Tag Archives: web and hosting tips

The Complete Guide To Updating Blog Content

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Hosting

The post The Complete Guide To Updating Blog Content appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . No matter what industry or topic you blog about, trends and technologies often update at a fast pace. If your blog site has been around for a while, chances are there are some obsolete links and dated references lurking in your archives. To keep pace with the fast-paced web, every blogger should update their content regularly.   Reasons to Update So why should you update your past blog content instead of leaving it as is? There are some compelling reasons: Search engines see all. When search engines pull up pages from your website, it’s not just the updated content they see. Although search algorithms seek out fresh content, a search for “latest tech trends” or “effective SEO techniques” can yield results from a year or two back if the post has seen a lot of traffic. Since these are fast-changing topics, such outdated information can reflect poorly on a blog. Avoid misleading readers. If a reader is in a hurry, or simply doesn’t bother to check the date of a blog post, they’re likely to just take outdated information and run with it. Fish out the gems. A benefit of going through your old content is that you can fish out well performing evergreen posts that are still as relevant today as they were when you wrote them. These types of posts are great for reintroducing, especially to newer audience members who may not be familiar with your past work.   What To Do STEP 1: Find your best performing posts. These are the ones that you want to revise first. You can do this in a couple of ways. You can check the number of shares and comments that each blog post has, but that might take some time. Another other way is to use your analytics. Check to see which posts have the most inbound links, unique page views, and popular keywords. That should give you a picture of which of your past posts are doing the best. STEP 2: Update your statistics. Chances are that if a post is more than a year old, the statistics or supporting research you originally used could use some updating. Do some research to find the most up-to-date information. STEP 3: Revise your language. This step comes after updating your statistics, just in case you want to add notes about certain changes that have happened since you first wrote the post. You’re probably a better blogger now than you were a year ago, so use this time to revise old posts to reflect your current voice. Just be careful to leave all of those helpful keywords intact. STEP 4: Update your SEO. SEO practices change faster than most can keep up with, so take some time to get up to date. For instance, earlier this year Google revised their guidelines concerning link schemes . STEP 5: Check your links. Links change and become outdated regularly, so it’s a good idea to check links for all of your posts to make sure they that still work. If you have WordPress, the Broken Link Checker plugin is a good tool to use. STEP 6: Use better pictures, or add pictures to blog posts that don’t have any. This is important for rich snippets that show up on social networks. The first thing people see is the picture, so make sure it’s something eye-catching. Also, with the advent of Pinterest, eye-catching visuals are all the more important. Melissa Taylor of Pinterest Savvy makes a great case for updating your blog posts for Pinterest. STEP 7: Add some transparency. Add a note to your blog post that it’s been revised and updated for accuracy. This also lets your readers know that you are making an effort to stay on top of your industry.   A few more tips: Revise the same post instead of creating a new one. An older blog post may be dated, but your best performing posts already have an established stream of traffic. Your evergreen posts are the ones that don’t need any updating. If you come across any, share them again for your newer readers, and the older ones who would want to rediscover them. It’s not always about the numbers. Some of your most popular posts of yesteryear may no longer be relevant to the current landscape of trends, or to your blog or business goals. Decide whether it is better to prune the obsolete content rather than update it.   As you can see, it’s not all very difficult to keep your blog updated over time. By doing so, you’re continuing to make your blog a valuable resource for your readers, no matter how long it’s been around. Continue reading →

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Blogging 101: How to Be a Better Blogger

