Tag Archives: image

Need – Designer & Developer

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Hosting

1) I have few sites need to redesign and add some features on current scripts 2) Need to make some websites Image Hosting URL Shorten … | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1735675&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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Are HTML Email Coding Issues Killing Your Conversions?

Posted on September 5, 2018 by Hosting

The post Are HTML Email Coding Issues Killing Your Conversions? appeared first on HostGator Blog . What’s the Key to More Email Conversions? It Might Be Your HTML How’s email marketing going for your small business? If hardly anyone on your list is opening your emails and even fewer are clicking through, you’re probably wondering if your subject lines, copy, and images need work . They might. But there’s another possibility: You may need to improve the code that makes your emails work. Without the right code, your emails can show up in your subscribers’ inboxes as a jumbled, hard-to-read mess or a blank page, even if you’re using an email template. Of course, most small businesses don’t have an email code expert in-house to fix their issues. So I reached out to one to learn more. Anne Tomlin is the founder of Austin, TX-based  Emails Y’all and a self-described email geek whose enthusiasm for her work is contagious. She shared her knowledge about what happens when code goes wrong, why off-the-shelf templates work until they don’t, and how small businesses can diagnose, fix, and avoid some common email coding issues.   Look Good or Get Deleted The first thing to know is that email marketing is challenging because not everyone receives your emails in the same way. Different people use different devices to read their mail, and they may be using a variety of email clients that all have different rules about things like downloading email images. Most businesses know they need to use responsive templates for proper display on mobile devices, but the range of email client rules can trip them up. “A lot of email clients don’t download images automatically,” Tomlin said, giving Outlook as one example. “You can work around that, but a lot of businesses send emails that feature one big image. When those emails are opened with those clients, they’re just blank.” Consumers won’t tolerate that. Tomlin said she recently heard a conference presenter say that about 30% of Millennials immediately delete emails that don’t render properly. Those recipients won’t follow a link to “view this email in a browser,” wait to see if images load, or try to figure out how to read it on their screen. They just delete your carefully crafted message or decide they don’t want to hear from your business again. This is high-stakes stuff in terms of conversions and subscriber retention, but Tomlin says “even major retailers make this mistake.” One clothing retailer sends her emails that are blank, because “the email content is one big image with no live or alternative text” and Outlook doesn’t show it. Another apparel chain sent an email with lots of images that didn’t display, “and the alt text for every image was ‘turn on your images.’” What’s the workaround when you’re sending image-heavy emails? “A good coder can style alternative text to match your brand. Stitch Fix uses alternative text really well, and it’s stylized to fill the image space if the images don’t load. With proper coding, using live text or well-designed alternative text… maybe the recipients will download the images.”   Pros and Cons of Off-the-Shelf Email Templates If major retailers are tripped up by email coding, you can bet smaller businesses are, too. I asked Tomlin whether pre-made HTML templates from email marketing services can help SMBs avoid these email rendering pitfalls. “Most off-the-shelf templates work just fine” for businesses that are starting out with an email program, “but they might not work for every audience.” Tomlin mentions accessibility for customers with disabilities as an example. “Most templates were developed a while back” before accessibility for people with low vision, hearing loss, and other issues was given a lot of attention, and many “aren’t up to date yet with accessible code.” Another potential issue with pre-fab templates is simply the pace of change in the email industry. “Things change weekly, sometimes without any notice. Say Gmail decides to change something on their end, and that may totally screw up the rendering of your emails on, say, a certain type of phone,” but senders don’t realize that’s now a problem. “ Any good developer will keep tabs on the latest changes, notify clients, and update the code” as quickly as possible.   Best Practices to Avoid Email Coding Issues I asked Tomlin what steps small businesses can take to avoid code-related email issues. The first is to format your emails to look good with or without images. “Using one big image with text” in your marketing emails “is not good practice. A properly coded email will have live text that shows up whether the image loads or not.” Other best practices include: Test your emails before you hit send. Most email marketing service providers will show you how your emails will look on a variety of devices. Know your audience’s email habits and clients. “Use those analytics that your email marketing service provider collects. For example, if people aren’t opening your emails in Outlook, you can code some crazy awesome stuff to reach them” or hire someone to do that for you. Know when it’s time for professional coding services. Tomlin cites three scenarios. “When your conversions plateau or drop” or if your email program just isn’t hitting the targets you set, it’s time to look under the hood to see if rendering issues are part of the problem. “When you gain a larger, more diverse audience, say, new customers from other countries,” an email code expert can ensure your new audience sticks around and opens your emails, regardless of the many devices and clients they use. “When your emails don’t look right” even when you’re using a template. For example, Tomlin sometimes sees text-heavy emails with badly aligned columns or copy that gets truncated because it’s too long for the template. When you decide to hire a professional, Tomlin suggests careful vetting. Look for developers who ask lots of questions about your audience and who share information to help you reach your goals. Email coding isn’t just using off-the-shelf templates. “A good coder will build your emails from the ground up and tailor them to your needs.” 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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10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO appeared first on HostGator Blog . How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO Blogging for SEO is pretty much a no brainer. Publishing regular blog posts gives you opportunities to target a large number of long-tail keywords, keeps people on your website longer, and gives other websites something to link back to. Getting your blog up and producing content for it are both important steps, but you can make that work go much further for your SEO efforts by taking a few extra steps to optimize your blog posts for SEO. While you should generally prioritize writing for your audience rather than search engines, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t useful steps you can take to make your posts go further with the search engines. 