Tag Archives: promotions

The Adventures of Snappy: Houston Aquarium Edition

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Hosting

In recognition of June being National Zoo & Aquarium Month, Snappy decided to visit The Houston Downtown Aquarium .  This Aquarium holds over 500,000 gallons of water and is home to over 200 species of aquatic life from around the globe.  With all that sea life on premises, would anyone even notice a blue gator wondering around? Snappy made it inside the lobby of the aquarium and was just having a look around, possibly performing some body-builder poses and showing off his ample biceps… …when he was introduced to none other than Sharkey!  Sharkey and Snappy made fast friends and Sharkey agreed to show Snappy around the aquarium, personally. The first stop was the stingray reef exhibit.  The exhibit was very imprssive and included the ability to touch and even feed actual stingrays. It did seem like perhaps Snappy was getting hungry himself, watching these tasty morsels swim around right in front of him.  Stingrays are fairly close relatives of sharks though, so Snappy figured it’d be better to make the stingrays be friends and not food. Snappy was understandably a huge hit with all the children throughout the Aquarium.  He had to often stop for photo ops and to take time to high-five and even break into the occasional dance to entertain all the kids. Not wanting to steal too much thunder from the stingrays, Snappy and Sharkey decided to head out into the blistering Houston heat in search of some games to play.  Who knew a shark and a gator would grow to be such fast friends? We will state, for the record and in the interest of full disclosure, that Sharkey won at the water gun shooting game.  They agreed to a rematch at a future date though, so keep an eye out for Snappy’s return to the Aquarium! Sharkey suggested they go for a ride on the carousel.  Snappy had never been on a carousel before, as there are sadly no carousels in the swamp.  It was great fun, and you an even see video of Snappy riding the carousel on the YouTube video at the bottom of this post! After the carousel ride, it was almost time to head back to the swamp.  First things first, Snappy needed to hang out with some more children who were very excited to meet him! As the Aquarium is quite literally located right by downtown Houston, we couldn’t resist getting a picture of Snappy in front of some of the skyscrapers. As mentioned above, here is a short video documenting Snappy’s visit to the Aquarium: We want to thank the Houston Downtown Aquarium for the hospitality, and for introducing Snappy to Sharkey.  To see more of Snappy’s aquarium adventure, follow HostGator on Instagram ! June is, once again, National Zoo & Aquarium Month.  Snappy recently visited The Houston Zoo and he had a great time at the Aquarium!  We would like to encourage you to visit the zoos and aquariums in your town.  Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll even see a blue gator there! Continue reading →

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33 Killer Resources for Getting More Out of Your Website

