How to Use Heat Maps to Maximize Your Site’s Success
As a website owner, there are tons of tools out there designed to give you more information about the people who visit your website. From Google Analytics’ deep tracking tools to the real-time data updates provided by sites like GetClicky or Chartbeat, it’s easy to get the information you need to make informed decisions about improvements to your website. However, one of the most overlooked site analytics tools out there …
Google Analytics for Dummies
Implementing data-driven decision making into your website strategy is critical to succeeding in the world of online marketing – and the free Google Analytics program provides one of the best platforms for achieving this goal. Basically, when you first build your website, you make a lot of assumptions. You assume that the copy you write and the images you choose will be the most engaging options for your target visitors. …
Web Business Lessons from the Netflix Debacle
While there’s no doubt that the current predicament facing Netflix embodies the idea of being “stuck between a rock and a hard place”, the way the company has handled its recent move to split off its streaming services from its mail-order DVD rental service has resulted in lost customers and tanking stock prices. So how could the company have handled its decision differently, and what lessons can we take from …
Choosing the Right Web Host
When planning for a new website, there are only two things that you absolutely must purchase – a domain name and a web hosting account. And while domain registration is pretty straightforward, choosing the right web hosting company for your needs can be a bit more complicated. So today, let’s look at what web hosting is and what features you should look for from a hosting company. For starters, if …
Google Panda 101: What You Need to Know
For the last few months, the web has been abuzz with the changes to the search engine rankings brought on by the Google Panda algorithm update. So if you haven’t yet heard about this important topic, it’s time to get educated, as these changes have some pretty dramatic implications for website building best practices going forward. For starters, a little background information… The first thing you need to know about …
Essential On-Page SEO Techniques
Much of the search engine optimization (SEO) world revolves around generating backlinks that point back towards your website, but there’s a whole other set of best practices you need to be applying to your site as you build it in order to ensure success with the search engines. So today, let’s look at on-page SEO and how it can improve your site’s chances of generating traffic through the natural search …
Website Security: How to Protect Your Site from Hackers
There’s no question that building a website is a lot of work. You’ve put in tons of effort drafting your content, choosing the right graphics and checking every single link on your site – so why risk having your efforts ruined by hackers or malicious software programs? Unfortunately, with advances in automated hacking programs, every site is a target. You don’t have to be a large bank or online retailer …
5 Essential Strategies for Getting Traffic to Your Site
If you build it, they will come – right?! Unfortunately, what works for Field of Dreams doesn’t work nearly as well for our websites, and with good reason. According to Mashable, nearly 150,000 new URLs are added to the web each day, which means that you’re up against some pretty stiff competition to get your site noticed! What this means is that, instead of sitting back and waiting for …
Effective Article Marketing Techniques
Article marketing has long been used as a method to build backlinks and drive traffic to a website, but in the wake of the Google Panda update, the best practices for using article marketing to grow a site have changed. Let’s look at how this marketing technique used to work, as well as what you need to do now to succeed with article marketing. In the past, article marketing …
7 Easy Ways to Make Your Web Content More Engaging
No one wants to read website content that sounds like it was pulled directly from the Encyclopedia Britannica! How boring! Instead, people come to your website because they want to get to know you and connect with you, which is why it’s so important to make your web content as engaging as possible. But what does engaging web content look like? For one, it’s bursting with personality. The people reading …