Tips for Increasing Conversion Rates Every Month

Conversion is pretty
much necessary in the process of Digital Marketing and to accomplish this goal
all business marketers strive for, but only the best accomplish. Increasing
your CTR rate is crucial to get a profit on an investment and to get the most
outcomes of your company’s digital marketing budget.

Many of the websites
get a good amount of traffic, but if that traffic doesn’t turn into leads, it’s
almost worthless.

Information

When asking for
information from users in an email opt-in form, ask for as little information
as needed.

Guarantee

Add a
no-questions-asked return policy on all purchases. This will likely decrease
the risk, and at the same time improving sales will usually more than mark up
for any returns.

Tracking Conversions 

Understanding the
customer’s reaction and buying cycles also increase conversion rates by 63%.
Every month analyze your sales funnel to recognize which content is likely to
lead to a sale.

For example, go
through which landing pages are more likely to convert into a sale? The
differentiator could be the offer, the content or call to action. Analyze how
the landing pages different and better work on that.

Using Heat Maps

Heat maps on the
website will help you to know every detail about your visitors’ behavior when
they are scrolling or navigating your web pages. Which elements do they more
attention to? Where do they leave your website? Are they are neglecting your
CTA buttons? All information is a powerful way to boost your business.

Make yourself easily connectable

Do you want users to
interact with you about products and services? Then, make it as simple as
possible for them to talk with your support team or senior executives. Each
user has his or her own communication choice and what may be simple and natural
for some, maybe very frustrating for others. So make sure you’re available for
them through all sources of communication: by phone, contact form, live chat,
etc.

Presence in Social Channels

Social media channels
are a crucial piece of any online marketing strategy. But there’s no use in
building your business profile if you don’t plan to connect with your
followers. If your goal is to get more conversions through your brand’s social
profiles you have to seamlessly integrate them into your communication
strategy.

Create User-Centric Content

Content marketing or
native advertising is always trendy in this digital world and they both show
themselves over and over every day. A good and quality content assists you to
attract genuine traffic on your website and users who’re interested in your
products, brand, and industry will surely make a purchase online.

How to calculate your conversion rate-

Well, let’s say you
have a home page that asks people to sign up for your email newsletter. Out of
the 2000 people who arrive on your website, 150 converts into leads (People who
sign up to opt-in emails). To calculate your CTA divide the total conversions
by a number of people or visitors, then multiply the result by 100. In this
case, you have a conversion rate of 7.5 percent.

Expert Hiring

Do all these tips
sound like a tricky too much, You don’t have enough support or time to invest
in this or if you simply hire the best SEO Company who can
help you to accomplish this objective you can get gain organic traffic and
quality leads.


5 things to do After Launching Your Website

You know about how to
make the website live, it’s time for some different issues on how to let others
know about your website? How to get more traffic to your website? How to know
if it is successful?

We tell you 5 things
to do immediately after you launch your company website. And we are sure you will
get answers to several questions that crossing your mind.

5 Things you need to
do after a website launch

1. Official
announcement to the staff of your company
 

Now that you are too
passionate about the launch of your company website, you must include your
staff and co-workers in happiness as well. The right way to go about it is to
have an official announcement about the launch.

You can prefer to send
an email to all the concerned departments in the office making the announcement
public. This must include the front desk administrator too. The other way can
be to arrange a meeting to inform everyone in the company about the launch. But
it does not have to end there. Declare the launch date, give them a brief about
how the website is special and possibly arrange a preview for them as well. It
has several benefits. The employees feel motivated; they have a sense of
belonging for the company and are passionate about the launch.

2. Submit the sitemap of your Website

Once you are clear
about how to make the website live, the next point you need to concentrate on
is to allow some of the main search engines to search your website. And that is
made possible when you will present the sitemap of your website to these search
engines. So the next answer to ‘what should we do after website launch?’ is
‘submit the sitemap of your website to main search engines such as Google and
Bing’. If you miss doing so, the search engines will not be able to find your
website and it would be like all trouble for nothing! Most of these search
engines have very simple guidelines that require to be obeyed for indexing.

3. Update your clients
about your website

 Once an official
announcement about the launch is made within the company and the search engines
are also informed of your website, it’s time now to tell the news to your
existing as well as potential clients.

In an ideal condition,
make a list of all your current and potential clients before the launch and
send them a mail stating the launch as soon as it happens. While the current
clients will feel special to be a part of this news, the potential clients will
be recalled of the company without making it too obvious for them. If you have
partners in the company, it is always an excellent idea to make them a part of
all that’s happening in the company. All of this will drive more traffic to the
website finally.

4. Spread the word
about your website

Now that the search
engines are informed of your website and your current & potential clients
also know about it, it is time to spread the word further using the right
platforms! And there can be no more reliable platform than social media to do
so. The most simplistic way is to introduce the website on all the pages of the
company and also drop the website link there. Assure that your message is
enthusiastic and encouraging enough for the visitors to check out the link that
you have mentioned.

