The Hwy52 Blog

Live chat software is a popular method for making it easier to engage with your website's visitors. As a user of live chat software we found, in many cases, that potential customers were more likely to engage using live chat than they were to fill out a static contact form or to call us on the phone.

Leading market research company, Forrester Research, found that 57% of customers abandon their purchase if they can not get their questions answered quickly. In addition, the same study found that 44% of online consumers rated having their questions answered while in the middle of a purchase as one of the most important features a website can offer.

Over the years we have been called upon to write press releases as part of our customers digital marketing strategies. Although the reasons for sending out press releases may have changed, the basics of how to write a press release has not. So, in the spirit of sharing, here is some information you might find useful on how to write an effective press release for beginners.

First of all, let's get straight what a press release is and is not. A press release is a short article written in a factual way. It is not a sales letter or an advertisement. Its main purpose is to promote your product, company, or event to the media in order to gain publicity. A well written press release can make a reporter's job easier by providing the basics for a news story, but a poorly written one will be discarded.

For many small business owners, sorting out fact from fiction regarding how to use the internet to grow their business can be a real challenge. There is an overabundance of information on the topic and answers are often hard to come by or overly technical. Does internet marketing really work? Where do I host my website? What about security? What is SEO? How does it all work anyway?

At Hwy52 Digital we have been helping businesses in Oakville, Burlington, Milton, Halton Hills and throughout Ontario get found online and stay ahead of the competition since 2008. Whether you have a new business or want to grow an existing business,

This is a bit (ok more than a bit) geeky, but I wanted to share my notes on how to SSH to a remote server using PuTTY and public key authentication. People seem to have a lot of trouble with this - mostly with the dreaded "server refused our key" error. There are several ways to set up PuTTY to use public key authentication. The method below has worked successfully for me many times -  mostly connecting to our CentOS VPS. I am sharing with you assuming you already have some basic Linux command line knowledge, you know what PuTTY is and that you understand you are using these instructions at your own risk.

• ssh to server via PuTTY using your username and password. The username should be the same user you will be logging in as via PuTTY. I do not recommend using root. You should be in your home directory if not :
  cd ~
• mkdir ~/.ssh
  chmod 700 ~/.ssh

In addition to providing web hosting services we also provide email hosting services - both as part of our web hosting packages and as a standalone service.

Setting up and managing an email client can be a challenge, especially as more and more customers need to check their email on multiple devices (mobile, tablet, desktop etc.). One area of confusion I often see involving email configuration has to do with what email retrieval connection protocol to use - POP or IMAP.

There is no single answer as to whether you should configure your mail client to connect using POP or IMAP. Everyone works differently and there is no single solution that will work for everyone. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive tutorial on internet email but is written as an introduction to the POP and IMAP protocols with the goal of helping you to better understand and configure your email across multiple mail clients.

I attended an event in Toronto recently that was hosted by Google Canada to kick-start the recently launched "Google Engage for Agencies" program. The Engage for Agencies program is new and its purpose is to provide training and support for agencies (like us) that help businesses with their AdWords efforts.

The event was first class and featured a keynote presentation by Chris O'Neil, director of Google Canada, as well as presentations, training and Q & A by other "Googlers" from the AdWords division.

Here is some information from the event you might find interesting.

If you have been learning about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, you may have come across the term "Backlink". For those of you who have not, you may be wondering what exactly is a backlink, anyway, and why do you need them?

A Backlink, also known as an inbound link, is simply a link from another website to yours. Backlinks are important for SEO because search engines like Google and Bing use them to help rank websites in their search results. Backlinks are something like votes from the web - the more "votes" (backlinks) a site or page has, the more authority it is considered to have by the search engines. There are many other factors that are used, but backlinks are one of the most important. Basically, if you want to show up high in the search results, it is good to have a lot of backlinks.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS you no doubt will have seen the standard RSS button on websites and wondered what it was. RSS is essentially an internet web feed format designed to share web content such as blogs, news, audio, video and a variety of other on-line content. RSS mostly stands for "Really Simple Syndication" but is sometimes referred to as "Rich Site Summary". In this article I would like to take a closer look at RSS, what it does, and how it can help your business.

The typical internet user may have several sites or more that they frequent for their content. They may visit Yahoo News, CNN and The Wall Street Journal for current events. They may also visit several entertainment or personal interest sites like PGA.COM or MLB.COM in addition to trade related sites like Hwy52.com. This ad hock method of information retrieval is very inefficient and can be quite time-consuming.

Every day in North America more individuals than you may realize use the major internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to search for products and services that you sell and provide. Chances are that if you are not on the first or second search results page for your keywords or phrases you are not going to get that call.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a term that refers to the art and science of getting people to find your website on the internet. It's a bit of a misnomer actually as you do not "optimize" the search engines but rather you optimize your website to be found and to rank high on the search engines.

I can say from my own observation that SEO is a science that it not fully exploited in the majority of businesses. Most likely do not have an SEO strategy and have not given this subject the priority it deserves. Consequently, there is a real opportunity for businesses that develop appropriate strategies to lead in this area.