Social Media Vs. Blogger Outreach to Promote Your Small Business

If these words are foreign territory to you, not to worry, we’ll fill you in throughout this article. On the upside, you’ve landed on this page. Which means you are doing your research and taking steps to boost your small business internet presence.

Social Media refers to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and much more. These websites are designed for its users to share real-time experiences through photos, text, sharing of news or information.

Every social media channel has it’s own environment. Not every platform is suitable for every business type; there’s certainly one that’ll work for you. It’s no secret social media has evolved substantially, from broadcasting messages in its early days to building relationships and engaging with their fans today.

Social media marketing is still very effective. But, it shouldn’t be your only strategy as the message can become redundant and repetitive.

Then there’s Blogger Outreach otherwise known as influencer marketing. The idea is most companies looking for more exposure for their product and service will turn to influential bloggers that have established a substantial following.

They will write about their positive experience, using their product or service. Normally, you would offer your product or service free of charge, sort of like providing them a sample enough for them to decide how they want to share your product with their following.

The benefit of running a Blogger Outreach campaign?

The Authenticity: The blogger is a real person providing their actual thoughts and feedback on your business. It’s not another marketing company coming up with another catchy slogan or salesy remarks and it’s not you trying to sell your own product.

The Exposure: You can gain from building these authentic relationships can result in natural links to your website.

The Relationships: You can build to establish a strong internet reputation.

The Opportunity to Appear in Organic Search Results.
Most bloggers will exercise SEO strategies in their articles and consider key terms that your audience would be more likely to enter into search engines like, Google.

Finding the right influencer blogger is key, you’ll want to find someone who resonates with your brand. For example, you want want a food blogger to write about your spa services. If you’re in the business of health and beauty, find a fashion blogger or an internet makeup guru to try your product and tell their following just how great it is!

So, when it comes down to which is better to promote your small business: social media or blogger outreach? It really is all about using both strategies together. As a business owner, you may not always have the time to stay up-to-date with regular posts or finding the right influencer to promote your products.

22 Effective SEO Tips by SEO Experts

How great would it be if we could gather all the Awesome SEO experts in just one room to talk about search engines ranks with a focus on the best SEO tips available out there? It would be glorious! Since we don’t have a room big enough to gather all the best experts in one place, we took advantage of the online “meetings” and gathered all the up to date SEO tips into an awesome expert roundup post. That is how we got the idea of interviewing 22 renowned SEO experts and how we found out 22 awesome and unique search engine optimization tips … the best of them.

22 Effective SEO Tips by SEO Experts for 2017

We’ve got answers from some of the brightest minds about the most actionable tips from the digital marketing world. We’ve found interesting news, insights and really helpful tips and guidelines about mobile optimization, metrics, qualitative content marketing, testing, technical SEO and customer centric websites. These 22 SEO Tips are some of the best for small businesses or large enterprises. Make sure you get the best of them.

1. SEO Is Not Just About Rankings

I’ve talked with many business owners that think ranking high in Google is all you need to be successful. The reality is that SEO is just one of many tactics to drive prospective customers to your website. Sure, ranking high in Google is great, but it’s also worthless if you don’t have a website that is set up properly to convert that traffic into leads and sales. Plus, you won’t rank high for long unless you have proper tracking in place and a process to monitor and analyze your SEO efforts. As you can see, SEO is not just about rankings; it’s also about website conversion rate optimization and website analytics and tracking. That’s important to understand before you start to invest in SEO.

2. Optimize Website for Visitor and Not for the Search Engines

Producing content that’s irrelevant and insignificant to your audience’s wants and needs leads to only one thing – people stop taking you seriously. People click on your links in the SERPs but they do not interact with your website and leave quickly – wasted opportunity to turn visitors into customers.

So how do I find what my buyer persona (not to be confused with ‘buyer profile’) is looking for? Glad you’ve asked, so let me give you some actionable tips. Finding questions that people are asking about your products or services. A very good place to start is Quora. I just went there and typed something very uninspiring like “carrots” (Writing content for a boring industry? No Problem).

3. Understand How Your Site Is Actually Performing Away From Vanity Metrics

If you track for the right KPIs, auditing will supply you with ongoing changes and help you focus on making the highest priority changes for you to hit KPIs and plan for the future.

4. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Creative Technical SEO

People often neglect testing in SEO, mostly because it’s not easy, but optimizing CTR is a way to get some huge wins. Check out how Etsy is doing it or this recent look at approaches from Wayfair and their learnings.

I’m talking about coming up with novel ideas and analyses that help move the needle but are less about copywriting and more about technical proficiency. A couple examples: digging deep into semantic keyword research and data mining or dynamically populating title tags using the Google Search Analytics API.

5. Have Content Deliberately Written to Be Highly Linkable

Highly linkable content is content written on a broad enough topic that you can work it into guest posts and other link opportunities naturally, without the article having to be directly related to the content you’re linking to.

For example, I wrote a big piece on customer delight – a thorough guide on how to make your customers happy at every point in your relationship. I’ve been able to link to this piece within articles on topics ranging from marketing and sales to operations and employee management. Having a few of these kinds of pieces means you’ll never miss an opportunity to link to your content.

6. Do Not Underestimate How Important “Branding” Is to SEO

Do not underestimate how important “branding” is to SEO.

7. Build Your Website on a Solid Foundation of Data and Keyword Research

Your goal should be to build a customer-centric destination that works 24/7 at attracting fresh business.

My company, Search Planet, specializes in E-commerce SEO. I often see even large e-commerce Web shops leak revenue and profit because they’ll mirror their own needs and organizational structure online, instead of focusing on their customers’ needs. So the best prospects don’t find them in search results. Or when they do, they won’t buy from them – but go to their competitors instead.

By transforming your online presence to be entirely customer-focused, you’ll cut through the clutter, dominate search engines, draw a flood of targeted traffic to your website, and make more sales.

8. Spend the Time and Money to Have Your Site Analyzed in Terms of Its Existing SEO

You could have all kinds of issues that you aren’t aware of and rather than just trying to throw links at the site or find someone to write better content for your home page, put some focus on doing a thorough SEO audit.

9. Make the Best Page on the Internet for Your Topic

So here’s how I think about SEO:

• If you made the best page on the internet for your topic …there are 2000 Math PhD’s trying to HELP you;
• If you didn’t make the best page on the internet for your topic …there are 2000 Math PhD’s trying to STOP you.

Of course, it’s not enough just to make a great page. But it’s step one. Combine this effort with a clear understanding of off-site SEO, links and basic understanding of how to increase your domain authority and everything is going to work out well for you.

10. When It Comes to Link Acquisition You Need to Be Looking for Trust

The landscape has changed so much, we’re seeing a lot more weight shifting towards user experience, and link building has become a game of trust.

SEOs need to forget about them; there isn’t a metric out there that gives a true reflection of the value of a link, we have come across so many links with good domain authority or domain trust that we would class as toxic websites. When it comes to link acquisition, you need to be looking for trust, and you can only do this through a manual review; is this website the kind of website Google would trust and want to pass value through, is it a trusted source of information? You should then focus on how your links appear on that site, links that look like ads, in the footer or sidebars are going to be less likely to pass value in the long term.

We’re seeing a huge increase in the influence site speed has on rankings. We have run a few tests now with clients and are seeing a direct and almost immediate correlation with speed improvements and an uplift in rankings. Make it a priority, work with the development team and ensure your website is as fast as possible.

11. Invest Time and Effort into Developing a Link Earning Strategy

Do not take any shortcuts to buy or build low-quality links. While links are still a ranking factor, that is no longer their sole purpose. An effective link will provide the opportunity to improve three things; your traffic, your brand, and build trust. These are the links that should be your focal point. These types of links are found in building relationships with relevant websites and companies, creating valuable (not just quality) content, and a consistently having a giving mentality. Though it takes times, the reward will be worth it.

12. If Everyone Else Is Zigging, Then Zagging Is a Strategic Opportunity

If you just want one SEO tip, then let me share the insight that led me to co-found SEO-PR back in 2003. Hundreds of SEOs optimize web pages hoping that they will get a high ranking in Google search results. And many of them do a great job. But only a small handful optimize news stories, blog posts, or press releases hoping that they will get a high ranking in Google News search results.

