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How to Optimize Images for Your Website

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Hosting

“A picture is worth a thousand words” – and that’s as true when it comes to SEO as it is with descriptions. Images play a huge role in website development, as their visual appeal is a powerful way to attract and retain reader attention.  However, the way that you incorporate images into your site can also influence the way your website is handled by the search engines.  To get the best SEO bang for your image buck, consider taking all of the following steps to optimize images for your website:   Step #1 – Check your licenses First – before we even get into the meat of modifying your images to make them more appealing to the search engines – take a few moments to be sure you hold the appropriate licenses to the images you plan to use. Smart webmasters know that you can’t simply right click and copy an image from anywhere on the web to use on your site.  Instead, you’ll need to download royalty free stock imagery, find images that have been licensed for commercial use under the Creative Commons license or purchase images from stock photo websites. Making sure that your image licenses are in order won’t improve your SEO, but it will prevent you from receiving DMCA notices from angry photographers who have the power to otherwise disrupt your business.   Step #2 – Resize your images Once you’ve appropriately sourced your images, take the time to resize to the exact dimensions at which they’ll be displayed on your website.  Photoshop and SnagIt are two popular image editing programs that you can use for this purpose, although the PicMonkey website represents a great free alternative for beginning webmasters. The reason that it’s important to do this before you upload your images is your site’s speed.  Forcing your website to reload images on the fly (because you’ve uploaded large images and told your site to display smaller versions) consumes digital resources, which can slow down your site’s operations.  And because site speed is becoming a major factor in your SEO performance, anything you can do to minimize the number of resources used is to your benefit.   Step #3 – Compress your images At the same time, don’t just resize your images – compress them as well! Both the size of your picture and the amount of information it contains (as in, whether it’s a high resolution image or low resolution picture) determine the number of resources required to load it to your site.  And since most websites don’t require the same level of photographic detail needed for art prints or printed pictures, you can safely compress your images without compromising their display value. To compress your images for free, check out Yahoo’s smush.it tool.  With just a few clicks of the mouse, this service will remove unnecessary bits from your image without changing its overall appearance – speeding up your site and improving its SEO performance.   Step #4 – Add target keywords to your image file names Once the size and compression rate of your images have been optimized, it’s time to start integrating your target SEO keywords.  One place in particular to do this is your image file names. As an example, if you run a website that sells fine jewelry and are in the process of uploading a picture of a gold watch, don’t leave your files names in their original photographer formats (for example, “IMG_023490.jpg”).  Instead, replace it with a keyword-optimized version – for example, “fine-jewelry-gold-watch.jpg.”  Doing so will help the search engines to better understand the content of your images, as well as how they should be treated from an SEO perspective.   Step #5 – Add title and ALT tags to your images In addition to optimizing your file names, you can integrate keywords into both the image title tag and ALT tag fields.  But that said, don’t treat these two areas as repositories for all the different keyword variations you can stuff into them. Think about the original purposes of these fields, which were to assist both the search engines and website visitors using adaptive technologies to better understand what they were seeing.  For this reason, any optimized tags you add should be descriptive in nature.  Don’t stuff your keywords into these fields – instead, create natural-sounding image descriptions that include mentions of your target keywords when it’s appropriate to do so. When it comes to image optimization, approach the process from a holistic standpoint.  Take as many actions as you can to improve your page load times and the ability of the search engines to parse your content, but don’t go overboard.  Including too many keyword repetitions or optimizing every single image on your site perfectly could set you up to experience an over-optimization penalty down the road. Continue reading →

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Is User Generated Content Right for Your Website?