Another great way of
spreading the word is to have a press announcement for your website and then
share the published release on various social platforms. All of this will
support to drive more traffic to the website of your company.

5. Work on Search
Engine Optimization 

We all know how
important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to increase the traffic to a
website. Admit the fact and work on it. Because even the best-done website
without Search Engine Optimization is all the effort wasted because no one gets
to see it. While you can get unlimited posts on how to make your website SEO
friendly we give you a few quickies here:

  • You must know the appropriate keywords for your content. Also assure that you use those keywords intelligently in the title, in the first paragraph, and the complete article prudently.
  • ‘Content is the King!’ Do not ignore this fact and work on making your content short and informative.
  • Making your site optimized for mobiles will have several benefits and improves traffic too.
  • It is important to verify that the website does not have any technical problems and is fast to load as well.

So that’s about it! These 5 things are the most suitable answer to the question ‘what should we do after website launch?’ But remember, it does not just end here! Maintaining the company website is one continuous process that does not stop. You need to continually update and improve it to assure that it accomplishes its goal of business growth.


Voice Engine optimizations Strategies for Voice Search SEO

Voice Engine Optimization strategies are very much useful and mostly require to be used in this recent online Era. Voice Search usage is drastically growing day by day according to many analytical studies carried by many leading research institutes. It is assumed that in future 30 to 50 percent of the search results will be handled through Voice Search on Google.

These are the most trustworthy online strategies to be followed to optimization Voice Search -

Business listings Optimization and management:

Always optimize and manage accurate business listings on Google. You should optimize your Google business listing correct, clean and fresh. If business listings are not optimized it will be a superior loss since every year around 10.3 $ million are lost due to wrong business listings online. It is very necessary to provide essential and relevant information to your users, make sure you give proper and detailed information like name, address, and phone number to all your loyal users.

Speed of Site:

Speed up your websites, it is necessary for every web developer to develop user-friendly and speedy websites and flexible websites. Websites must be flexible with the proper and expected resolution based on different device usage. Voice search is used in various devices like mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. Mobile voice search users need results on-the-go; hence google has released mobile-first indexing updates.

To assure best website speed, use accelerates mobile page in your website, using AMP you can see your website speed automatically decreases to approx 1 sec, it gives better user experience and also boosts your website speed.

The strategy of Fresh content: 

Concentrate on questions to build awareness among your user segment, voice search segment users are very intelligent they just don’t use keywords they feel free to ask detailed questions during voice search. This is to be remarked that 41 percent of the voice search users are asking questions to Google assistant lie to their best friend.

Marketers must assure all potential keywords and idioms used in your site and also concentrate on more natural questions your audience or targeted segments looking for.

Content Strategies Refinement :

Contents of your page must be self-sufficient and it must be best refined, if your using featured snippet on your page then you must ensure that you optimize for voice search since 40 % of the voice search answers always come from featured snippets.

Some best content strategies:

  • Build an effective FAQ’s Page on your site and provide answers to drive essential traffic to your site, it also leads to best and powerful reviews and rankings.
  • Content must always be active and fresh, regularly keep it updated
  • Use markup languages<H2> header tags, to high-lightened and marked up questions.
  • Use Google by Business: Solve questions on your Google listing
  • Create and develop compelling questions

Testing:

Testing is one of the primary stages need to be conducted before any launch, You must always test the voice search features and functionality by yourself because it’s always needed to be ensured best since voice search optimization is still new.

Testing process

  • Test with multiple devices such as desktop, mobile phones, laptops, notepads, etc.,
  • Frequently check the results generated.
  • Ensure which listing you offer on which device.
  • Competing analysis of your ranking and your competitor's ranking.

Top Free SEO Tools of 2019 Recommended by Experts 

A complete listing of the top SEO tools of 2019. For digital marketers who desire to massively boost traffic and sales as soon as possible.

1. Free Website SEO Check-Up

Features:

  1. Run endless analysis on our most powerful servers.
  2. Saved reports make it easy to view growth and past work.
  3. In-Depth Website Review
  4. Side-by-side SEO comparisons with rivals.

2. Internet Archive — Wayback Machine

It allows you to take, manage and search collections of digital content without any technical expertise or hosting facilities. Capture a web page as it looks now for use as a trusted reference in the future.

3. Moz Local Listing Store

One of the most useful tools to grow your Local SEO. Moz retrieves data from various sources like Google, Facebook and measures the efficiency, duplicacy, and completeness of the business listings across the search engines. Moz shares your business listing across the search engines and makes it feasible for the new customers to spot your business.