1. Do Keyword Research. Keyword research should be one of the first steps you take in developing a blog strategy for SEO because it helps you figure out the types of topics your audience is interested in. For each blog post you write, it’s smart to have a primary keyword or two in mind, along with a few similar or related secondary keywords. You’ll want to use these in the post where relevant, but only when it makes natural sense to do so. Don’t ever try to force a keyword in where it doesn’t work –the search engines frown on keyword stuffing and you could be penalized. And with Google’s use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) , it’s less important than it used to be to use exact keywords in lieu of synonyms or similar terms. But having those keywords in mind and using them as you write is still worth it, as long as you don’t go overboard. A couple of useful tips for doing blogging keyword research: Go for long-tail keywords – One or two-word phrases are often very competitive and hard to rank for, so relevant longer phrases or questions are more worth your time. As an example, targeting a broad keyword like “seo” in a blog post makes less sense than getting more specific, like “small business local seo.” Think about voice search .  As more people use Siri and Alexa, optimizing your content for voice search becomes more important. And since voice search is a newer development in SEO that not all businesses are thinking about, it’s a good way to be competitive.   2. Check for Rich Results in the SERP. Once you have your target keywords in mind, head to Google and do some searches for them. Many types of searches now include rich results on the search engine results page (SERP). If a search for your target keyword produces a featured snippet above the organic results, or if many of the organic results include images, video thumbnails, or other rich information, then you want to make sure you’re optimizing your content to compete for those things. In some cases, that means adding schema markup to your webpage. In others, it means changing the way you structure your content to try to compete for the featured snippet .  Either way, you need to know what you’re competing for and against in order to create the right kind of content to be competitive.   3. Choose Your Post Title Well. One of the main parts of the page the search engines pay attention to in trying to understand what the page is about is the title. That makes it an important opportunity for you to communicate your topic by using your primary target keyword. Make sure you include it in a way that makes sense. If you shoehorn it in so that it’s confusing for your human readers, the lack of clicks you get will hurt your SEO chances more than use of the keyword will help them. But since your post will be covering the topic of your keyword, finding a natural way to include it shouldn’t be too difficult.   4. Include the Keyword in Your URL. The page URL is another important place to include your target keyword. It’s another part of the page search engines look at to figure out how to understand what the page is and, as such, is an important ranking factor. Always customize the URL before publishing. A blog post on how to find good winter boots should therefore have a URL like www.shoewebsite.com/blog/winter-boots. 5. Optimize Your Headings. You may be sensing a theme here. Your page headings are another part of the page that search engines give weight to in figuring out what your page is about. That means that, once again, you want to look for opportunities to (naturally) include your keywords in the page heading. That includes anything that has a , , or tag on the page. Headings are often a good place for those secondary keywords you have in mind, since it probably won’t make sense to use your primary keyword in every heading on the page.   6. Use Your Image Text. Another page element that search engines pay attention to is the text behind your images . The name of your image (e.g. keyword.jpg) and the alt text you can fill in are two more places you can include your primary keyword on the page. 7. Use Relevant Internal Links. Links are easily one of the most important ranking signals for the search engine algorithms. Getting other websites to link to yours is a challenge, but you have the power to do as much relevant internal linking on your own site as possible. Each time you write a new post, think about any blog posts you’ve already published that are relevant to what you’re writing now. Wherever it makes sense to do so, add in those links and, if you can do so naturally, use anchor text that relates to your target keyword for the older post you’re linking to.   8. Write a Meta Description. While meta descriptions don’t affect how your website ranks, they do influence what people see when they’re browsing their options on the search engine results page. If they’re trying to decide between a few links on the page, a strong description that uses the keywords they searched for (which show up in bold on the SERP) could make the difference in their choosing to click on yours. Google will display up to around 300 characters on the SERP in the description field, so figure out how to describe what’s on your page (using your target keyword) within a couple of lines here.   9. Link Your New Post to Old Posts. For all the same reasons you look for opportunities to add old links from your blog to new posts, you should periodically review your old posts to look for opportunities to link to posts that were published later. One way you can do this is by doing a search of your own site for the target keyword of each new post you create. When you find uses of that keyword or similar terms in your old posts, you can add in a link to the new.   10. Choose Tags and Categories Strategically. Blogs allow you to create tags and categories that help you group related posts together. This is both a useful navigational aid for people browsing your blog and a tool you can use strategically for SEO. Every category or tag you use creates a new page that will include the name of the tag or category in the URL, along with a lot of relevant content and links on the page. As with keyword stuffing, you don’t want to overdo it here and create tons of tags with similar keywords, but you should think carefully about which keywords and tags will be the most valuable to readers and for your SEO strategy. Come up with a list of a few based on the most important keywords you want to rank for, but making sure they each represent different types of topics (e.g. don’t have categories for synonyms or slight variations on terms) and use them whenever they’re relevant to what you’ve written.   Optimize Every Blog Post for SEO   Your blog is one of your most important and powerful SEO tools. Every blog post you publish presents a number of opportunities to strengthen your website’s search authority. Don’t waste any opportunity you have to use your posts to their fullest SEO potential. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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The Business Guide to Advertising on Instagram

Posted on December 18, 2017 by Hosting

The post The Business Guide to Advertising on Instagram appeared first on HostGator Blog . Instagram Advertising Guide Instagram is now one of the main social media players, but one that some brands may still not be entirely familiar with. In spite of the image-driven platform’s huge popularity, we still hear a lot more about Facebook and Twitter. For a lot of brands though, Instagram is a place you should […] Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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