This week, we get some expert advice from SEOMoz and InMotion Hosting and learn about improving your user experience with KISSMetrics and Website Magazine.

How Much to Spend Online Marketing
InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting surveyed their client base about their marketing spends and found some interesting insight on the state of online marketing in small business today. More than half of the advertising budgets of the survey respondents is going to pay-per-click advertising with, you guessed it, Google Adwords. What is most surprising here is the small budgets websites have when it comes to marketing – a paltry $202 per month on average. Repeat after me – it takes money (and a plan) to make money. read the full article.

Cache Anything and Speed Up Load Times
Website Magazine

I’ve been a big fan of CloudFlare for a while now and I’m glad to see the editors over at Website Magazine singing their praises. CloudFlare is a CDN (content delivery network) and WAF (web application firewall) rolled into an easy-to-use SaaS tool. Essentially, it stores your website files and different locations across the globe. By routing your DNS through their servers, the app will automatically deliver your website’s content to the user’s browser from their nearest datacenter. As if that wasn’t good enough, CloudFlare stores and shares a database of potentially harmful (i.e. hacking, spamming, flu-infested) IP addresses and blocks them from visiting your website. The best part is, its easy enough for novice webmasters to use, but robust enough to satisfy experienced admins. read the full article.

How to Win a Content Arms Race – Whiteboard Friday
SEOmoz

With the rise of content marketing over the past two years and additional post-Panda pressure to get relevant off-site citations in order to grow search traffic, the competition for content marketing is heating up. As always, Rand Fishkin brings great advice here on how to bump up your efforts with better strategy and more resources, so you can out-publish your content marketing competition. watch the video.

Are You Making These Common Website Navigation Mistakes?
KISSmetrics

Some great tips here from the pros at KISSmetrics on improving your website’s usability (and rankability) by simplifying and specifying your website’s navigation. If you haven’t checked your navigation in the past 12 months, this article might give you some good direction on how to improve time on site, conversions and SERP rankings. They’ve also provided some great examples of websites that are doing navigation right. read the full article.

About Josh Ewin

Josh Ewin has been involved with the web hosting industry since 2000. A frequent writer and industry analyst, Ewin enjoys helping webmasters and business owners improve their experience with web hosting and site operation website development and maintenance. Ewin holds degree in Economics from The Ohio State University and lives with his family in Maryland.