4. Screaming Frog — SEO Spider

The SEO Spider is a desktop website auditor for PC, Mac or Linux which drags websites’ links, images, CSS, script, and apps like a search engine to assess onsite SEO. It is a website crawler, that enables you to drag websites’ URLs and get key onsite elements to reviews onsite SEO.

5. Google Page Speed Insights by Google

Features:

  1. Get your Page Speed score and use Page Speed ideas to create your web site faster through our online tool.
  2. Run the open source Page Speed Modules on your Apache or Nginx server to automatically rewrite and optimize resources on your web site.
  3. Leverage Google’s Public DNS to improve the security and speed of your browsing experience.
  4. Speed up your site by using Google’s infrastructure to assist the most popular, open-source JavaScript libraries

6. Redirect Detective

Redirect Detective is a free tool that enables you to do a full track of a URL Redirect.

It will give you the entire path a redirect takes to get to the endpoint. In some cases, you might be amazed at just how many URL’s a redirect will go through.

7. Broken Link Checker

Features: 

  1. Tests your websites and blogs for dead links
  2. Can scan an endless number of web-pages
  3. Certifies both internal and external URLs
  4. Displays the location of problematic links in your HTML
  5. Reports error codes (404 etc) for all bad URLs
  6. Runs on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Android, and iOS

8. Markup Validation Service

This validator verifies the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. If you wish to verify specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or CSS stylesheets, Mobile OK content, or to find dead links, there are other validators and tools available. As an alternative, you can also try our non-DTD-based validator.

9. Google Trends

You can check the potentiality of the content by inserting the appropriate search terms. In the tool, you will see the percentage of search term increase or decline as compared to the earlier time. Check the level of interest for the several segments of the users in many parts of the world and devise your content strategy accordingly.

10.Google Analytics

It is an extensively used web analytics tool used to create website traffic reports. This tool will give you insight into how users find and use your website. You can trace the execution of your keywords and ROI of your online marketing campaign.

11. Schema Creator

Example of Schema in Search engine result page

With the schema creator tool, it is very simple to create different types of a schema for your product, services, events, etc and display them as the way you want. Adding a rich snippet and schema mark up can increase your website rank significantly in the SERPS.

12. Google Keyword Planner

By far, one of the most beneficial tools possible for keyword research. Just enter the keyword in the tool and it will give you the best feasible keywords results with search volume, commercial bid value, etc. Moreover, GKP also gives you local insights and mobile insights.

Salient features

  • You can generate Adwords campaigns
  • See your competitor’s keywords
  • Search local keywords easily

13. XML Sitemaps

Now building an XML sitemap has become easier with the free build a sitemap tool. You simply require to enter the site URL and other parameters and this free tool will generate the sitemap that you can instantly upload to the Google webmaster tool.

14. Browseo

This web application will allow you to see the webpage as the Google crawlers or spiders see it. This will give you a fair idea of how much importance you have given to the particular elements in the website structure.

15. Copyscape

With the help of the Copyscape tool, you can check the duplicity of the content. It will give you the results of where else the same content prevails in the search engine. Follow the most reliable results and remove the duplicate content respectively to improve the page ranking


Digital Marketing Importance in Automobile Industries

The Automobile industry is a mixer of design and development, manufacturing and marketing. According to statistics, the Indian automobile industry is the 4th biggest automobile industry among all the countries in the world in terms of the high sales rate and the 7th largest country in the manufacturing of automobiles. The ever-increasing market for the production and manufacturing of automobiles and its parts gives rise to business possibilities for company owners and dealers. Sustaining in this competing world of the automobile field is a challenging one but not difficult. You can be successful with the perfect blending of superior technologies and resources such as digital marketing.

If you desire sales, you must tell about your automobiles and their designs to the public i.e. you need to spread sound knowledge of your services through online appearance for your cars and motor vehicles. Reaching prospective buyers and growing conversion rates can be achievable through tailor-made strategies of digital marketing.

Digital Marketing Services for the automobile industry:

  1. Automotive SEO
  2. Management of Social Media
  3. E-mail Marketing
  4. Content Marketing
  5. YouTube Marketing
  6. PPC management

        1. Automotive SEO:

Primary traffic is the backbone for any industry either it is a startup or a branded one. Since the customers mostly rely on the internet for searching for their favored services. Optimize your website page and its products (motor vehicles) with compelling titles and meta descriptions (rich snippets) that help search engine crawlers in making your site stand high in SERP results. Furthermore, the effective SEO helps in quick loading speed of your site and less bouncing rate.

Image optimization will be the most important factor for your business since you might have heard that one picture worth a thousand words. Displaying pictures of automobiles help the guests in choosing a car as per their choices.

Search engine optimization gives

  • Wide reach for your automobile company
  • Brand credibility
  • Targeted leads
  • Ranking in SERP

    2. Management of Social Media :

If you want to sell more cars or parts of automobiles, social media is an excellent platform. Showcase your vehicles with Commercials on all social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Instagram is excellent for automobiles since you can showcase all the car models and parts of automobiles such as various types of wheels, engine. Besides, write creative content related to them.

