Tag Archives: dedicated-servers

Getting to Know the New Google Carousel

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Hosting

Wouldn’t it be convenient if Google users could perform a search – say, for example, for the best local Mexican restaurant – and then be presented with the top search results, along with full color pictures at the top of their screens? Well, wish no longer – this is exactly what the new Google local search carousel does. It’s an eye-catching way for users to review local results in restaurants, nightlife, and other attractions. Though the carousel previously only showed up on tablets, it’s been live for desktop search in certain situations since June.   Where Can I Find It? Google doesn’t guarantee that the carousel will show up in regular search, but it does appear in Google maps when a user searches by category. As of now, it’s only available in the U.S and for English language searches, though Google will likely roll out more languages and locations in the future. The company also plans to expand the carousel to include more business verticals aside from restaurants and hotels.   How to Get On the Carousel Google selects businesses to appear on the carousel in the same way it selects top search results: via its search algorithms. Remember that Google’s aim is to bring the best, most relevant search results to its users. Businesses that use SEO best practices and that update their websites regularly are most likely to get on board the carousel.   What is Good SEO? SEO best practices are always evolving, but here are just a few things to keep in mind: Relevant keywords. If you know that your customers are likely searching for “nail salon in Phoenix, AZ,” use those keywords in your header, your body content headings, and throughout your website. You can find more related keywords by using the Google Adwords keyword tool . Just remember to use keywords in a natural context, instead of simply throwing them on the page in a spammy fashion. File names. It’s also a good idea to use keywords when naming pictures, video, and other files for use on your website. Off-page SEO. This category encompasses all SEO strategies that happen outside of your website, including the generation of backlinks from other sites, review websites, and social media outlets. List your website with online business directories like Google+ Local. Get involved in social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter if you aren’t already. Submit helpful guest blog posts to industry-related blogs. These are great ways to build your online reputation, and to build some quality backlinks and social proof in favor of your business. Content quality. If your website has a blog or new article directory, keep in mind that Google’s algorithms look at the quality of your content – not just how many keywords it contains. Search engines also use social signals (such as Facebook “Likes” and shares) to gauge how popular content is. Update your content regularly and make sure it’s stuff that your readers will actually find relevant, helpful, and worthy of sharing with others.   How Effective Is Google Carousel? Though this feature is relatively new, firms are already rolling out studies to measure just how effective Google carousel is at promoting businesses. Two in particular, Local U and Ethical SEO conducted separate experiments with a total of 112 respondents. Local U presented their respondents with the  search results page “pizza in Denver,” and asked them to click on the page location that most appealed to them. The Google map received 32% of clicks, while the first image in the carousel received 13%, and the first organic result received 11% of clicks. Ethical SEO used the term “Chicago restaurants” in their query, and found that respondents clicked on the carousel results 48% of the time. Interestingly, the third and eight carousel results, not the first, were the ones with the most clicks. When asked, users cited the amount of reviews as a factor in determining which carousel result to click on. These findings suggest that Google carousel is indeed effective at grabbing the users’ attention. In general, the search results with the highest ratings and most appealing pictures tend to do the best. As Google expands this feature to include more businesses, more experiments with bigger sample sizes will likely be done to better gauge the extent of the carousel’s effectiveness.   The Bottom Line The local carousel is just one more tool that Google has employed in its mission to bring top content to its users. If your business is already using best SEO practices, including having established a great reputation on the web, then keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re not already using best SEO practices, looking for and implementing ways to improve your online presence gives your website the best possible chance of being included in the carousel search results. Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Best Social PPC Platforms for Your Business