Now, the Google News algorithm is similar but different than the Google algorithm. Why? Because inbound links aren’t as strong a signal of the importance of a story. This puts a premium on relevance. But, the big mistake that many SEOs make is assuming that the popularity of keywords used on Google is the same on Google News. They often aren’t. You can see this for yourself by using the Google Trends Explore tool. The default result for any keyword will be web search interest. But you can use the drop down menu to see news search interest. And the trends are often different.

In addition, Google says that 16% of searches that it sees every day are new. Well, ask yourself: “Where do baby search terms come from?” And you’ll discover that the stork doesn’t bring them. They are generated by the “news.” So, these are search terms that your competitors haven’t been optimizing their web pages to get high rankings for 15 years. So, you have a better shot of getting your news stories or blog posts (if you’re a news source) and even your press releases to get high rankings for than you would for yet another web page.

Now, admittedly, your ranking in Google News may only last a day or two. But, for near term news and events, this is the opportunity to drive traffic to a relevant landing page on your website. Now, the links in press releases are no-follow, so there is no “link juice” in them. But, they can still drive visitors to a page with more information — if it’s relevant and important. We used unique tracking links in four press releases for Southwest Airlines to generate $2.5 million in ticket sales. And when the CFO asked how we knew that they came from the press releases, we showed him that the tracking parameters on the links weren’t used by any other element of the company’s marketing. And when he suggested that we were merely harvesting interest that had been generated by the company’s excellent TV advertising, we showed him that the releases were for new service to cities where Southwest Airlines had never run an ad. He asked what else we knew. Well, we’d analyzed the database of people who had purchased tickets and found that two-thirds had never flown Southwest Airlines before and that they were generally purchasing round-trip tickets for two people.

13. Invest More in Content

Invest more in content. This is without a doubt the thing that people underinvest in the most, yet, doing so almost always brings great yields, both in terms of conversion and SEO.

14. Run Your Own SEO Tests Across Different Search Categories

Don’t believe everything you read and watch on the internet about SEO. Most of the best SEO’s I know don’t even have a Twitter account. Run your own SEO tests across different search categories.

15. Perform an In-Depth SEO SWOT Analysis

My best SEO tip is to do an SEO SWOT analysis. What are your SEO Strengths? What are your SEO Weaknesses? What are your SEO Opportunities? What are your SEO Threats?

If you create a basic SWOT grid and start to detail your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can start to get a better idea what kind of SEO you need. This is exactly how we work at Bowler Hat and even our SEO service page details how you need to identify what kind of SEO is right for you.

16. Understand What Your Targeted Audience Might Be Looking For

Make sure you understand what your targeted audience might be looking for when they might search for a site that you are optimizing.

What words they might use when they search for it, how they might construct their query and what words they will expect to see on your pages. Also what questions they might have about the goods or services offered on that website; and the answers to those questions, so that you can provide answers, and begin the journey towards having them become customers of your site.

17. Test Longer Strategies over Tactics and Measure Each Step of the Way

Is it possible that a single implementation could make a big difference? Yes. Is it likely? Not really. If you’re investing in SEO, you’re accepting a long game.

Google wants to rank the sites that earn their users’ satisfaction. Google isn’t as easily influenced, thanks to new search models and AI that are designed to truly understand the value of a page the way a user would.

18. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly

There are many things you can do to your website to improve SEO, but I would say right now that you should focus on making sure your site is mobile-friendly.

At the moment, Google uses your desktop site to rank you on desktop searches – Mobile First turns this on its head because it will base your desktop rankings on your mobile site. So if your mobile site is very poor, or even if you don’t have one, expect mobile first to cause you problems.

19. Create Your Own Websites and Experiment Things Risk-Free

The one SEO tip I would offer, that applies to both those who are new or more experienced, would be to start your own websites as soon as possible.

When I started out in the industry I was obsessed with consuming every SEO article that was published, but ultimately things really took off when I started launching websites. None of them are particularly successful, but they allowed me to try things risk-free without jeopardizing a client’s campaign. I was able to freely dive into onsite SEO, and I also dabbled in the ‘dark arts’ of link building which of course led to one of my sites being penalized..all fun and games! In order to truly understand how a website works I think it’s important to have some hands on experience, and getting that is easier than you might think. WordPress websites are simple to set up, and building up a bit of traffic can also allow you to experiment with advertising, log file analysis and more!