Advertise your company with Promotions. For example, write periodically posts such as “OWN IT TODAY” by offering discounts, coupons, special offers, etc. It generates interest for clients and makes them purchase your cars.

Social media marketing gives

  • Brand reputation
  • Enhanced User experience and engagement

    3. E-MAIL Marketing:

Collect all your client’s details and run successful email campaigns. It was found that 25% of website visits were triggered by email marketing only. Composing email operations for multiple locations and brands with new car models pictures and videos improves customer experience hence leads to your company.

Email Marketing helps in

  • High traffic
  • Scope for more sales

    4. Content Marketing:

Some people may doubtful which model/brand should buy and which provides great fuel efficiency and mileage. And it will be difficult to go to various showrooms and ask for details since all the sellers may do not have all types of brands in their showrooms. Presenting the information related to the models, brands, their features in the form of blogs sounds excellent and marketing it in social media is fuel to your industry. Market your content all over the social media platforms for more profits.

Content Marketing helps in

  • More traffic
  • Brand credibility
  • Dealership credibility

    5. YouTube Marketing:

Producing 1-minute to 3-minute videos on automobiles with their brands credits more chance for sales since YouTube has global users who spend at least 3 hours per day on YouTube. If you are only a producer for automobile parts, then you can explore all your products such as tires, steering wheels, etc with creative video making. You can also run ads on this platform.

YouTube Marketing helps for

  • More exposure and engagement
  • Bulk reach through shares

    6. PPC Management:

Promote the parts of motor vehicles and vehicles with Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Pay-Per-Click management. Boost your sales capacity by planning powerful campaigns.

Pictures play an important role in the automobile industry. Building campaigns with different models of vehicles and their 3D views will be a great influence on your company. These campaigns generate engagement and growth rates and sales. Approach potential buyers with dealer automotive ads.

This strategy gives you

  • Maximum number of clicks on your site
  • More probability for sales

The first step of the automobile research method to the last step of sales can be completed efficiently with digital marketing that ascertains a successful business. This is the power of digital marketing for the automobile industry.

Conclusion:

All the digital marketing methods and tactics will lead the buyers to purchase products from your showroom. Secure your automobile industry with these effective digital marketing strategies and reap profitable returns for your business.


Image SEO: Optimization of Images for Google Image Search SEO?

Visuals are more powerful than the words because the human mind treats things in images, visuals have become the most powerful way to communicate. Even though many readers may embrace the words that you share, visual elements in your content will most likely hold with those people much better than your words will. Powerful visuals maintain the ability to pass information to people by the use of gestures, images, signs, posters and short films advertisement between others.

IMAGE SEO - IMPORTANCE

A business owner who is looking to compete in the organic search results, SEO is necessary. With so much focus on creating high-quality content and a top-notch website, many people end up neglecting SEO for images. As the value of images on e-commerce, travel, and media websites have been grown over time, we need to optimize the images to make the article or the website more search engine friendly.

Here is a list of how to optimize images-

  1. Images Resizing
  2. Selection of Best File Type
  3. File Name should be relevant
  4. Use of ALT Tags
  5. Image Title Optimization
  6. Image Captions
  7. Use of Responsive Images
  8. Complementing Text For Your Images
  9. Image Structured Data
  10. Site Maps
  11. Analysis of Image Optimization Potential

1.   Images Resizing:

When you are discovering the correct size for an image designed for the web, the only number that matter is pixels, how many pixels tall and how many pixels wide the image should be, e.g., 1024 by 680 pixels. Images with higher resolution and bigger dimensions slow your page loading times considerably.

So, when you are thinking of using an image on the web, give attention to its size in pixels. Scaling down the file size, without losing too much quality, will work well on the web.

Image Resizing Tools:

  • Imageresize.org
  • B.I.R.M.E
  • PicResize
  • Reduce Image
  • Simple Image Resizer

If your site has tons of videos and images, it is important to optimize the file size to deliver faster loading pages across the internet. Regarding this, it is advised to reduce the file size to make pages quickly usable.

Right compression rate selection

Never compress an image too much as it will end up not just reducing the file size, but will also affect the image quality. Ideally, you should test with your file types and compression rates to see what works best for each image. There are numerous image-editing tools, with a “save for the web” option, which you can use to automatically reduce the file size while optimizing image quality.

2.  Selection of Best File Type:

Knowing various file types may help you in improving the state of your website. There’s a large image file formats list available online, including JPEG, PNG, and GIFs.

The file sizes between the three file types can vary dramatically as each of them uses a separate compression method.

In most cases, JPEGs will be your best bet as they present the best quality for the smallest file size. PNGs are more common as decorative images because of their small file size. It is suggested to use GIFs for thumbnails and decorative images only.