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Hosting

When it comes to PPC ( Pay Per Click ), there’s no doubt that the big search engines are great places to advertise. With Google now reaching at least 80 percent of all internet users, Google Adwords has become a powerful force in PPC advertising. However, you can’t talk about PPC these days without giving at least a mention to social media. The larger social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all have their own PPC programs that allow you to target your ads to a specific audience. Social networks collect plenty of demographic information from their users. This means that – even when they’re not searching – members can still see ads tailored to them and their interests.  So the question then becomes: Which social network PPC program will serve your business best?   Things to Consider As with any advertising campaign, your budget and target audience should be your main focus. It’s true that PPC costs much less than traditional advertising methods by comparison, but the daily costs can quickly add up and you’ll really feel it if your campaign isn’t getting the results you expect. Test and retest your chosen platform(s) before making any major financial commitment. Time spent on testing is well worth it in the long run. Also, don’t advertise on any particular PPC platform just because everyone else is doing it. Find out where your demographic congregates and take your advertising dollars there.   Who Uses Social Media? This is the first thing to consider when you’re thinking about going the social PPC route, as targeting the right demographic is crucial to the success of your PPC campaign. Though marketers and webmasters are singing the praises of social PPC, the truth is that not every business can benefit as much as the next when it comes to this advertising channel. The following are a few of the different types of users you’ll find on social media networks: Age: According to data from the Pew Research Center, the age demographic with the largest social media usage rate is 18 to 29-year-olds (83%), followed by 30 to 49 year olds (73%). Not surprisingly, this age stratification has stayed constant since 2005, with the younger subset being the most frequent social media users. Education: The data shows that social media usage pretty much spans across all education levels, with 65% of users holding a college degree or higher, 69% of people with some college education, and 66% of participants with a high school education. Gender: Roughly 71% of women engage in social media, compared to 62% of men. Location: About 70% of people in urban areas use social media, 67% of people in suburban areas, and 61% of people who live in rural areas.   Comparing PPC Programs Facebook is probably the most widely used social PPC program, since it was the first one to make a huge splash on the social media scene (it’s also the most widely used social network by a landslide). With over 800 million users and a minimum daily budget of only $1, it’s a good choice for advertisers who want a wide reach on a budget. When advertising on Facebook, you can choose from the CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per mille, or cost per thousand views) methods of payment, though costs have been rising since last year for those paying by CPM. Twitter is currently the biggest well-known micro blogging platform – with 500 million registered users as of October 2012, they’re fast catching up to Facebook in terms of user base. Twitter offers both sponsored tweets and sponsored hashtags for advertisers, though advertising here is considerably more expensive than on the other platforms. For this reason, you most often see sponsored content from big companies, media giants, and well-known celebs on Twitter. Because of its succinct nature, this platform is fast paced and suitable for promoting hot and trendy things that you want to quickly build a buzz around. Though this social network has a broad swathe of users, account holders tend to be young (with an average age of 18-29), African American (26%), and/or urban dwellers (72%). LinkedIn is the place to advertise if you’re offering B2B or employment services and products. With its very specific demographic (professionals and job seekers), LinkedIn allows you to target business professionals in specific industries. Right now, the minimum budget is $10 a day, which could be well worth it if your audience is mostly found on LinkedIn. At the end of the day, experience is a great indicator for future success. If you’re still unsure about which social PPC platform is right for your business, the best thing to do is test. Run test campaigns on the platforms you feel would best suit your needs, and see which ones you perform well on. Then, optimize those campaigns so that they perform even better. Social PPC popularity is showing no signs of slowing down, making now a great time to dig your business’s roots into the social PPC soil. Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What You Need to Know about Google’s New Dynamic Remarketing for Merchants

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Hosting

Imagine going to a store you love and having employees from the store follow you around for the rest of the day making purchasing suggestions based on the products you looked at. They’re always on hand to show you that pair of shoes you were lingering in front of or that MP3 player you were thinking of purchasing as a birthday present. No matter where you go, these employees are a constant reminder of items that are back at the store waiting for you. While this might be a bit annoying in real life, Google offers a subtler and much more effective advertising method called Dynamic Remarketing . Dynamic remarketing displays customized ads to visitors based on the part of your website they visited. If a visitor was browsing tennis shoes on your site, then Google will pull the information for those shoes from your website and place it into a dynamic ad that the user will see when visiting another site in the Google Display Network (GDN). Using dynamic remarketing on your website makes it much more likely that users will come back and make a purchase. Google’s Dynamic Remarketing program offers Google’s brand of search retargeting to all users with a Google merchant center account. This is a powerful tool for boosting revenue, as it keeps interested customers in the sales funnel longer.   How It Works What makes this technology dynamic is that it tailors ads across the web based on your visitors’ activity on your website. Basically, you add a tag (a snippet of code) to your site, along with a parameter for the product ID and a few other customer parameters. When someone visits your website, the tag automatically adds them to a list based on their activity and keeps track of them via a browser cookie. When the user visits a different website in the Google Display Network, then the tag uses the product ID to pull the product image, name, and price to the dynamic ad.   Features Auto-optimized layouts: Choose to customize your ads with your brand characteristics, or just upload your logo and let Google select the most optimum layouts for the user and device. Products recommendation engine: This feature chooses the best mix of ads to display to users in groups of one, two, four, or six. It selects products based on popular choices on your website, what items the user was closest to purchasing, and the items that are most frequently purchased together. Real-time bidding algorithm: Calculates the best bid for each impression. The system drives each bid up or down in real time based on expected performance.   Advantages Affordable: Before Google Dynamic Remarketing, search retargeting was closed to smaller operations because of budget restrictions. Unlike other search retargeting programs, Google Dynamic Remarketing has no minimum spends. This makes it a great choice for small to mid-sized businesses. Effective: Google maintains more targeted information on users, thereby allowing marketers to bid to specific demographics according to characteristics like age and gender. More control: With Dynamic Remarketing, you can control what sites you show up on by bidding up or down on specific sites, or choosing not to appear on them altogether. Large potential reach: The Google Display Network reaches 80% of all internet users worldwide, and includes spots on Youtube, Blogger, and Gmail. Choice in Pricing Models: You can choose either a PPC or CPA pricing model, and Google will optimize your campaign for clicks and/or conversions based on your business goals.   How Soon Does It Start Working? A remarketing list must have at least 100 cookies on it before it can display a related ad on the GDN. A list for Google search ads must have 1,000 cookies before it tailors users’ search result ads. Visitors are added to your lists within seconds of their arrival on your site, and there is no maximum number of cookies a list can contain.   Tips for Your Dynamic Remarketing Campaign In order to use the service, you need to link your Google Merchant account with your Adwords account. Note that you can link multiple Adwords accounts with your merchant account. After running one or two campaigns, use what you’ve learned to create your own custom lists. This will allow you to better target your visitors and optimize your bids for future campaigns. For example, you may want to create lists for users who view specific product categories, or a list for frequent visitors to your website. You can add the tag to specific pages of your site, or place the tag in the footer of your website for it to work across all pages. Use Google Tag assistant, a free Chrome extension, to check whether or not you’ve correctly added a tag to your site.   Like most PPC programs, there may be a slight learning curve associated with Google’s Dynamic Remarketing.  Dip your feet in with a carefully-controlled spend and optimize your campaigns as you generate data in order to get the best results from this new program. Now, we want to hear from you.  Have you started using Google’s Dynamic Remarketing program?  If so, share the impact it’s had on your business in the comments below! Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Magic Mondays