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Hosting

Content marketing is the hottest marketing trend out there right now, as the regular publication of fresh content can be a huge differentiator for your website. From business blogging to “how to” videos, this engaging content comes in many forms. However, most businesses find that it can be overwhelming to keep up with the demand for new content, as it takes time and effort to regularly develop high quality content. As a result, many businesses opt to have users generate content for them, either in place of or as a supplement to the content they’re already creating. If this all sounds appealing to you, read on to learn about what user generated content (UGC) is and how to decide if it’s right for your business.   What is User Generated Content? User generated content comes in many forms. This can include product reviews, guest posts, customer images and more:   Product Reviews Product reviews are often used by consumer goods companies. If you sell a product or range of products, you may allow customers to review them directly on your site. Some examples of companies using this tactic include Modcloth , Zappos and Babies R Us . Product reviews can include information on the quality of your product, how quickly it shipped and more. Some sites even provide categories for their products to be reviewed on “like,” “fit” or “ease of use,” depending on what type of good is being sold.   Guest Posts Sites that include a business blog can rely on guest posts as a huge source of user generated content. Guest posts allow users to share their opinions and experiences on industry topics, easing the burden of regular content creation while also driving traffic from the guest poster’s site. As a result, this technique can help you to create buzz about your blog and to enjoy the flood of traffic that comes when your guest posters promote their posts on their own social media profiles.   Customer Images Customer images can be an especially valuable type of user generated content and involves customers posting images of your products – perhaps either using or wearing said products. Alternately, you can create a meme encouraging users to interact with your brand by posting photos of themselves in a certain pose or location. A great example of this type of UGC is the True Blood “Show Your Fangs” campaign . Fans of the HBO show came out in droves to post photos of themselves “showing their fangs.” This helped to create enormous buzz for the show’s sixth season. Finally, many brands also encourage fans to create their own content from scratch. This can include videos, artwork or comics that fans create based on your products or services. This particular type of user generated content has been extremely popular with brands that have cult followings, as it provides a creative outlet that allows die-hard fans to feel more connected to the company.   Pros and Cons of User Generated Content Flow of Content User generated content can significantly decrease the amount of content your team is directly responsible for creating. However, for this strategy to work, you need to have a strong base of users who are willing to generate this content. Often, the first step to creating UGC campaigns is to find the most easily accessible way for users to contribute. You’ll need to decide which types of user generated content are right for your brand. From there, you’ll want to let your users know that you’re interested in seeing their content. Letting them know that you want their reviews, guest posts, photos or other content pieces encourages them to help support your content strategy. From there, it’s also important for you to like, comment on and share the content they create. Users are most likely to continue to create and share content for you if they feel that you’re engaging back with them. Ultimately, this strategy can be a time saver that also increases your reach by piggy-backing off the relationships you have with your followers. But that doesn’t mean that you’re completely off the hook. Without engaging with the users who are creating this content, it’s likely that the flow of content will trickle to a halt.   Quality of Content Just because you’ve found users who are willing to generate content for you does not mean that all the content you receive will be of the highest quality. It’s very possible that you’ll receive fuzzy photos or guest posts that are inappropriate for your brand. In fact, you may even receive some poor reviews. Before you launch this type of strategy, think about how you’ll address low quality content or negative reviews. It’s also important to decide whether you’ll share all the content that’s created by your campaign or only that content that you deem “worthy.” Launching a user generated content marketing strategy without knowing exactly what your quality standards are can seriously undermine your campaign’s success. However, as long as you know how you’ll treat these situations, they aren’t a good reason to avoid user generated content.   Legal Concerns It’s also important to determine whether user generated content raises any legal concerns for your brand. Some companies make users sign terms and conditions statements that release the brand from liability should the user post something inoffensive or inaccurate. Speaking with legal counsel before launching any user generated content strategy can be beneficial. Again, this isn’t a reason to avoid this type of campaign. It’s simply something you’ll want to address before starting so there are no unpleasant surprises.   Is User Generated Content Right for You? Given all these different considerations, how do you know if user generated content is right for you? For starters, be aware that user generated content is beneficial for nearly all business in one form or another. If you don’t yet have a strong fan base, it may not be the right time to start a user generated content campaign. However, if you’re already up and running with a loyal following, this is a logical step for your business to take. User generated content vastly increases your reach, creates positive buzz for your brand and can be a lot of fun in the process. If you’re looking to increase your web presence, it’s likely that user generated content is a good fit for you. Laying out your strategy and addressing any legal concerns before you get started will allow you to experience this new marketing strategy as a fun, innovative way to promote your business. Continue reading →

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How to Diagnose Sudden Drops in Website Traffic

