If you’ve followed our blog for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed that this year we’ve been focusing on showing you ways to learn about digital marketing and SEO (short for search engine optimization) to get the most out of your website. Even if you weren’t sure how each of the techniques we’ve discussed could positively improve your site’s performance, today’s topic is something that can help your business grow in ways you never imagined. Today we will discuss the importance of sharing your NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) information online to help with your local SEO. We’ll also show you how to get started!

If you aren’t using the WordPress content management system (CMS) to manage your website, you should be. WordPress is incredibly easy to use, offers all the tools you need, and best of all, is an open source platform. You read that correctly. The world’s most popular CMS platform is free to use! If you aren’t using WordPress to manage your site, here are 14 reasons you need to make the switch today.

When building a simple website, there’s more to consider than organizing content with HTML and styling it with CSS. While the majority of a web developer’s time will be spent in this area, good websites also utilize Meta Tags to help provide some more structure and additional information about a webpage. Sites who use meta tags are typically providing information to browsers and search engines, making them an important part of any search engine optimization (SEO) or overall digital marketing strategy.

Shared hosting plans are incredibly convenient. The full-service approach to hosting makes it easy for business owners to remove themselves from the behind-the-scenes work of keeping a website online. There can, however, be some drawbacks to these hosting plans. To make sure you’re really getting the most from your shared hosting package, it’s important to regularly ask these 3 questions.

Nothing can ruin a great afternoon like a blasted 404 error page. We’ve all been there – surfing the web like there’s no tomorrow, when BAM! All progress comes to a screeching halt because we land on a page that reads “404 Error: Page not found!”

How frustrating!

And then the questions start to rise. For instance, why is it called a “404” page? And are there any other sorts of pages out there we need to be watching out for? To better understand these pages, which are flagged by server response codes, we have to first understand how the web works. Don’t worry, it’s actually pretty simple.

In April, several members of the HostandStore.com team traveled to Austin to take part in a digital marketing conference called Pubcon. It’s important to us to attend conferences where we can learn from experts because we ultimately hope to share that knowledge with you. We are far more than a hosting company, so it’s important that we stay up to date on what’s going on in digital marketing.

After all, that is a key part of learning SEO or any other aspect of digital marketing. Pubcon was an opportunity for us to hear from many of the industry’s leading experts. So what did we learn? It’s hard to sum up such a useful event in a single blog post, but we’ve narrowed down six key takeaways that we believe can help each and every person that reads this post.

File storage is something everyone needs. Being able to keep up with data, media, documents, etc. is a critical part of daily life – especially at work. Using servers for file storage has become increasingly popular. We’ve written before about the many ways servers can be used. In this post, we’ll explain why these file servers are becoming more and more the norm.

Alternate attributes, commonly called “Alt” tags, are used to provide information about web images. These tags aren’t required for the image to render properly but they are a good idea because they can be a key part of optimizing images for the web. Alt tags are simple text snippets added to image src placements in an HTML document.

Millions of people blog using the popular open-source CMS platform, WordPress, but most of them fail to capture its full capabilities. If you are one of them, there’s a chance you may be overlooking a tremendous opportunity. Today, we will discuss two main reasons why it’s important to segment your WordPress blog into “Category” pages. First, though, let’s define what these Category pages really are.

We all understand the importance of server security. Server monitoring is a very important part of keeping your site, email or app online. It helps you know if your server experiences issues or if the performance changes suddenly. The reason this matters is because any drastic or abrupt changes in server activity can knock you offline. There are also instances where these changes are actually caused by malicious activity, such as hacking or DDoS attacks. Server monitoring is a great step towards protecting yourself from that.