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Hosting

The HostGator offices are populated by very diverse and creative individuals.  We have talented artists and musicians and practitioners of virtually every other creative pursuit imaginable.  We’re an interesting bunch, and from time to time our creative interests intersect with our workday. We’ve been periodically posting videos on our YouTube channel of Bobby, one of our front-line support agents, mystifying and astounding his fellow gators with his own brand of up-close magic; Magic Mondays it has come to be known as. Our YouTube channel has lots of videos, from the educational to the entertaining.  Help pass the time this Monday and go check it out, maybe even subscribe in order to get the latest video content from us!  In the meantime, we wanted to share the most recent Magic Monday video with you right here:   Do you have any requests or suggestions for video content we can create to share with you?  Leave us a comment and let us know! Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Video Marketing 101: How to Add Video to Your Website

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Hosting

Want to quickly and dramatically improve the engagement that website visitors have with your brand?  Add video to your website!  According to Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. (also known as “The Brain Lady”), there are a number of biological reasons that we tend to pay more attention to video content, rather than written text.  Specifically: The Fusiform Facial areas of our brains compel us to pay attention to other faces.  Evolutionarily, this tendency leads us to treat the face as a starting point for information and believability.  As a website owner, faces can be used to call attention to important points and marketing content. Voices convey more rich information than plain text.  When used in the context of web video, webmasters can use vocal inflections and other mannerisms to form a stronger bond with site visitors than they can using text alone. Emotions tend to be contagious.  Want to get your visitors excited about a product or service?  It’s a tall order to accomplish via text alone, but easy when your website displays a video of an enthusiastic person. The human brain is attracted to movement.  Text doesn’t move.  Adding video to your website allows you to capture the same attention that our caveman ancestors would have given to movement in the bushes that would have signaled imminent danger.   The benefit of all these different biological processes is obvious.  When you add video to your website, you tap into a number of key evolutionary mechanisms in order to boost both attention and engagement amongst your website visitors.  But what if you aren’t a professional videographer with Hollywood-level equipment?  Do you need to make a major capital investment in order to bring the power of video to your website?  Absolutely not!  Any of the following tools can help you to create powerful video clips without blowing up your marketing budget:   Animoto  When it comes to video creation, there’s no easier option than Animoto.  With both free and paid versions available, the program allows you to drag and drop images into a pre-designed slideshow and to set your video to a musical background.  The resulting video clips aren’t quite as compelling as a “talking head” style video would be, but they’re a great place to dip your toes into the waters of web video (especially if you’re camera shy!).   Screencast Want to avoid having to face the camera, but still want to capture the benefits that vocal inflection can have on message retention?  Screencast videos are the right option for you. In a screencast video, you use a program like Screencast to record both your voice and the content that’s displayed on your monitor.  In this way, you can create simple tutorials and educational videos that allow you to boost your perceived authority within your industry while capturing the benefits that web video can bring about.   Youtube  Ready to take your web video marketing techniques to the next level?  Record yourself speaking directly into your webcam using Youtube’s built in web video recorder!  This style of video allows you to take advantage of all the different benefits listed above without any expenses beyond the use of your computer’s webcam.  It can be scary to put yourself out there in this way, but the results will be well worth it.  As you’re making your first web video, keep the following guidelines in mind: Web videos should be short.  Limited viewer attention spans make it a good idea to limit videos to no more than 5-10 minutes in length. Think in terms of visitor value.  Don’t make web videos just to make web videos.  Think about the subjects that will bring the most value to your visitors and use these topics as the starting point for your new video marketing campaign. Not every video will go viral.  One common misconception about web video is that every clip you create will go on to be a Youtube success.  Obviously, this isn’t the case, but don’t let this discourage you.  Keep experimenting with different video techniques until you find one that resonates with your audience.   Once your video clip is ready, the easiest way to add it to your website is to upload the file to Youtube and then use the embed command to add it to your website.  As an added bonus, utilizing Youtube in this way will give you access to the company’s internal analytics program that will show you how exactly viewers are engaging with your clips. Don’t be scared when it comes to web video.  Using the tools above represents a quick and easy way to bring the incredible power of video marketing to your company’s website. Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment