If photography is your talent, you can upload your images and incorporate quirky texts to make an engaging presentation. It’s an effective way to captivate people. This tool is all about simplicity in video making. You set your tone, customize it, and finalize your video. It’s a good option for the blogger who’s learning the ropes.   2. Hyperlapse Hyperlapse empowers you to make jaw-dropping time lapse videos without buying any expensive equipment. It’s your chance to transform any long process into a 30 second spot. Back in the day, this type of video was a clunky endeavor. You needed a tripod or a tool to keep the camera steady. The Hyperlapse app gives you cinematic quality with automatic stabilization. Don’t be shy when it comes to using this technique. Jason Boone , a video producer, provides his advice: “Once you’ve properly scouted the location you can begin the shoot. There are a few tricks to keep in mind when shooting a hyperlapse. The first is once you start shooting, keep shooting, and at a regular pace. The pacing and timing of your shots are important.”   3. Powtoon Video isn’t limited to you hopping in front of a camera every day. There’s also the choice of using ready-made characters and design. That’s where Powtoon steps in. This video tool lets you create animated presentations and animated explainer videos. With access to r oyalty-free footage and music, you have the control to craft something truly different for your audience. For example, if you just started a fashion blog , you can create a quick video announcing an upcoming Meetup or a discount code from one of your sponsors. No more boring surprises; you can do it with a little flair. Your video possibilities are truly endless with Powtoon. You can select from a wide variety of characters, objects, layouts, and backgrounds to add to your video. Plus, there’s a user gallery to spark new ideas for your own creations.   4. Adobe Premiere Clip As a novice, you’re probably not going to shoot ever video perfectly. So, you need a tool to help you edit out any unwanted footage. Adobe Premiere Clip polishes your mistakes and turns your finished video into a work of art. It’s a powerful editing platform where you can drag and drop clips, adjust the exposure, and even out your audio levels. Need to spruce things up? You also can insert titles, transitions, and slo-mo effects. Here’s Andy Betts , a former print journalist and magazine editor, discussing more about the tool’s features: “Looks are a series of filters you can apply to your video to change the color, contrast, and overall tone. There’s 30 to choose from, some less subtle than others. Just tap on the thumbnails to see the effect in action. You can change them again later.”   5. Loom Loom is one of my personal favorites. This app makes it convenient to capture your screen and record with your front-facing camera. In a few clicks, you can share your video with a unique link. It’s useful when you desire to do an impromptu video for your blog fans. Let’s say you want to send a personable message to a few readers. With this browser app, you can record when you feel comfortable without any cumbersome setups. Security is a big issue nowadays, especially with ongoing data breaches . Loom understands their users’ concerns and takes security seriously. Therefore, all videos are uploaded over an SSL-encrypted websocket. The company can remove any of your files from their systems upon your request. With Loom, you get to communicate easier with your followers. This benefit makes building relationships better.   6. Giphy When it comes to video creation, most bloggers forget about the power of the meme. It’s not a traditional video, but you can use clips to craft a catchy meme with Giphy . “A good GIF can be playful and full of dynamism, or it can be slow and smooth; whatever describes the feeling behind the moving images. The key is to understand what makes an eye-catching GIF and create a language that fits the mood of the message,” states Lisa Hassell , founder and director of Inkygoodness. Use the GIF maker by uploading one of your best-performing videos. Then, then trim the video to capture a specific emotion, like happy, funny, or shock. For a bonus, you can include stickers and captions.   7. Canva A video without an attractive thumbnail gets scanned over by visitors. Your goal is to prevent that from happening, and Canva offers a solution. With this graphic design tool, you can produce a thumbnail highlighting the purpose of any video. Using a colorful, clean image means more clicks for your blog. Canva’s easy-to-navigate interface makes the process simple. You can add graphic design elements, like banners, icons, and frames. Non-designers can feel relaxed when tweaking templates because there’s an undo button to erase any errors. If a picture paints a thousand words, you’re in good hands with Canva. Your thumbnails will be professional and irresistible to your fans.   Lights, Camera, Action! Video is helpful for driving engagement with your blog visitors. Select a tool that works with your marketing strategy. Try different platforms to attract and maintain your audience. Is your blog on WordPress? Check out these top WordPress video plugins. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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SEO for Images: Your Ultimate Guide and Best Practices

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Hosting

The post SEO for Images: Your Ultimate Guide and Best Practices appeared first on HostGator Blog . Image SEO Best Practices: The Ultimate How-To Guide SEO involves a lot of different parts, so it can be easy for businesses to overlook some of the smaller steps to practicing good on-site SEO, but every little thing you can do to strengthen your website’s SEO makes a difference – especially if it’s something other sites may be overlooking. Taking time to optimize your images for SEO is a simple and important step to making your website more competitive in the search engines. It’s the kind of little thing many businesses let slip through the cracks, which makes it that much more worthwhile for you to do. Why Images Are Important for SEO So much of how we understand SEO is all about text and keywords, but images have a role to play as well. For one thing, they’re extremely important for user experience. Think about it: if you found yourself on a webpage that looked like a Word doc with nothing but text on a white background, you wouldn’t feel like the website was trustworthy or memorable. In fact, research verifies that people are 80% more likely to read content that includes an image and 64% more likely to remember it afterward. Images are a big part of how we experience a web page. That matters for SEO because Google’s algorithm pays attention to behavior metrics that reflect user experience, like bounce rates and the amount of time visitors spend on a web page. But images can also be optimized to more directly help with SEO as well.  