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Hosting

Logging in to your Google Analytics account and seeing a sharp downward trend in your traffic stats can be scary.  What once looked like a promising trend in upwards traffic growth can quickly degenerate to visions of closed doors and scrapped expansion plans in the absence of the natural search traffic you once relied on. Fortunately, some causes of traffic drops can be easily remedied, while others will take more time repair.  So before you start to panic, walk through the following diagnostic steps to determine exactly what’s caused your declining visitor counts:   Step #1 – See if your site is up and running Though this first step might seem a bit obvious, your immediate reaction to a decrease in website traffic should be to determine whether or not your site is live. Any number of things can take down a websites – from hosting issues to problems with your domain name registrar and more.  If you see that your site is down, contact your hosting provider immediately for information on what might be causing your current outage.   Step #2 – Make sure your analytics code is installed correctly If your site is live, your next step should be to check your analytics code integration.  This is an especially important step to take if you’ve added your analytics code to your site using a plugin, as the presence of multiple plugins can cause conflicts in which one program interferes with another’s operation. Additionally, making changes to your site’s code or introducing third-party analytics code modifications can all cause your site to stop reporting traffic data correctly.  Check this before you become concerned about more serious causes of traffic drops.   Step #3 – Determine whether or not your site has been hacked Next, if your site is running and your analytics code appears to be installed correctly, you’ll want to see if your site has been hacked, as this may result in your traffic being funneled to an external site. The easiest way to check to see if your site has been hacked is to enter the query “links:yoururl.com” (without the parentheses) into Google.  If you see any spam content in the snippets that appear, chances are you’ve been hacked.  Contact your hosting provider or a qualified website developer for help reclaiming your site.   Step #4 – Log in to your Webmaster Tools account Another important step in the traffic drop diagnosis process is to log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account (assuming you’ve set up one before noticing your traffic decline). Once you’re inside, navigate to the “Messages” section.  This is where Google notifies webmasters of major issues that have arisen; including sites that have become inaccessible to Google’s indexing programs, sites that have been detected violating the company’s webmaster guidelines and sites that have been issued manual penalties in the search results. If you see a notice here, you may be able to gain some insight into what’s gone wrong with your site’s traffic and what steps you’ll need to take to repair the situation.  But if you have no new messages from Google, you’ll need to move on to the final step in the diagnosis process…   Step #5 – Check the SEO blogs for news of an algorithm update Google and the other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms.  As a result, a sudden drop in traffic could mean that your site no longer meets the engines’ standards and has gone down in the natural search rankings – leading to a corresponding drop in traffic. The easiest way to determine whether or not one of these updates has occurred is to head over to popular SEO blogs like Search Engine World or Search Engine Land , as these sites are often the first to report on changes within the major engines.  They’ll also be the first to report on the methods that sites can use to reclaim their lost rankings, which may be instrumental in your ability to regain the traffic your site has lost. Be aware, though, that the process of recovering from lost traffic due to algorithm changes can be difficult and time-consuming – if you’re ever able to recover fully at all.  Because this type of traffic drop can be devastating to a business, it’s best to avoid using grey or black-hat SEO techniques, as these can jeopardize your site’s long-term stability.  Instead, focus on adding plenty of great content to your website and build links in natural ways – rather than using manipulative techniques to improve your search rankings. Hopefully, the cause of your sudden traffic drop will be something that can be easily resolved, as in the first few steps described in this process.  But if this isn’t the case, know that recovery is possible, though you may be facing a long road to return your site to its former traffic patterns. Continue reading →

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CISPA, Enough Already

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Hosting

We at HostGator have always vehemently opposed any piece of legislation that contradicts the idea of a free and open Internet.  If you haven’t read our prior blog posts about CISPA and it’s earlier incarnation SOPA, then please do so now in order to bring yourself up to speed: CISPA Must Die! SOPA Must Die! The problem with legislation such as these is not what it appears to do on the front end, rather it’s the back end implications that make it frightening.  Cyber security is serious business, and it is a realm that could use some tightening up.  However, this tightening up cannot come at the expense of your privacy due to a circumvention of existing privacy laws. Continue reading →

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