20. Focus on Content Quality

The single biggest tip I can give SEOs for 2017 is focusing on content quality. Over the last year, I have extensively been running experiments on how much the swing of search results has moved to the quality of the content.

It seems that the Google algo is getting better and better at pulling out content and really starting to understand how that content answers a query. Traditionally we used to talk about “content” and used to hammer in content in areas where really there was no structure, for example on product category landing pages in eCommerce websites. That used to be good enough to dominate the short, mid and long tail of queries as long as you had a decent volume of links.

21. Find a Way to Create Attention

Attention creates awareness, which in turn creates (brand) traffic and links, which will improve your SEO. You need to find a way to create attention (to your product/service/brand/company/website).

22. Hone Your Technical SEO Skills as Much as Possible

If I had to give one SEO tip it would be to hone your technical SEO skills as much as possible.

While SEO is a relatively broad discipline, the technical aspects of it are relatively opaque to many, and there is no shortcut for. On top of that, it is a skill that will likely always be in demand.

Top 5 Tips For Marketing On A Shoestring Budget

Local Business Owners Survive and Thrive by maximizing every dollar of a budget, every ounce of effort and every minute of time. An effective marketing strategy for your small business is crucial to efficiently grow revenue and minimizing wasted resources.

If you can maintain focus, understand your customers and your strengths, simplify your approach and maximize efficiency, you can find success with less. If funds are tight at the moment, try our 5 tricks for marketing on a shoestring budget for strong results without the massive price tag.

5 Ways to Market Your Small Business on a Shoestring Budget

1. Hone in and Focus

Big Companies with huge marketing and advertising budgets can afford to cast a wide net. For small business owners, a scattershot approach will deliver a very poor return on investment. Whatever channel you are focusing on, each marketing message must be targeted with laser-like precision.

A Well-targeted online advertising is the most cost-effective option for most small businesses. But if you don’t understand your targeting options or if your net is cast too wide, you can blow through your budget without creating value. The biggest value comes when you can find opportunities your competitors are undervaluing, where demand is lower than it should be, and the clicks, or impressions, are relatively cheap. You don’t want to follow the crowd and subsist on your competitors’ scraps. Rather than copying the strategy of your larger competitors, find the opportunities that are more precise with smart use of keywords and by targeting less obvious demographics.

Stay on-message, with your best message - make it clear what you are offering that the competition is not. Be results oriented, set your KPIs (key performance indicators) before you spend any money and keep a close watch on your results.

Think in terms of high-impact messages that are clear and succinct. Your intent should be apparent and simple to understand. In assessing your target audience it helps to consider demographics. How old is the audience you are trying to reach? Are they male or female? You can also use psychographics and other segmenting tools to drill down and create narrow marketing channels. There is virtually no benefit in marketing to those you are unlikely to reach.

2. Keep in Touch

Engagement is crucial to maintaining your customer base. The dollars you spend attempting to gain new customers will far exceed the ones you spend to keep them, so you need to make sure you look after your existing customers. Use e-mail and social media to enable a regular flow of communication and preserve the existing link with your patrons.

What you must remember is that maintaining a relationship with your customers requires finesse. You know the old saying, familiarity breeds contempt. Find that balance between being overwhelming and being effective. Here's a tip. The more helpful, professional and informative your communications are, the better they will be received. Every communication shouldn’t be an outright sales pitch.

3. Publish Great Content

Content is King. Content marketing is still one of the most reliable and cost-effective methods of marketing for small businesses, and it’s a solid choice for those who are trying to eke maximum value out of a shoestring budget.

Stand-out content is a surefire route to higher sales conversions - but this requires a solid content strategy, something which can be intimidating at first. Simply creating content with no real thought or goal behind it is akin to casting too wide a net with your advertising dollars. Again, you need to be focused on getting the most out of a smaller marketing pot.