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Hosting

If you run a website, you know how important it is to get the most out of it. To improve your skills as a webmaster, check out any of the following 33 resources:   Website Reference Sites Mashable – Mashable is a site that focuses on the online world. With segments for business, technology and social media, it is one of the web’s leading sources of information on online marketing and a great way to stay up-to-date. Social Fresh – Social Fresh is a leader is social media marketing and technology, making it a great resource for best practices in online marketing. Copyblogger – Copyblogger focuses on content, from landing pages to newsletters to sales pieces. If you’re looking for tips on writing copy that will help you soft sell your products and services, check out this great resource.   Website Optimization Tools XML Sitemap – An XML sitemap (like the one created by this plugin) helps search engines to more easily read your site, which is crucial for ranking high in search engine results. ClickTale – Clicktale is designed to track user behavior on your site and produces professional-looking reports on visitor movement throughout your pages. CrazyEgg – This tool provides website analytics through heat mapping and scroll reports. It also offers a feature called Confetti, which allows you to segment all the clicks on your site by referral source. ClickDensity – This analytics tool is free, self-hosted and simple to use. ClickDensity provides heat mapping that you can manage completely behind the scenes, free of charge. Zentester – Zentester offers A/B testing, scroll and heat mapping, and an analytics feature as well. It’s a simple tool that helps small business owners create great landing pages for their websites. Webpagetest – Webpagetest allows you to test your web page’s load time on multiple browsers in real time, giving you a quick way to understand if your site is optimized for load time. Google Page Speed – Be sure to check out Google’s own tool for determining the load time of your website.   Website Tracking Tools Google Analytics – Google Analytics is Google’s tool for determining what your users are doing on your site. It offers some basic analytics like demographics, bounce rate and number of pageviews, and is both free and easy to install. Chartbeat – This tool offers analytics with a focus on what’s hot now. If you’re looking for real-time trends, Chartbeat offers a visually pleasing display of this type of data. Clicky – Clicky offers website analytics, including time-on-site tracking and real bounce rates. All statistics are real-time, though some detractors feel its interface is not user-friendly. GoSquared – This analytics tools also focuses on what’s happening right now, including a second-by-second analysis of what’s happening on your site. Reinvigorate – Reinvigorate offers basic analytics, like number of visitors and visit length. It also includes a basic heat mapping tool as part of its package. Woopra – This analytics tool aims to integrate analytics and CRM with the end goal of tracking user behavior across different types of devices.   Social Media Integration Disqus – This third-party commenting system integrates easily with a variety of CMSs, including WordPress and Blogger. Disqus is extremely mobile-friendly and reflects comments and responses in near real time. Livefyre – Livefyre is a new commenting system that offers many of the benefits of Disqus and Intense Debates, while also allowing users to post their comments simultaneously to Facebook and Twitter. IntenseDebate – IntenseDebate is a third-party commenting system that offers the ability to reward Reputation Points to rank comments and allow “better” comments to display above less popular feedback. Add This – AddThis is a simple social sharing tool that allows users to easily share your content to the social network of their choosing. Shareaholic – Similar to AddThis, Shareaholic offers the ability to install a tool bar with social sharing buttons to your site. Its aesthetics are different, so your preference between the two will be determined mostly by your taste. Click to Tweet – Clicktotweet advertises itself as the simplest, best way to promote your content on Twitter. The plugin allows you to generate pre-populated tweets with a snippet unique text you’ve created from your site’s content. Hrefshare – Much like Click to Tweet, Hrefshare allows you to create pre-populated content for your users to distribute. The difference is that Hrefshare integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ in addition to Twitter. Send to Kindle – Adding this tool to your website allows readers to save your content to their Kindles. This way if they want to read at a later time, they already have your content at their fingertips.   Contact Capture LeadLife – LeadLife is a more traditional CRM and contact management system. Its cost may be significant for many small businesses, but it has shown a definite impact on revenue for some companies. Constant Contact – Constant Contact is a newsletter and email capture service. Starting at $15 per month, this tool allows you to easily manage your email list and capture new leads. MailChimp – The Mailchimp newsletter service is free of charge if you have a subscriber base of 2,000 or less. This contact capture program also integrates with services like EventBrite and SurveyGizmo. Aweber – If you need better analytics and reporting features from your email newsletter service, give the Aweber list management program a closer look.   Website Survey Tools SurveyMonkey – SurveyMonkey offers both free and paid versions that can handle everything from small, informal surveys to the ability to customize surveys, skip questions and even download survey reports. SurveyGizmo – This tool is allows you to create surveys with a customizable look and feel. You can also embed videos and images into your surveys and integrate easily with your MailChimp email list.   Social Media Management Tools Hootsuite – Hootsuite (which comes in both free and paid versions) allows you to post or schedule updates to multiple social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Facebook business pages, LinkedIn, Google+ and Myspace) from one simple interface. Tweetdeck – This Twitter management tool is 100% free to use and offers the ability to view multiple Twitter streams at once. Similar to Hootsuite, you can schedule updates from this easily-accessible interface. SproutSocial – Sprout Social is a paid toolset that provides social media management features, as well as analytics. Unlike the options above, it allows multiple people to access the account, making it a great tool for larger teams.   Having the right resources on hand can help ensure you’re making the most of your online presence. Implementing the combination of the tools above that’s right for your business can help you to easily take your website to the next level. Continue reading →

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Smart Ways to Update Your Stale Website

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Hosting

Does your website feel stale and uninspired?  Have you avoided making any updates to your pages, due to a lack of time or technical “know how?” Well, then, it’s time to move past these trite excuses and start updating your stale website! In today’s digital world, websites must be more than simple, static billboards that telegraph the same information day in and day out.  Your users are expecting an engaging, dynamic presence – and the easiest way to convey this feeling is to regularly update your content.  At the same time, regular site changes are important from an SEO perspective, as the search engines value and prefer to reward websites that feature “fresh” content. You don’t need to undergo a complete website redesign every month to keep things interesting.  Instead, consider the following strategies for ways to update your stale website without a significant investment of time or energy:   Tip #1 – Add a blog Blogs are great from both a reader and an SEO standpoint.  When you install and regularly update your company’s blog, readers come back again and again to see what new information you’ve posted.  The search engines also reward your site, as the inclusion of more content naturally creates more opportunities to get picked up for different keyword-specific search results pages. Installing a blog is easy when you use tools like WordPress or Joomla.  Truly, the harder part is setting and sticking to a consistent publishing schedule.  Though it can be a challenge to marshal the resources necessary for proper editorial standards, the effort is well worth the rewards of a regularly updated site.   Tip #2 – Revise your “About” page Most companies slap together a generic “About” page – only to realize later on that it isn’t connecting with readers in a meaningful way.  If you find yourself in this position, don’t worry.  It’s easy to update your “About” page in order to make this content fresher and more engaging for viewers. To revise this all-important page, start with the “5 Ws”: Who are you? What do you do? When did you open for business? Where are you located? How are you achieving your business’s aims? It’s a simple framework, for sure.  But by following these guidelines, you’ll create the kind of punchy “About” page that both answers readers most pertinent questions and encourages them to dive more deeply into your other content.   Tip #3 – Add a new special to your home page Want a quick and easy way to freshen up your website’s content?  Simply post a new special on your home page!  For example, you could: Offer a special discount on shipping costs to new customers Give away free product samples with purchases over a certain dollar amount Provide discounts in exchange for referrals to your business Remember – your website visitors are always looking to get the best possible deal they can.  Adding any of the different specials described above to your home page both captures their attention and helps them to believe that their getting great value by working with you.   Tip #4 – Feature a new product or service Similarly, showcasing a new product or service on your website connects with readers in the same way as featuring a home page special.  Most shoppers like to believe that they’re on the cutting edge – that they’re “early adopters” who try new things before others.  Featuring new products or services on your home page appeals to this instinct, while also putting different offerings in front of your regular readers’ eyes. You don’t even have to launch a new product or service to take advantage of this effect.  If you offer a product or service that doesn’t generate many sales, giving it a spotlight on your website’s home page can help to freshen the look of your site while also raising the impact of underperforming offerings.   Tip #5 – Try a new template Finally, if you want to go all out and truly freshen up your website, you can’t do much better than trying a new template. If your website operates on WordPress, Joomla or any other popular CMS, updating your stale look and feel truly is as simple as purchasing and uploading a new template.  Of course, with any template swap, you’ll likely have to do a bit of clean-up work to ensure that your information displays appropriately within your new site.  However, the time and cost of doing so still comes in dramatically lower than having a custom site built from scratch, making this a smart way to update your stale website. Do you have any other ideas for ways to freshen up the look and feel of a dated website?  If so, share your recommendations in the comments section below! Continue reading →