You can also use unique editing software to change the file type.

Image Optimization Tools:

  • Shopify
  • Kraken
  • FileOptimizer
  • Affinity Photo
  • Pixlr
  • JPEG Mini
  • CompressNow

3. File Name should be relevant:

Take time to optimize your images for SEO because it is a simple and important step to make your website more competing in the search engines. So, before uploading any image it is important to choose the right file name to rank high in SERPs. For example, naming a picture as “Dog.jpeg” would work better than one named “dog-puppy-pup-puppies.jpeg”. Modifying the name of the file with relevant, detailed keywords can help you get most of the SEO power!

4. Use of ALT Tags:

The search engine needs to understand what the image is all about. For that, it gets necessary to provide a good alt tag to let search engines precisely record your image content. Even when images are not loading, search engines can still read the alternative text to help rank a page.

For example: img src=””cute-dog-pug.jpeg”” alt=””cute”

Try and include related words to boost visibility and avoid keyword stuffing.

5. Image Title Optimization:

Image title is the text which a user sees after hanging over the image. This text doesn’t serve search engines as much as it serves your users. So, these are less important for SEO, but they can provide a further connection to the alt text. For better user engagement, you can consider adding a brief call to action such as “buy now” or “download today.”

6. Image Captions:

The image caption is the text that follows the image on the page. It may not have a direct impact on SEO, but since they are noticeable on a website page and people tend to scan headings, images, and captions as they scan a web page, they can add to the user experience.

7. Use of Responsive Images:

Using a responsive image solution is compulsory in the modern, mobile-friendly web development. So, if you have been using stock images, it is time to re-think and use different images for better SEO practices.

8. Complementing Text For Your Images:

If the text is not enough to describe what an image is saying, the search engines might not understand the importance of your image. Adding more appropriate text and keywords to the description might work.

9. Image Structured Data:

Google Images supports structured data for product images, videos, and recipes. If you add structured data to your page, Google will show the image as a rich result.

10. Site Maps:

Even though you have the most realistic visuals for your website, they don't need to be accessible by search engines. Providing a site map as a visual model of a Web site’s content allows the users to travel through the site to find the data they are looking for. So, to assure that search engine crawlers notice every image, be it an infographic, meme, photo, video thumbnail, etc., include them in your site map.

11. Analysis of Image Optimization Potential:

Getting a precise analysis of the optimization process provides insights into how well the changes to image size, format, encoding, decoding, and quality are working for a website. So, measuring your webpage performance frequently can help you make the necessary corrections.

When it comes to image optimization, there are several tools to help you examine your potential:

  • Website Speed Test
  • Google’s Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools
  • GTMetrics

Conclusion-

Image SEO may take time and effort but is important for your overall SEO efforts. For those who wish to stand out from the competition, it is important to consider the smallest of details to have the most valuable positive SEO impact in Google image search. So, follow the above-stated steps to assure that your images are well optimized and contribute to great user experience.


URL Canonicalization and Using Canonical Tag Properly

Google is not the first search engine that surf the Internet. But Google does things in a better way and provides useful results. Google hasn't stopped expanding as a company since that very day.

Though SEO is done for all the search engines that exist today, one major search engine that handles most of the traffic on the Internet is Google. Whenever we talk about SEO, people automatically assume that we are talking about optimizing the website for Google.

When it comes to SEO, we need to check many factors, both onsite as well as offsite. But if your onsite SEO is not up to the mark, no matter how well you do for your offsite SEO, you will not get the results you are expecting.

URL Canonicalization

The term Canonicalization can be tough to understand. Let’s say there are two URLs of a website:

  • http://xyz.org
  • http://www.xyz.org

Both of these pages show content, and none of these pages redirects to any one of them. This can result in duplicate content issues on Google, and you can face penalties.

Let's see one more example. There are two URLs on a website that result in the same page resolution.

  • http://xyz.org
  • http://xyz.org/index.php

If both of these web pages show the same result, then this may cause an issue as well!

You may not pay much attention to this issue, but this may result in serious duplicate content penalties. The problem with search engine bots is that they can’t decide which version of the URL they should add in their index. If two pages are resolving the same content, they will assume one is a copy of the other and your website will get penalized.

If your site is opening on 2 URLs showing the same content, then you must have to fix it. You must use server settings so that whether a user opens with www or without www, the site will open on any of the one version. In this way, you can fix the canonicalization.

Though at times you would like to share some content on two URLs, then you can use rel="canonical" tags to let a search engine know that which is the original and which one is a copy of it. This can save you from duplicate content penalties.

How to apply URL Canonicalization?

Let us now check how to apply URL Canonicalization. We don’t need to type in lines of code to do it. A simple rel=”canonical” tag is enough to apply Canonicalization.

