Friday, 24 November 2017

Tips For All Of Your Content

Designed to help you rank well in search engines and enjoy a wider audience, writing content for SEO is a critical part of becoming a well-known blogger in your given field.
Write your page to load quickly.

While it’s not an element of on-page SEO necessarily, page load time is a huge factor in the world of SEO, and there are certain steps you can take during the writing process to streamline load times. 40% of people abandon web page when they take more than 3 seconds to load, so it’s essential to keep load time in mind as you craft your pages.

•             Optimize your images. Images are an important part of a good blog, and they’re critical for SEO, as well. When they’re too long, though, they can easily harm a page’s load times. With this in mind, optimize your images to load more rapidly. This involves adjusting your image sizes so that they’re not excessively large, uploading speed-friendly image formats (JPEGS are the best options), and inputting image src codes to prevent the browser from surveying the page directory in an attempt to “read” the image.

•             Keep redirects at bay. Redirects can destroy your page load time, so it’s important to keep them to the bare minimum. As much as you can, avoid citing URLs in your content that redirect to other URLs. This will help enhance your load time and create a better user experience.

Make your headlines powerful and attention-grabbing.

The headline is a huge asset when writing content for SEO. In addition to the fact that the headline is the first thing people see, it’s also one of the primary things that Google evaluates when ranking your sites. To ensure that your headlines are performing well and drawing readers, be sure to do the following:

•             Include relevant keywords. For best results, input your keyword phrase at the beginning of your headline to make it as prominent as possible.
•             Keep them the correct length. Current stats say 65 characters or fewer.
•             Use action words. Action words make readers want to act. When your headline asks someone to click, share, or download, they’re more likely to do just that.
•             Address the reader directly. Addressing the reader directly makes your headlines more personal, and can grab a reader’s attention from the depths of the SERPs.

Optimize your meta description.

Meta descriptions are the small snippets of descriptive text that show up in Google’s SERPs. If you want SEO juice, you CANNOT ignore this part.

Include keywords (but not too many).

Keywords used to be all the rage in the world of SEO. Today, the buzz has quieted a bit, but they’re still an important piece of on-page SEO. With this in mind, you’ll want to include relevant keywords in all of the writing you do, but take pains to not go too far with them and “stuff” your content like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Use links to beef up your SEO strategy.

Links are a powerful tool to help improve your SEO. While internal links (links that point back to your own content) can help direct users to your other material, external links (to high DA sources with a score of 50 or above) will help communicate to Google and other search engines that your website is authoritative and relevant, and that you value quality connections to other online content.


Content That Supports Good SEO

1. Structure the content in your head before you write it.

While nobody is saying you need to sit down and create a “brain map” of your various ideas, content that supports good SEO is the opposite of an impressionist painting. Instead of being random and sudden, it is methodical and categorical. Because of this, brainstorming content is a powerful way to ensure that you’re including all of your main points and topics, and that you can use the content to input links, keywords, and other important SEO elements.

To this end, think about all of your content, with these questions, before you write it:

•             Who are you trying to reach?
•             Which keywords will you include?
•             What’s the overall point of your material?
•             What do you want the content to communicate?
•             By thinking through the course and structure of your content clearly, it’s easier to publish great content that lends itself nicely to SEO.

2. Structure your content for easy readability & long-tail keywords.

Great blog posts rely on great structure, and good SEO does, too. With this in mind, consider mapping or outlining your blog posts before you write them. In addition to giving you a structure to abide by, this simple task will also help you lay out your introduction, body, and conclusion, and ensure that your content is easy to read, which, in turn, makes it more reader- and search engine-friendly.

Long-tail keywords are your best friends in terms of optimizing for keywords that won’t break the bank (take too long or too much $).

3. Format all of your content into short chunks.

A large brick of text is intimidating to readers, and it will push people away. With this in mind, be sure to divide all of your content into readable chunks of text, with a beginning, middle, and end.
As a general rule, paragraphs should be only 3-4 sentences in length, and you should do your best to insert subheaders at intervals of every 300 or so words. This makes your content easier for readers to approach and helps keep it from feeling intimidating on the page. It also has the potential to improve your click-through rate, which can boost your overall SEO scores.

4. Make your headings descriptive.

Beyond just using headings, you need to know how to make them descriptive and useful. Headlines are meant to guide readers through your blog post, and headlines that are highly descriptive and include target keywords will do the best job of this. They’ll also work as a sort of advertisement on Google’s search engine results page and, if they’re written well enough, will draw more people to your content.

5. Nail the transition.

Transition words are important to your writing, and they can go a long way toward making it smoother and easier to understand for readers. While this sounds simple, it’s important to remember that good content is the foundation of good SEO, and content your customers can’t read doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance of ranking well.

With this in mind, don’t hesitate to use transition words and phrases like “However,” “Secondly,” etc. These help your readers keep pace and will work wonders to streamline your writing.

6. Have other people proofread your posts.

While you may be an effective writer and editor, having other people read your posts will cut down on errors and improve your writing. With this in mind, hire an editor or another writer to help you look over your post before you publish them, and don’t ever make a habit out of publishing something you’ve not adequately proofread, since this is a recipe for mistakes and sloppiness, both of which can damage your rankings.

7. Make sure your articles are long enough to provide ample main content.

According to Yoast, every article you post should have at least 300 words. The reason for that is that content shorter than that doesn’t provide enough of what Google, in its updated Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, calls “main content.”

While it’s true that longer articles tend to perform better in the world of SEO, the main priority you have as a writer is simply to ensure that your articles provide enough main content to be useful to search engines and people.


