by Aurelien Parment | May 7, 2015 | Small Business
According to Gartner, the global Cloud SMB market average compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2013-2016 will average out to be about 26%. With small business as a whole growing 32% year over year, the opportunity for small businesses to thrive is bigger than ever as well as the ability to compete against multi-national giants.
You might be one of those small business owners reading this blog right now who wonders exactly how they can compete with large companies. After all, you may lack the PR, marketing, and financial muscle that large companies have enjoyed for years, and unlike them, aren’t able to launch a product with ease or create huge marketing traction. However, with the growing power of cloud and web technology being easier to obtain than ever, you too can be like a Fortune 500 – without taking on the weight and pressure of being one.
In today’s blog post, we’ll look at how SMBs can compete with large companies and thrive to become best-in-class. Stick around – we’ve got some pretty good nuggets for you.
(more…)
by Aurelien Parment | Apr 14, 2015 | Small Business, Tips
With nearly 1 billion websites online and a limited human attention span, getting anyone to look at your website can be a formidable task. Over the past decade and a half, search engines have helped solve some of the problem, but the challenge of being discovered by customers or a random web surfer is still fairly difficult. You can certainly pay for an ad to be placed at the top of a search result, or use social media to get your name out there, but both can also be very tedious. One of the suggestions that many marketing professionals make is to employ search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to get noticed by search engines.
Getting your site SEO-ready involves a great deal of work but is very doable. In today’s blog post, we’ll showcase five different ways you can employ SEO on your website to help improve your search result ranking.
1. Publish Relevant Content
Quality content is the top driver for search engine discovery. When writing for your website it’s always important to write to the reader, not to the search engine that will discover you. When writing, identify a keyword for your content and repeat this phrase strategically throughout the piece of content. Additionally, use bold, italics, heading tags, and other forms of emphasis to highlight keyword phrases, but don’t overdo it; search engines will punish you. Best practice for keyword density is 3%.
(more…)
by Aurelien Parment | Apr 13, 2015 | Small Business, Tips
For many of us the season of spring means renewal and change. The transition of the calendar from a chilly winter to a warm spring means that it’s finally time to get up and get active, alongside the flora and fauna. Many of us will do our sweeping, vacuuming, cleaning, and purging of dust and files so that we can have a more stress-free year ahead.
Spring cleaning now also applies to our technology. Over the winter it is highly likely that our website and web hosting have become cluttered with files and media, thereby causing slowdown in website load times and bandwidth. Even though we know we ought to do it, we don’t because the tasks are daunting and will involve arduous tasks like file backup, deletion, archiving, and more.
With today’s blog post however, we’ve got you covered. In this post, we’ll cover 5 ways you can clean your website this spring, so you can spend the rest of the year doing what you do best – managing it.
(more…)
by Aurelien Parment | Apr 9, 2015 | Small Business, Tips
Building an online presence is now easier than ever with all the technologies available. With the right content management system and domain name, anyone can build a website to attract employment opportunities, build influence, or network with other Internet users.
This is called “personal branding”, which is the practice of individuals marketing themselves and their careers as if they were a brand, with the intention of self-packaging to attract opportunity. The idea was coined by motivational speaker and entrepreneur Napoleon Hill in his book Think and Grow Rich in 1937.
Creating a personal brand can be a great experience and net wonderful rewards and, with today’s technologies, can be done without much knowledge of coding, too. Check out some of our tips for building a personal brand that helps you stand out:
(more…)
by Aurelien Parment | Apr 6, 2015 | Small Business, Web Hosting
The cost of web development and management has declined greatly in recent years. Like we discussed in our previous post about the declining cost of domain names, the cost of running a server has declined as well. In the early days of the Internet, you had to purchase a physical server to host a website or incoming email. For a small business, having a physical server might be a good decision because everything is in one spot, but for those whose goals are to scale, purchasing a physical server may not be as good due to cost, management, and performance.
In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of virtualization and the implementation of Virtual Private Servers (VPS). A virtual private server is a virtual machine that can be used as an Internet hosting service and gives the end-user superuser-level access to a dedicated instance of an operating system.
Myhosting.com is also proud to offer a VPS solution for small businesses as well as they look for a way to manage their websites. If you’re a business owner looking to maximize your website dollars and do it all stress free, check out the five reasons a VPS is advantageous.
(more…)
by Aurelien Parment | Mar 31, 2015 | Small Business, Tips
Web development and the Internet have come an extremely long way. 20 years ago, a domain name went for 50 dollars a year. Since then, prices have fallen substantially – and in many cases, a domain name can be had for cents or for free.
While having a domain name is now easily obtainable, creating the website to go along with it is still a challenge. Features are more important than ever to create an all-encompassing website experience that will keep an audience coming back for more. Here’s what we think are the top 10 features of a successful modern website:
(more…)