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Hosting

The post Blogging 101: How to Be a Better Blogger appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . There is no shortage of advice out there on how to be a better blogger. It seems everyone has their own take on what it means to succeed in the blogosphere. That’s because successful blogging is a multifaceted accomplishment, requiring you to be more than just a good writer. Blogging requires an amazing amount of focus, determination, and (overall) passion about the topics that you’re blogging about. Read on to see what it takes to make your blog successful.   Get Direction What is the purpose of your blog? You should be able to answer this question before you ever start writing. For this reason, it’s a good idea to have a mission statement. You don’t have to define your blog too narrowly, or publish your mission statement for all to see, but having one written down will help to guide you with each new piece of content you write. Next, establish three to five topic buckets. As blogger Mark Collier puts it, topic buckets fold under the larger umbrella of your website’s purpose. For example, if the focus of your blog is to help people with personal development, you might choose motivation, productivity, wealth management, and relationships as your topic buckets. All of your categories would fall under one of these buckets, and every one of your blog posts would fall under one of your categories.   Be Consistent A blogger who only publishes when he feels like it isn’t very likely to have an audience. The truth is, you won’t feel like writing most of the time. However, if you want to create an audience, you will need to blog consistently, whether it be a few times a week or a couple times a month. The important thing is to let your readers know what to expect from you. Keeping an editorial calendar is a great way to stay on track with your blogging. You might also consider writing blog posts in batches instead of one at a time, and publishing each one when the time comes. When you plan ahead, you’re more likely to succeed in staying consistent with your blog.   Appearance Matters Human beings are very driven by visual appearance, so you can bet that a user’s first impression of your blog will include the appearance of your website. Your website appearance should reflect your personal style, your business brand, and/or the aim of your blog. Keep this in mind if choosing a theme for your blog. It’s also important to keep your pages clean and clutter-free. If you have distracting pictures, animations, old content, or banners that don’t contribute to the overall look of your site, then it is time to clean them up. If you have a lot of pictures on your website, consider using a photo gallery theme to keep things in order.   Be Creative Coming up with content ideas is probably the most difficult part of blogging, so mastering the art of idea generation is one of the best things you can do. First off, you should keep a running list of blog post ideas that you can refer back to. From there you can come up with ideas in a number of ways. Spend an hour or two each week brainstorming topic ideas. Just write down everything that comes to you, no matter how unpolished the idea seems at first. Sometimes they just need some time to marinate. Set Google Alerts for your chosen topics and see what news items you can write on. Visit sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora to see what people are asking about in different categories. Create blog posts around reader emails. Ask readers directly what topics they’d like you to address.   Stay on Task If you have trouble staying on task, then there are a number of tools that can help. Ommwriter is a free tool that creates a writing space within your desktop, and even provides ambient music and appealing keyboard sound effects. Time Doctor is another great tool. Not only does it track the amount of time you spend on a task, but it also checks up on you, should you drift off to Facebook or YouTube. A lot of bloggers have had great success with Focus Booster . This little program uses the Pomodoro technique of working for a set amount of time followed by a short break. Which ever tool you use, the most important thing is that you choose something that works for you and follow through with it.   Get Out More As much as productivity and focus matter in blogging, unplugging and living your life is just as important. Neglecting your other hobbies and passions in favor of blogging can not only drain you, but it can also hurt your writing. As Vincent Van Gogh once said, “Whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”   Though blogging can sometimes be a challenge, it can also be a great joy when your audience appreciates what you do. Remember that no great blogger became that way overnight, not even Seth Godin or Brian Clark. Use these tips to improve on your blogging life, and watch your efforts blossom as a result. Continue reading →

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3 Steps to Getting More Out of Google Analytics

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Hosting

Google Analytics is probably the most popular free tool to keep track of how your website is performing, and for good reason. It offers a lot of great features, though they can be intimidating at first glance. This program has a lot to offer, so wrapping your head around it all might seem a bit daunting. However, once you pick on how to use some of its more advanced features, you’ll have more valuable control over your digital marketing efforts.   1. Read the Reports Analytics reports give you a very clear picture as to how visitors are interacting with your website. When you log in, you’re brought to the audience overview page by default. This general overview breaks down your website stats, which include total website visits, page views, unique visitors, average visit duration, bounce rate, and percentage of new visits within the given time frame. Though this information is helpful, there are other reports you can check out to get more detailed information about your traffic. Content Overview: When you click on Content> Overview in the left navigation panel, you’ll see a report that tells you what people are specifically looking at when they visit your website. You’ll see specific information about you page traffic, including which of your pages are most popular. This is helpful in identifying which pages you might want to get rid of, improve, or downplay. Traffic Sources Overview: Knowing where your traffic is coming from allows you to fine tune your online marketing efforts. Analytics sorts sources by search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic, and traffic from AdWords campaigns. Click on Search Engine Optimization and you’ll see what keywords lead users to your website, as well as what pages users are landing on and what geographic areas they live in. Intelligence Events: This nifty tool allows you to set alerts for when specific events happen on your website. For instance, you might want to be alerted once a certain number of people make a purchase or download a free resource in a given month. Google will calculate the actual performance against the expected performance. You can set intelligence events for both web analytics and AdWords. Conversions: This section allows you to set and monitor conversion goals for your site. You do this by specifying the goal URL to track. For instance, if your goal is to get people to sign up for your newsletter, then set the confirmation page as your goal URL. You then set up a sales funnel consisting of all the pages your visitor will go through to ultimately reach the confirmation page. KISSMetrics has written an excellent guide to using this feature.   2. Use Reporting Tools Reporting tools let you use and control your analytics data in a variety of ways. If you’re a WordPress user who’s hungry for more analytics power, you’ll be happy to know that there’s more than one plugin for that. For example, Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast lets you track things like views per category, views per author, and can automatically track pageviews and outbound clicks. If you aren’t a WordPress user, there are also other tools that give you more control over your analytics. Google Analytics Evolution allows you to plug your data directly into an Excel spreadsheet. Bringshare.com allows you to merge your  data with other sources to generate reports, white papers, and other company documents.   3. Explore Advanced Features Advanced segmentation. This feature gives you more detailed information when it comes to where your traffic is coming form. For example, you can create and view the segment of people who bounced from your website in a given month, or only visitors who made a purchase. You can even create multiple segments and compare them on the same chart. Custom Reporting. Just as the name suggests, custom reports allows you to create customized reports based on specific criteria and metrics. You can create reports that tell you things like bounce rate per city and Page Views by browser. You can find this option under the Customization tab. Flash Tracking. Tracking Flash content on web pages has always been a major challenge for web developers. Google addresses this with Flash Tracking . It translates your tracking code into ActionScript 3 language, making it easier to track Adobe Flash content like forms and buttons. Customized email reports. You can schedule reports to be emailed to you once, daily, weekly, monthly, or on a quarterly basis.   If you’re fairly new to analytics, then Google is a great place to start. Even after you learn your way around, you’ll find that there are still more features to learn about. The best way to learn is to tinker around and see which ones serve you best. Soon enough you’ll be rocking graphs and spreadsheets like the pro that you are. Continue reading →

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7 Steps to Proper New Website SEO

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Hosting

If you’ve recently launched a new website, or if you’re on the cusp of launching one, congrats! You’ve done the hard work of setting the whole thing up, or have paid good money to get it done. Now it’s up to you to make it stand out from the oodles of other websites on the web. If that sound daunting, it’s because it is. According to World Wide Web Size , at least 3.76 billion web pages have been indexed as of August 19th 2013. The good news is that not all of these web pages are your competition. Many of them lack proper SEO, and worse, interesting or helpful content. If you’ve already got the helpful content part handled, follow these steps to help jettison your website upward through the SERPs.   Step 1: Perform Keyword Research This should be done as early on as possible, even before work on the website begins. This is because you need to know what your website should be ranking for. Remember to base your keywords on more than what people are searching for in Google. Erin Everhart said it best in her Search Engine Watch article How to Make Your Keywords Fit Your Marketing Message : “When you have those uncomfortable ‘So, what do you do?’ conversations with the person next to you on an airplane, a keyword is one of the first things out of your mouth.” Your keywords should encompass your brand. You need to integrate keywords throughout your website, including in your page content, blog posts titles, alt tags, and even in your video. However, make your keyword usage as natural as possible. Going overboard can make your website looks spammy.   Step 2: Optimize Content Not only should you incorporate keywords into your titles, tags, and text body, but you should also make your content shareable. By now you’ve noticed that just about all blog posts have social share buttons either at the top or the bottom of the post (though best practices say that  it’s best to have them at the top). Not only do search engines use keywords in evaluating SEO, but they also use social signals like Facebook shares and Twitter tweets to evaluate the popularity of your content.   Step 3: Watch Your Links The SEO ways of old dictate a certain approach to linking. It involves distributing articles with optimized keyword anchor text to other sites, and gaining backlinks from any old website with a high enough PageRank. Those days are no more. Google has cracked down on articles and press releases with keyword optimized text , so you could  get your website penalized for it. Also, search algorithms have gotten smart enough to recognize whether the website linking to you is relevant or not. Only get your backlinks from websites it makes sense to be connected to, and add the rel=nofollow attribute to keyword optimized text so that it doesn’t pass for PageRank.   Step 4: Install Plugins If you’re using WordPress then you have no shortage of plugins to choose from for your site. However, you should know that SEO plugins aren’t exactly a cure-all. Rather, they optimize your website’s code for search engines to pick up on. Some popular options include All in One SEO Pack , Yoast , and Scribe . Each SEO plugin has its own offerings, so investigate which one is best for your site.   Step 5:  Install Analytics Analytics software helps you to keep your fingers on the pulse of your website. If you’re new to analytics, Google’s free analytics program is a great place to start. Open a Google Analytics account if you haven’t already, and add it to your site. Google Analytics allows you to monitor vital traffic stats including unique visits, bounce rate, and conversion rates. It even lets you do cool things like split testing and analyzing your traffic in excruciating detail.   Step 6: Redirect Traffic If you’re changing your URL, then you’ll need to redirect your traffic. You want to make this as painless to your visitors as possible. As suggested by Google , use 301 redirects to channel traffic from your old site to your new one. Instead of redirecting an old web page to the new site’s root, direct it to the corresponding page. This is for permanent changes only. If the redirect is temporary, use a 302  redirect.   Step 7: Keep the Momentum Stay consistent with your website. Consistently post to and update your social media outlets. Listen to feedback, watch for bugs, and otherwise make adjustments where necessary. Keep updating, tweaking, and improving your website. Make it a dynamic, thriving web entity that people will be attracted to because of its valuable offerings, whether paid or free.   You should also remember that SEO isn’t a magic bullet, but a way for valuable websites to get the exposure they deserve. The higher the value of your website to your visitors, the better SEO will work for you. Continue reading →

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How to Measure Website Success

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Hosting

Every website is different. What might be considered successful results for one website may be lackluster for another. To measure your own site’s success, you must first define what success means to you and develop a clear picture of how your website is performing according to these metrics.   What is the Purpose of Your Website? To start, ask yourself about the purpose of your site. Was it created to sell products? To boost fundraising efforts? To engage consumers in a particular niche? Defining the purpose of your website is essential to defining its success.   Setting Good Goals Next, you need to set some clear goals that coincide with your website’s purpose. When devising goals, consider the following questions: Are your website goals tied in to the overall goals of your organization? Are your goals measurable? Are they challenging, yet realistic? Are they set in a specific time frame? Do your goals depend on specific website visitor actions? (Signing up for a newsletter, buying a product, etc.)   As an example, say you’re a business owner who sells jackets online. Your organizational goal is to generate revenue through jacket sales, so one goal of your website is to get visitors to buy jackets (a specific website visitor action). Your goal might be to sell 500 jackets per month through your website (which is both measurable and constrained by a specific time frame), up from the 400 you sold last month (which is challenging, yet realistic).   Metrics That Matter Website metrics are a way to measure how people are interacting with your website. When you keep track of web metrics, you’ll be able to see what’s working on your site and what needs improvement as far as web traffic and conversions go. Here are some metrics that you should be tracking – no matter the purpose of your website: Conversion Rate: This metric measures how many people are performing your website visitor action. Conversion rate is given as a percentage, and is based on the number of people who convert versus the number who leave your website without taking the desired visitor action. Exit Pages: This statistic lets you know what pages your visitors are exiting your website from. This data, along with the conversion rate metric, can help you to optimize your sales funnel. Know what pages within your sales funnel people are exiting on and improve on those pages in order to maximize conversions (although, keep in mind that some pages – like your “Thank You” page – are natural exits). Unique Visitors: This numbers tells you the number of individual people who visit your website in a given time period, usually daily. This is more significant than just measuring page views. Page views can tell you that you had three visits to your website in a day, but not if it was the same person visiting three separate times. Referrers: This data tells you where your visitors are coming from and can be extremely helpful in measuring and strategizing your marketing efforts. Top Keywords: This important metric tells you what search engine keywords are leading people to your website. Top Internal Search Keywords: Don’t confuse this with top search engine keywords. This data tells you what people are using the search box on your website to search for. This could be helpful in determining what content on your website is most popular, or if there’s something you’re missing on your site that people are expecting to find. Top Search Engines: This metric tells you what search engines people are visiting your website from, which can be useful when it comes to prioritizing SEO activities. Average Time Spent: This number lets you know how much time people are spending on your website and individual pages, and it’s a good way to measure the quality of your website. Bounce Rate: Your bounce rate is a measurement of how many people visit your website and then leave after only viewing the page they landed on. In other words, it tells you if your website is driving traffic away before engagement can occur.   When you measure your website metrics, you gain valuable information that will help you to achieve the goals you’ve set. If, for example, you see that the most visitors to your jacket sales website arrive by searching Google for “winter down jackets,” you can use that information for both marketing and optimization purposes.   Measuring Metrics Given the importance of a website’s metrics, there are plenty of tools to choose from when it comes to measurement. Google Analytics is free and perhaps the most popular tool for measuring website metrics. Google Analytics not only lets you measure the success of your website, but also lets you perform split testing, helping you to turn your analytics data into actionable steps towards improvement. Piwik is another free tool that can be hosted on your own web server. It offers many of the same features as Google Analytics, but since it’s hosted on your server, you’re the only one that sees the stats. If you master Google Analytics and want to get deeper into your website’s analytics, Deep Log Analyzer is a good option. It’s not free, but it’s easy to use and could prove useful in further optimizing your website for conversions. Remember that measuring the success of your website is two-fold. First, you must set your website’s goals, and then you must measure how your website is performing. Consistently revising your goals, measuring your website’s performance, and making improvements are surefire ways to improve the success of your website. Continue reading →

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