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.

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.

At HostandStore.com, we think of ourselves as more than a web host. In fact, we actually receive many requests from customers hoping to learn more about their websites and how to market their businesses online. That’s why we published this blog post with 25 resources to help you learn SEO in February. This week, we’re going to feature some digital marketing experts who we can all learn from.

Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is much more than a buzzword in the technology community. It’s the act of optimizing websites so that search engines are more likely to rank them higher. While this may sound like some sort of mysterious magic, we promise you it’s not.

The term domain name has been around since the beginning of the internet.

A domain name is the unique identifier given to a website or a server. The domain name points to the exact location that a website’s files are located. Without domain names, we would be typing addresses like “99.99.99.99” rather than “www.HostandStore.com” or “Google.com” every time we needed to navigate to a particular website.

Last week, four of our team members attended the 2014 State Of Search Conference in Dallas. The conference was incredibly informative, featuring an elite line-up and a strong course track. We cannot overstate how useful this conference was to us!

Images are all over the web. They can be easy to take for granted, but without images the internet would be no different from an Encyclopedia. Images can be an amazing tool for any website – as long as they’re properly optimized and implemented. With this in mind, let’s walk through 5 of the most important aspects of optimizing your images for the web.

Once upon a time, one of the biggest design challenges that developers encountered while building a website was optimizing content for different desktop-based browsers. With the advent of today’s mobile technology, the focus of website design has shifted dramatically to accommodate the myriad of different smartphones and tablets on the market. Millions of people access the web via their mobile devices daily, and that number is growing; studies indicate that mobile browsing is poised to become even more prevalent than desktop-based web viewing in the next couple of years. If your website is more than three years old, or if you have yet to redesign it to make it mobile-friendly, you are probably missing out on a massive and ever-growing segment of your potential viewing audience.

What is Google Places and Why Should You Use It?

Hi, Everyone!

I hope everyone is having a great holiday season. I just wanted to take a few moments to discuss the importance of Google Places and what it can do for your business.