Prior to any content creation efforts, research how to reach your target audience. Don’t assume you’re already aware of exactly who your target demographics are. Consider conducting market research to find what specific keywords they use to describe your product, what they find compelling about your product and what related topics interest them that are adjacent to the product you offer. Are you reaching a local, national, or international audience? This information will help you determine how to best reach customers in your choice of both content topics and mediums.

Creating valuable content that engages readers and provides useful information is one way to get a top spot in the search engine rankings. We've all seen how easily something can go viral. Remember Chewbacca Mom? In the age of social media, content can be viewed literally millions of times in less than 24 hours. The key is to be first in line. Your content will have less value if someone else beats you to the punch.

If you have the ability to create superior content yourself, go for it. And don’t be afraid to outsource for inexpensive help - websites like UpWork offer a pool of talent for less. Making smart use of freelancers once you have a content strategy in place is a cost-effective way to get your content needs covered without having to invest in a long-term hire.

4. Giveaway Discount Coupons

Coupons leverage the eternal fondness most people have for saving money and getting a deal. As such, offering coupons has been a powerful way for brands to attract new customers for many years. Make this work for you by investigating platforms that can distribute your coupon to a large number of people for a small cost.

Once you’re committed to offering business coupons, you need to have a plan in place to convert those trying your business into long-term customers. Talk to your new customers as appropriate, and find out what you can about what they want as a customer. Which aspects of your business do they love? Are there any impediments to them becoming a long term customer?

The free trial is another useful tool in the penny marketer's chest. Some people appreciate the opportunity to try something before they commit. It doesn't even have to be a long period of time. Sometimes seven days of service can do the trick.

5. Grow Your Community

Your best marketing assets are the satisfied folks you've served before. They will work cheaply on your behalf if you treat them right. Try offering a free month of service or product discounts in exchange for referrals. In many cases, the act of giving the reward itself is more meaningful to your existing customers than its value. In other words, customers value being appreciated.

Networking is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business. It can also be one of the most time-consuming. When you can persuade your existing customers to take up the cause of promoting your business, the growth can be exponential.

Small Business Owners with a Strategic Marketing plan in place have a far greater chance of succeeding on a shoestring budget. Match your passion, skill, and self-awareness to use what you know about your own business and your target audience to deliver bright ideas that will win new customers over and over again.

How do I implement Search Engine Optimization on my Website?

Before You Start: Make sure the keywords you are planning to use are ideal for your business! Optimizing your webpages around bad keywords can be a huge waste of efforts. For help determining your optimal keywords, See Optimal Keyword Detection.

Optimize the Page Title Tag.
The Page Title Tag is what appears first in search engine results, and also what appears in your browser’s title bar. Search Engines do have some ranking weight on page title tags, so remember when optimizing your page title tag to do the following:

• Be Mindful of Page Title Length: (50-60 characters)
• Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag: (city / product / service)
• Leverage Branding: (if more notable than company name)
• Consider Readability and Emotional Impact: (Convey most positive message possible)

Optimize Meta Description.
Your webpage’s meta description is a brief snippet or preview to the information / content that is on the page. You want this description to be as concise and compelling as possible. Note: meta descriptions will not directly impact your search engine ranking, but if used correctly can improve user click through’s, which in turn can improve your search engine ranking.

• Recommended Length: between 150 and 160 characters.
• Only use alphanumeric characters.
• Avoid Similar or Duplicate Descriptions Tags.
• Let the searcher know exactly what content is on this page.

Optimize Header Tag.
Header Tags (H1) are not to be confused with Page Title Tags. They are similar, but have different purposes. Your webpage Title Tag is a keyword focused description of the content that shows up in search engine results, your webpage header tag is a keyword focused introduction to the content on the webpage itself, to improve user readability.

Implement Image Alt Text & Title.
Image alt text (alternate text) helps explain to search engines what the image is. Use Alt text to describe all aspects of the image, using as many accurate descriptors as possible. You can also add an additional attribute “image title”, to help further describe the image to search engines. The more images on the page with alt text and titles, the better.

Implement Internal Site Linking.
Internal linking is a hyperlink on a webpage that directs traffic to another one of your webpages. What this does is make it easier for your visitors to navigate throughout the content on your website, which will improve your “user experience” in the eyes of search engines.

15 Important Factors To Consider Before Choosing A Web Hosting Service

Choosing a reliable hosting service is one of the very first and most important steps in your website development and marketing process. No matter how “maxim” it may sound, your website hosting is literally the foundation of your website online success.

Whether you’re looking to host your very first site or want to move an existing site to a new hosting provider, taking the time to think through each of the following items can help you feel confident that you have made the best decision that will meet your needs long into the future.

Physical Hardware

Physical hardware running your site being one of the most important considerations, take the time to research the server types of a hosting company is using. Is high-speed SSD storage included? Does it use redundant devices, such as RAID-configured hard drives? What is its response time when replacing failed hardware and are backups onsite?

Technical Support Team

No matter how good a host may be, it’s likely you’ll need to work with its support team at some point. Discover your comfort level when communicating with them upfront, as this may very well impact how quickly you arrive at issue resolution.

Response Times & Contact Options

Some web hosts require that you work through their ticketing system. Others have a phone-in option, use live web chat, or want you to reach them via email. So what is the best way to get in touch with them? Is the team available 24/7 or only during certain hours?

Reputation

In evaluating host contenders, reading reviews can help you make a more informed decision. HostReview is one of the resources you can use here—it’s a community of webmasters who share their experiences with different hosting providers to help find the most suitable option.

Hosting Features

Beyond providing you a server(s) where you can load your site contents, some hosts include many features, others make them available as add-ons, and still, others don’t offer any of them. These include:

• Bandwidth: the amount of data transfer (in GigaBytes) that you can use per month. Your site visitors utilize bandwidth as-as the traffic moves from your server to the Internet and vice versa; each time an image located on your server is loaded in a browser, data is transferred, hence bandwidth – which basically means, the more users you expect, the higher the bandwidth you will need. As a very rough estimate, 5GB bandwidth should be enough for a medium-sized site with moderate traffic.
• Disk Space: the amount of data you can store on your server. Today most (even quite cheap) hosting packages allow huge disk space. Most of my websites never occupy more than 1% of the available disk space. But you should know (to be able to estimate when needed) that if you are planning to build a simple website or blog, 3GB of available disk space would be obviously a lot more than enough (mind that a dynamic site (forum or blog) will need a lot of space for the database expansion).
• Operating system: two standard web hosting operating systems are Linux and Windows. Linux is the traditional choice with most providers as it is significantly cheaper and is compatible with plenty of Open Source applications and most scripts you may need (unless you plan to use any Windows applications).
• Control Panel: All hosting services provide some sort of a control panel where you will be able to add your domains and configure settings. Cpanel is the most common control panel found on any hosting service.
• IP Address: IP address is basically the unique number which identifies the location of your server on the Internet. Like we have mentioned above, if you are on a shared or virtual private server, your site should be sharing an IP address with a number of other websites. If you are on the dedicated server, you have a unique IP address.
• Server Location: tightly related to the above one, this one is important to mention for a number of reasons. For us, the most important reason is that Google considers the server “physical” location when ranking a website in both local and general search (for location-specific searches). So if you are creating a website for your local business and expect people to search it by location, find the hosting provider nearby.
• Server Uptime: Uptime refers to the percentage of time your server (and website) should be “up” and running. Uptime is an important SEO-relevant metric. Apart from obvious damage to your website performance, frequent crashes often negatively affect SEO. Google won’t rank your website high if it is often unavailable or down (see tip #2 in the list of the ways of increasing Google crawl rate). Most web hosting providers “guarantee” min 99.9% uptime (but it is recommended to do your research and check for real people’s reviews before jumping to any conclusions).
• (Free) Site Builder: Just don’t use them. period (hence the absence / presence of one should NOT be a criterion). You don’t need any (especially with various easy-to-install and easy-to-use website platforms like WordPress. Many built-in Site Builders are not SEO-friendly and limit flexibility; besides many of them are proprietary which means you won’t be able to painlessly move your site to another provider.
• Customer Support and Feedback: Every hosting provider (like any person or service) may fail at times but the availability of the customer service and the rate at which they solve issues and – that’s what defines a good service provider.
• The number of accounts per server: If shared server, it is advisable to know the number of sites with which you share the server. As if there are many sites on a server, the greater the chances of your site to load more slowly. Compare the number of accounts on a server with the number of accounts used by other hosting companies to have a starting point to negotiate. For full access to server, resources would better be up to 100 accounts per server.

Acquaint yourself with each host’s feature list in determining those that best match your specific needs.

Price of Hosting

Web host pricing is nowhere near uniform. Only by taking the time to comparatively shop will you finding a company that offers high quality hosting at a reasonable price. Determine accepted payment methods and look for discounts if you’re able to pay for service a year in advance.

Control Panel

A control panel or portal is the interface you’ll use to manage your website once it’s live. Here you can do such tasks as performing a manual backup, reset your server (if allowed), or configure additional domains. Two of most popular control panel options are cPanel and Plesk. Choosing a host that offers one of these helps make site maintenance easier.

Usability

As well as features like bandwidth and storage, you should look at the usability of the service. This will affect you if you are new to hosting and don’t have much coding or technical knowledge, or if you’d like more freedom to customize your website and hosting options.

The first usability feature to look for is whether the hosting provider has cPanel, Plesk, ispCP or ISPConfig. These programs allow you to set up and customize your website and hosting if you’re unfamiliar with the FTP (file transfer protocol) and is a must if you’re new to website hosting. Equally, if you plan to upload files from your computer to the website, such as header images and logos, you will need to ensure the hosting site provides FTP access.

Datacenter Geolocation

Having your site hosted at a datacenter that is geographically close to your target audience helps maximize site load speed experienced by your visitors.Having said that, organizations catering to a global audience should disregard this and consider using a content delivery network instead (see below), as it will replicate their website in multiple geolocations to improve performance.

Content Delivery Network

If your site is likely to have high bandwidth requirements, serve large files, or have other significant demands, you’ll want a content delivery network (CDN) to serve up at least a portion of your content. A CDN enables your site to quickly and efficiently serve a very high number of customers—performance that isn’t always possible using traditional hosting options. The host should also make CDN integration easy for you.

Email Features

This is one of those areas where you might not have considered asking your host for help. If you have a spam problem, then it may be because your hosting company doesn’t provide an adequate solution to stop it. Look into or ask about your provider’s spam solutions and general email practices. No matter what they say, email isn’t dead quite yet.

Upgrade Options

When you start a new website/blog, it is highly recommended to purchase a shared web hosting plan. This way you can save a lot of money on hosting bill during the time you grow you website/blog. Shared hosting is Web hosting in which the service provider serves multiple Web sites, each having its own Internet domain name, from a single WebServer. Most Web hosting companies provide the shared hosting plan nowadays.

As a rough estimate, the shared web hosting account is sufficient to support a properly optimized WordPress website with 5,000 to 100,000 unique visitors. However, if you are expecting your website to grow into a real big in next two or three years then it’s worth considering – what are the upgrade options web host provide you at the time of purchase. You may like to migrate from shared web hosting account to VPS or dedicated server for more disk storage, memory capacity and processing power with added security features. So, it’s very important to inquire about these upgrades options at the time of setting up web host account.

Security

In addition to other threats, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is a frequent cyber attack form, with millions of sites being hit every day at a rate of tens, or even hundreds of gigs per second. Protection is a critical component for any website. Most web hosts offer basic security/firewall and DDoS protection, but the most effective threat mitigation available today involves routing all of your site traffic through a service that scrubs out nefarious traffic before it has an opportunity to wreak havoc with your content.

Scalability

In starting a new website, perhaps you only need a simple, shared hosting account. But once it becomes a success, your hosting needs will likely grow commensurately. In looking ahead, then, you may want to use a hosting company that provides such expansion options as virtual private servers (VPSs), dedicated servers, cloud hosting, and more.

Refund Policy

These days all web host companies have a refund policy or trial period and during which you can try the hosting services and decide whether you would like to continue or not. Remember that, if you forget to cancel your account before the last day of your trial period then you will be charged for the whole trial period. If you have this question in mind then it’s worth asking beforehand. Some companies do not require credit card information during the trial period and later when you decide to continue with then you will need to upgrade to your chosen plan after the end of trial period.