Where the average visitor to your page will only see the image itself, search engine crawlers see text behind the image that you can fill in to tell them what you want them to see.   7 Tips to Improve Your SEO for Images For every image you use on your website, follow these tips to optimize them for the search engines.   1. Use relevant, high-quality images. This is crucial for the user experience side of SEO. An image that’s unrelated to the content on the page will be confusing for the user, and one that’s blurry or badly cropped will just make your page look bad and unprofessional. Make sure every image you use has a clear relationship to what’s on the page and looks good. You have to be careful not to use any images that you don’t have the rights to, but you can find lots of resources online that provide free images businesses can use. Commit some time for each page you create and blog post you publish to finding at least one good image to include – bonus points if you can find a few.   2. Customize the filename. This is one of those steps that’s so easy it’s amazing everyone doesn’t do it.   Before you add an image to your website, take time to customize the filename. Change it to something that’s relevant to the page and includes one of your target keywords for the page. If your web page is about a backpack product you sell, the image could be named something like brandname-backpack.jpg. Most visitors will never see the filename, but it gives you a way to provide the search engines a little more information about what’s on the page and the best keywords to associate with it.   3. Use alt tags. This is another part of the webpage that most visitors won’t see, but search engine crawlers do. You can provide alt text for every image you add to your website that will show up in place of your image if a browser has trouble loading it. This text is one more part of the page that you can use to signal to search engines what the page is about. Always update the alt text for your images. Include your primary keyword for the page and something descriptive of the image itself. If you use WordP ress, there’s an alt text field you can fill in to do this. If you prefer to use html, you can add alt=”your alt text” to your image tag.   4. Find the right quality-to-size ratio. This part’s a little tricky, because you want your images to look really good (see: the “high quality” part of #1), but you don’t want them to be big enough to slow down your website. Site speed is an SEO ranking factor, so if your visitors have to wait a while for a page on your site to load, it’s bad for the user experience and your SEO. Often the file size of an image is much larger than it needs to be for the size it will show up on your website. If you use a CMS like WordPress, resizing how an image appears on your website after you load it to the CMS is super easy – but it means that you still have the large file size that slows things down on the backend. You can make your website faster while still displaying images at a high resolution by resizing your image files before you load them to your website. Often this is easy to do with programs that come standard on most computers, like Mac’s Preview program or Microsoft Paint. Or if you have Adobe Photoshop, you can use the “Save for Web” command to help you find the smallest file size that still provides a good resolution. After resizing, you can still make your image file size smaller without sacrificing quality by compressing them. Check out tools like TinyPNG and JPEGmini to make this process easy.   5. Choose the right file type. You’ve probably noticed that there are three main types of image files, but you may not really understand the difference between each. Understanding the different file types can help you choose the best one for your needs: JPG is one of the most common file formats because it uses small file sizes and is widely supported. But the image quality isn’t always as good as with PNG files and the format doesn’t support transparent backgrounds, so there are some cases where JPG won’t work. PNG is a file format for images that provides a high resolution and can support a text description of the image that’s good for SEO. The main downside of PNG is that it tends to require larger file sizes than JPG and GIF. It’s often best for complex images and those that include text.   GIF doesn’t support as wide of a color range as the other two, but it can be a good choice for simpler images. It supports small file sizes and transparent backgrounds. For photos, JPG often works well. For designed graphics, GIF and PNG are more common and if you need a higher quality version, the PNG is the way to go.   6. Add images to your sitemap. Google encourages website owners to submit a sitemap to them to help them better crawl your pages and get them added to the index. They also allow you to include images in your sitemap or alternately, create a separate image sitemap to submit. If you use WordPress, there are plugins you can use to generate an image sitemap for you, such as Google XML Sitemap for Images and Undira All Image Sitemap . If you prefer to do it yourself, Google provides information on creating an image sitemap here . By giving Google clear information about the images on your website, you increase the likelihood of them showing up in Google Image Search, which increases your website’s overall findability.   7. Host images on your own site. While it may be tempting to host your image on a third-party website like Imgur to save space, doing so involves a real risk. Anytime those sites are overloaded with traffic, your images could fail to load, creating a confusing experience on your website and making your brand look bad. You’ll be better served by hosting the images on your own website and using the advice provided above to make your image file size smaller so they don’t slow down your web pages any more than necessary. And when you go with a reliable hosting provider , you’ll always know your images (and the rest of your website) will show up as they should for your visitors.   Make the Time for Image SEO Image SEO is relatively easy, as far as SEO goes. By committing a little extra time to find the right images and optimize them for search every time you add a page to your website, you can give your pages an extra edge in the search engines. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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