Take an example, there are two URLs on the website that result in the same content when they resolve. These two URLs are:

  • http://xyz.org
  • http://xyz.org/index.php

HTML Canonicalization

The second URL results in the same content as the first URL. They both are displaying the same page and hence you can apply the rel=”canonical” tag, in this case, to indicate that the URL with index.php is a Canonical URL of the first one.

This is how it is applied.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://thewebpage.org/index.php”>

HTTP Header Canonicalization

The above markup can be used in the case of HTML content but what if we are dealing with a non-HTML content like a PDF document or anything like this, In that case, we can use HTTP Header Canonicalization.

> HTTP/1.1 200 OK

> Content-Type: application/pdf

> Link: <http://www.example.com/white-paper.html>; rel=”canonical”

> Content-Length: 785710

When Canonicalization should be used?

Now that you know what exactly Canonicalization means, you can move forward on the topic and see when should you use Canonicalization. Because there are many more cases other than these two I have mentioned in the examples above.

Here are a few conditions that can be prevented with proper URL Canonicalization.

  • Different URL for one same content
  • Various categories and tags that result in the same content
  • Mobile website displaying the same content but on different URL/subdomain
  • URLs having HTTP and HTTPS URLs and both resulting in the same content
  • Various ports
  • When a website has a www and a non-www version
  • In case of sharing syndicated content

These are some major conditions in which we can apply URL Canonicalization to save our site from facing any kind of duplicate content penalties.

When URL Canonicalization should NOT be performed?

There are scenarios in which we should not perform URL Canonicalization, and this section is targeted towards specifying these particular conditions. You can also consider these as errors when it comes to URL Canonicalization.

Skipping pagination canonicalization

If you are planning to canonicalize paginated URLs, then you have to know that this is a very bad idea. You can not add a canonicalization tag on the second page of a URL as that URL will not be indexed at all by Google.

Multiple Canonical tags

If a web page has multiple rel="canonical" tags, then it can be harmful to your website. Make one specific tag and make it clear which one you prefer.

I have seen that many people apply the Canonical tag like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”index.php”>

This style of canonicalization is an invitation to a lot of errors in your page. You need to understand that the more complete your canonical markup is, the better it will be for you and your content.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://thewebpage.org/index.php”>

The above markup is a better way to apply canonicalization.

Canonicalization on the mobile version of websites

Just a canonical tag to differentiate a mobile website on the subdomain of your main website is not enough. Google suggests that you use both rel=”alternate” as well as rel=”canonical” to mention that the URL is for displaying the mobile version of the website.

Here is how you can implement it:

> <html>

> <head>

> <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/” >

> <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://m.example.com/” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”>

> </head>

> <body>

Do not use a Canonical tag outside of <head>

Search engine bots will totally ignore the tags that are set outside the <head> are of the website so in order to apply a proper canonical tag, you need to add it between <head></head>.

Do not use multiple Canonical tags on your website

Using multiple Canonical tags is pointless. Search engines will ignore both of the tags and you will face weird SEO behavior and issues on your website. Multiple canonical tag URLs are sometimes caused due to plugin glitches so you might have to keep an eye on that.

Do not point a Canonical URL to a website with a non-200 status code

A website with a code like 301 and 302 will force the search engines to crawl one extra URL and this means that they need to crawl two URLs at once. This adds up to a big amount and it can easily deplete your crawl budget.

Do not use Canonicalization for PageRank Sculpting

PageRank is no more a public entity or statistic to a website but it is still considered by the search engines. If you are planning to use Canonical tags for PageRank sculpting and to get better ranking, let me make it clear that it will do more harm to your website than good.

Conclusion

The concept of onsite SEO is much bigger than that it looks. You need to take care of many things at once, and you also need to keep yourself updated with the changes that take place in everyday time.

 


Impacts of Web Design in Content Marketing

The design a company chooses impacts how a potential
consumer perceives them. From color choice to style, different elements add up
to create a first impression.

This means that bad design of website, or lack of design can
have potential customers closing the browser and seeking other businesses. As a
result, your company’s design can affect several components of your digital
marketing strategy, and this is especially true of content
marketing.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the practice of publishing content
that does not directly advertise a company’s product or brand, but generates
interest in those things by providing relevant and helpful information. Content
marketing as a strategy is one of the most important sub-strategies of search
engine optimization (SEO). SEO is an affordable
marketing technique that allows you to appear higher in
search results.

How web design impacts content marketing

Although these guides are primarily driven by content, Home
Depot’s web design impacts how users access and read them.

Accessibility

One of the most important considerations in designing a
content-heavy site is accessibility. If you publish informational content on
your site, it needs to be easy to find and read. Your navigation should allow
users to find the information they want, without clicking through pages of
irrelevant content.

If a visitor has to dig through page after page to get to
the information they’re searching for, they’ll be likely to give up and visit another
site instead of staying in your site. Creating a straightforward navigation
setup with drop-down menu choices is a great way to help visitors to find what
they are seeking and access it quickly.

Appearance

Visitors will make judgments about the quality and
trustworthiness of your content based on how professional your site looks. Even
if your content is easy to find, the design can turn people away.

If your site looks outdated or is visually unappealing,
users may be hesitant to consider you a valuable resource. You need to have a
clean design that illustrates your professionalism, and gives visitors
confidence that they can trust your advice.

Readability

Along with the overall look of your site, your text should
be visually appealing and easy to read. Too many fonts can be overwhelming and
unprofessional, and you can typically stick to one font for titles and another
for body copy.

Choosing the right fonts and colors is essential for
helping your visitors read and comprehend your content. You might publish the
most helpful content available on a specific topic, but if your font color is
too similar to your background, your visitors may not be able to read it.

Your body copy also needs to be clean and large enough to
be read without struggle. These details all seem minor, but can have a major
impact on how effective your content marketing strategy is with potential
customers.

Comprehension

Many people are visual learners, and need graphics and
photos to fully understand new topics and information. This means it’s
essential to include visuals with all of your content.

Regardless of your industry, visual content like photos and
videos can help your potential customers get a better idea of how they can use
your products or services. From a design standpoint, this means that your
site’s layout should work well with visual content, and make it easy for
readers to scroll through photos and watch videos.

Designing a content-friendly website

There are many different web design elements
that play a role in content marketing, but the bottom line is that your site
should be designed  by keeping visitors
and readers in mind. The easier it is for your visitors to find what they’re
looking for, and the more enjoyable it is for them to read your content, the
better results you’ll see from your strategy


How to perform a quick technical SEO

On-Site SEO Basics

Some of the most important elements for search engine
optimization happen on your own website. You may hear a lot about link building,
but link building without good on-site search optimization isn’t going to be as
effective. Here are the bare minimum on-site optimization elements you should
put on each of your website’s main pages, including and especially the
homepage.

The Golden Rule for On-Site Optimization

Before we get started, one thing you want to keep in mind
when using any of the following SEO elements is not to overdo it. You might be
tempted to shove a lot of keywords onto your pages, but that is not the goal.
In fact, Google has unleashed an over-optimization penalty that targets
websites that have too many keywords stuffed onto one page. So when it comes to
keyword optimization, keep it simple – think of up to five keywords or keyword
phrases for each page on your website and optimize for those.

If you’re not sure what keywords to use, try entering some
preliminary ideas on Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool to get suggestions

Title Tag

The title tag on pages of your website tells search engines
what the page is about. It should be 70 characters or less and include your
business or brand name and keywords that relate to that specific page only.
This tag is placed between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags near the top of
the HTML code for the page.

Meta Description

The Meta description on pages of your website gives search
engines a little more insight into what your page is about. There is still
debate about whether meta descriptions can help with keyword rankings.
Regardless, you want to write your meta description by keeping human audience
in mind that includes the page’s main keywords, as the meta description does
show up in search results.

Using WordPress?

If you use WordPress on your own domain, you are in luck.
Adding title tags and meta descriptions to your pages is easy using free
plugins such as All in One SEO, Platinum SEO, and SEO by Yoast. You can also
get SEO suggestions by using premium plugins such as Scribe SEO.

Additional On-Site SEO Elements

While the title tag and the meta description are the most
important SEO elements, they are not the only ones. Be sure to incorporate the
following into your website’s page content for further search optimization.

  • Internal Links – Link building isn’t just reserved for external sites linking
    to your website. You can help search engines learn more about your website
    by internally linking to other pages on your website within your content.
    As an example, this blog post utilizes internal links when linking to
    other posts on the blog.
  • Header Tags – This blog post utilizes three different levels of HTML
    header tags that help break the content into sections as well as let
    search engines know more about what each section of content is about. The
    <H1></H1> tags surround the post title – there should only be
    one set of <H1></H1> tags per page. The <H2></H2>
    and <H3></H3> tags surround subheadings on the page – there can
    be multiple instances of both. Using header tags helps both readers and
    search engines break up your content into digestible sections.
  • Image Name & ALT Tags – If you use images on your website, you should think of good
    keywords for both the image name and the alt tag. On the first image
    within the post, we use <img
    src=”on-site-search-optimization-seo-title-tag.png” alt=”On-Site Search
    Optimization SEO Title Tag” /> as the goal is to optimize it for the
    keywords on-site search optimization.
    This helps search engines find good images for their image search based on
    the keywords specified.
  • Bolded Text – You don’t want to get too crazy with this one, but
    occasionally bolding a selection of text to get a reader’s attention can
    also help search engines distinguish other important information and
    keywords in the page’s content.

2. Why You Need Content

If you keep up with the latest in online marketing news,
then you have likely read about content development and content marketing.
Content is great for both your website visitors and search engines. The more
content you have, the more likely your visitors will stick around on your
website. And the more content you have, the more likely search engines will be
to put more of your website’s pages in the search index.