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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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Building Effective Website Calls to Action

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Hosting

 Odds are, you haven’t put a ton of time and energy into your website just to have it sit around gathering digital dust.  Instead, you want your website to do something – whether it’s to sell products, generate leads or just promote your way of thinking. But given the amount of noise most internet users are faced with these days, you need to make it explicitly clear what you want your visitors to do.  This can be done using “calls to action,” which can be implemented with the following steps:   Step #1 – Define your target action Before you can create a call to action, you first need to determine what type of action you want people to take after reading each page of your website.  As a general rule, it’s best to have no more than one major call to action on each page of your site. Consider the following example target action and call to action combinations: Prompting a blog post reader to share the article on a social profile – “If you liked this post, take a second to share it with your friends on Facebook.” Encouraging visitors to sign up for a web design email newsletter – “Enroll now for free tips on creating cutting-edge website designs.” Provoking customers into purchasing weight loss products – “Start your new life today by clicking the ‘Buy Now’ button below.” Because your call to action must be tailored to the individual target action it supports, you’ll need to have these desired outcomes identified before moving on to the next step.   Step #2 – Utilize copywriting techniques to write your calls to action Once you have your target actions defined, you can begin writing your calls to action.  But keep in mind that plain language isn’t going to cut it here!  Your calls to action should take advantage of popular copywriting techniques in order to prompt as many users into action as possible. A few of the rules you’ll want to keep in mind include: Make your “ask” obvious.  Be direct about the actions you want users to take – hedging and beating around the bush results confuses readers and prevents them from doing what you hope they’ll do. Use powerful words.  In the second example shared above, the words “free” and “cutting-edge” are designed to provoke emotions.  Using these types of power words inspires feelings and emotions in your readers – both of which can lead to eventual action. Keep it short.  Calls to action should be clear and concise, so avoid using any more words than are truly necessary to get your point across. Don’t stress yourself out too much in this step.  There are hundreds of different copywriting techniques out there – mastering them all is pretty much impossible without years of study.  Do the best you can for now and we’ll discuss an easy way to improve the effectiveness of your calls to action in Step #4.   Step #3 – Place your calls to action appropriately on your site Writing your calls to action well is important – but so is where you place these key phrases on your site! For example, if you create a call to action that encourages website visitors to sign up for your email newsletter, but then place the statement below the fold on your home page, you run the risk of having most people miss your prompt altogether.  And really, your call to action can’t be effective if nobody sees it. So once you’ve written your calls to action, take care to place them in the most appropriate places on your site.  Prompts to share your blog posts on social networks may make the most sense at the end of each blog post page on your site, but most calls to action need to be featured prominently in order to be acted upon.   Step #4 – Split test your calls to action for best results Don’t leave the wording or placement of your calls to action to chance.  Although you can write words that sound persuasive to your ears or place your prompts in a way that you believe will generate the most follow-through, you can’t really be sure that you’re using this motivational tool correctly without data to back up your assumptions. The best way to determine whether your calls to action are as engaging as possible is to use the A/B split test protocol to pit different calls to action against each other.  Test the exact wording you use, test the specific placement used on your site – test anything you think of that could make your phrases even more enticing to website visitors.  Sure, it’s extra work, but the difference in website conversion rates brought about by even the smallest call to action tweaks can be extraordinary! Continue reading →

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