You don’t have to be told that creating a website is easy these days. But making something that sticks and stays relevant for years to come is certainly the exception rather than the norm. With so much competition across various niches, what does it take for your site to stay alive? That’s where Google Analytics, or GA for short, makes all the difference in the world. GA provides access to tools that help you better understand your audience, making it easier to tailor your site to what they want.

We have arrived at a point where businesses can no longer ignore social media. In fact, some profiles on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram have even crossed over into the print medium. And it seems like nearly all ads now feature hashtags or accounts to follow too! So what does it mean? Well, in short, social media has transcended being just a platform for catching up with friends and meeting new people – it has become a place to do business!

When people of similar interests meet, they often trade suggestions. For example, when two book lovers engage in conversation, one would almost immediately ask the other if he/she has read a certain title from a genre they both enjoy. If not, then a suggestion might be given to check it out.

That’s very similar to how backlinks work – they are simply recommendations given by other websites. To put that into better perspective, let’s just say you published an article on your book blog about your experience reading the first Harry Potter book. Let’s say that another book blog or book-centric site picked up on it and wrote a post that mentioned your piece and included a link. That’s what we call a backlink. And if that backlink comes from a reputable source, it could be very valuable to your site.

Your website can help your business grow. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re getting your website in front of the right viewers – as many of them as possible. Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a huge topic of discussion online because it does just that.

While SEO is a very proactive, forward-thinking effort, it can still be applied to existing (and even outdated!) web content to help get your site garner more positive attention in search engine results pages. For example, think about your company blog. Even if you or your team isn’t updating as frequently as you should, what you already have can still be used to your benefit. You may be sitting on a gold mine! Today, we’re going to show you 8 ways you can use your existing blog posts (or any page, really) to improve your site’s SEO.

If you’re looking for ways to get more out of your website, you should try applying search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. It’s a great way to help new visitors discover your site by improving your rank in search engine queries. Imagine being found by people looking for content that you already have on your site. They’re going to love it! Consequently, there’s a good chance they’re going to love you. Today, we’re going to discuss 7 Browser Tools for SEO and how they can help you improve your site’s rank.

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!

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.

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.

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.