The key to pleasing both search engines and visitors is to
have quality content on our website. Quality content can
include a variety of things including, but not limited to, the following.

  • Blog Posts
  • Industry Articles
  • Tutorials & How To Guides
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Podcasts

Creating quality content for your website can be a huge
investment, but it is worth it. Search engines will love it, and visitors will
love it so much that they will share it on social media, leading to even more
visitors. You can start out by simply creating blog posts on your website, and
as your audience grows, you can expand your content inventory to additional
types of media.

3. Off-Site Optimization (aka Link Building)

Link building is probably one of the most talked SEO tasks.
The basic goal of link building is to get other websites to link to yours. If
you think about ranking at the top of search results as a popularity contest,
then links are like votes saying your website deserves to be ranked highly.
Getting links with keyword anchor text will help you rank specifically for the
keywords that are linked to. For example, Adobe Reader ranks number one for the
keywords click here because so many websites linked to it using the
anchor text click here to download Adobe Reader.

So how do you get links? There are lots and lots of ways to
do it – some good, and some not so good. If you read enough about link
building, you will hear ultimately about three kinds of links and link building
techniques.

  • Organic Links – These are links you don’t have to ask for, and they are the
    best kind. Especially if you can get them on sites with high authority
    such as major news outlets and other well-recognized name websites.
  • Whitehat
    – This basically stands for good, quality link building (the kind you
    should strive for).
  • Blackhat
    – This stands for spammy, low-quality link building (the kind you should
    avoid).

Most websites will have a hard time generating enough
organic links to raise their rankings in search engines. This is why link
building is such a popular services. But you can get started on building
quality links by doing some of the following activities.

  • Submitting guest blog posts to popular blogs in your industry.
    Generally, you will get a link back to your website in an author box at
    the top or bottom of your post’s content.
  • Reaching out to related (but not competitive) businesses to see
    if they will link to you. A good way to do this is to see if the
    businesses you work with have link pages on their site for partners,
    vendors, suppliers, etc.
  • Create local search profiles (if applicable) and social media
    profiles. While the links do not always count towards search rankings,
    they can attract clicks which will generate more incoming traffic to your
    website.
  • Submit your website to applicable industry directories or,
    alternatively, buy advertising. For example, anyone in the wedding
    business could get listings with a link back to their website on The Knot,
    The Wedding Channel, and other similar sites. Bypass low-quality
    directories that have nothing to do with your industry or ones that link
    to shady websites in the adult, pharmaceutical, or online casino
    industries.
  • Create link worthy content. Infographics are a great example –
    you create a beautiful image representing important information and allow
    others to use the infographic on their own website in exchange for linking
    back to yours as credit.
  • DataForSEO – Use this tool to get raw SEO data straight to your
    custom application. You can use their rank tracker API to track keyword
    rankings, SERP results, keyword data and more.

4. How Google+ Can Help with Rankings

It goes to show that personalized search results trump even
local search results. Hence, if you want to get into the personalized search
game, your goal is to do the following.

  • Create a Google+ personal profile and business page.
  • Recommend the website you want to rank well in search results
    by giving it a +1, sharing the website on your profile and/or page as a
    status update, and linking to it in your profile information under
    recommended websites.
  • Fill out your profile information completely to make others
    want to connect with you.
  • Check your settings and make sure that your profile information
    is public along with your status updates.
  • Share other interesting updates on your profile so it doesn’t
    look too self-promotional.
  • Start connecting with people who you want to see your website
    in search results. Use the search box on Google+ to find people to connect
    with and add them to your circles. Hopefully, most will add you back.

Essentially, the more popular you are on Google+, the more
likely you are to influence personalized search results with those who are
following you. Hence, take advantage of this social network to its fullest
extent to reap the benefits.

5. Monitoring Your Results

Last, but not least, you will want to keep track of your SEO
progress by monitoring your results. The three most important tools you can use
to monitor these results are the following.

  • Authority Labs – Create a free account which you can get after using the 30 day trial of the pro account. Use this tool to track keyword rankings for your website so you can see if they are moving up in search results.
  • Google Analytics – Use Google Analytics to learn more about the visitors to your website. In particular, monitor your organic search traffic sources to see what keywords people are using to find your website in search results. By setting up goals, you can see which keywords lead to visits where visitors do what you want them to do on your website such as sign up for a mailing list or purchase a product. This will help you learn what keywords you should be targeting with your SEO campaign.
  • DataForSEO – Use this tool to get raw SEO data straight to your custom application. You can use their rank tracker API to track keywords rankings, SERP results, keyword data and more.

There are a lot of other valuable SEO tools out there, but
these are the best ones to start with to help you learn more about whether your
SEO efforts are making a difference.