The Importance of Color in Website Design

Color deeply influences the overall look and feel of a website and can form the first impression about a company for visitors. Color is one of the top three most important factors in a purchasing decision, according to an article by the Touro College Journal.

What do consider when developing a color palette

Companies and clients will often have a set of colors used in the corporate logo that they want implemented in the site design. It’s the web designer’s job to educate the client about how those colors will fit into the site’s style and gently encourage changes if necessary.
Colors have different meanings in different cultures and countries, so understanding the meaning of color in your target market is important. Here are some general guidelines for color codes:

•             Blue is associated with stability, trust, and confidence. It is an excellent color for credit card website or other sites needing to inspire confidence.
•             Black represents elegance, wealth, sophistication, and mystery.
•             White symbolizes peace, purity, and simplicity.
•             Orange represents warmth, enthusiasm, or warning.
•             Red is associated with strength, power, love, and desire.
•             Green can represent nature, health, vigor, and community.
•             Yellow is often associated with brightness, happiness, idealism, and hope.

Text colors

Text is harder to read on a monitor than on paper so the choice of background and font colors is supremely important. Readability of text is the primary concern. If the text is light colored, then the background must be dark and vice versa. White and black are the most common combination and red and blue are useful for link and highlighted text. Contrast is important for making text readable, so avoid dark backgrounds with text of too similar a tone.

Browser-safe colors

A common problem when attempting to build a web design around an established set of logo colors is that Pantone colors do not always reproduce accurately in browsers. When a non-browser safe color appears in a website, browsers will adapt by shifting the color. Some computers with aging graphics hardware may also fail to display colors correctly.

The best way to avoid this issue is to stick to the “browser-safe palette” of 256 or 216 colors (for really conservative designers). These colors are designed to be accurately displayed in all browser and hardware environments. While some designers (and clients) may find this limiting, it is the only way to ensure that a site is always viewed at its best. By limiting colors this way, designers can ensure that file sizes are smaller and that the site will load quickly.

Color psychology

Designers of all stripes know that colors can be organized into groups based on the feel they give a viewer. They fall into three basic categories, and sites incorporating colors from each group can have a more balanced feel.


Thursday, 16 November 2017

Everything You Need to Know on Social Media for Small Business

You’ve launched your website, opened your doors and created a Facebook Page for your new small business, but what’s next? It’s time to get people aware of your brand and what better way than social media?
There’s a reason why roughly 94% of small businesses use social media as a marketing tool, but doing it effectively is a whole other subject. Paid ads, organic reach and posting relevant content across your social media channels is not the easiest thing do while running a small business. However, there are ways to rule the digital space, even as a mom and pop.
Find Your Core Social Networks
A big mistake small businesses encounter is trying to tackle every social channel at once. We love your eagerness, but let’s face it–you have to take your time and invest in a few of the essentials first. Unsure what networks are right for you? We’ve got you covered with our small business guides for each main network.
Facebook for Small Business
The first channel nearly every small business jumps to is Facebook. And that’s OK. With over a billion daily active users, you have one of the largest pools to generate an audience. However, you want to be strategic with Facebook especially when it comes to paid and organic content, targeting your audience and engaging your followers. Read more on how to get started with Facebook.
Instagram for Small Business
While other social channels are staples to marketing, the fastest growing network is Instagram. Brands are rushing to Instagram to visually showcase their product or service to younger audiences. But do you fully know your Instagram demographics, what features users prefer or how to monitor hashtags? This guide outlines everything you need to know as a small business using Instagram.
Twitter for Small Business
Many smaller brands are still unsure of their need for Twitter or fear it will take too much time to manage. Let us break the common myths of Twitter for small business and show you how to scale the unscalable in this guide. Learn how to use Twitter to promote, communicate and engage on a small scale that’s perfect for your business.
Understanding the Value & Cost of Social Media
Figuring out the value of social is no easy task, which makes it hard for brands with little to spend know how much it costs to market or advertise. Your marketing and advertising department might just be you, so catch up on the best practices to learning the value and cost of social media.
How to Make the Most of Your Social Media Budget
If you’re trying to plan your social media spend, you’re heading in the right direction. But sometimes, smaller businesses are unsure how to make the most of their budget. While it’s good to be cautious with your budget, it’s just as helpful to know where you can spend. Read this guide to get the most out of your social media budget.
How to Measure the Value of Social Media
What is the value of a like or comment to your business? How much return do you earn from Retweets or mentions on Instagram? These are tricky questions to ask, but there is value to your business when you focus on traffic, awareness and leads within your social marketing strategy.
Ultimate Guide to Measuring Social Media ROI
One of the biggest struggles for businesses of all sizes is to measure social media ROI. But it’s not as impossible as you think. You simply need to look in the right places and understand what you’re tracking the value it brings specifically to your company. Learn more about social media ROI in this helpful guide.

Tactics To Improve Search Engine Rankings

SEO is a big topic and many web site owners are overwhelmed, feeling like it’s simply too much to handle, getting “fire hosed” with information from consultants. As a result, they look for bite sized chunks of information – tactics. Sometimes these individual tactics can make a dent in the problem, but not considering the overall picture including current site, competition, online marketplace, resources, ongoing marketing and analytics can result in lost opportunity and bottom line lost revenue.
The smart answer to the question about “top three SEO tactics” to focus on starts with an evaluation of the site in question to see if there are any immediate, high impact opportunities such as unblocking search engine spiders from crawling the site or assessing the content management system and any other major possible barriers to getting crawled and included.
Assuming those questions are solved and the market for the web site is well understood, the next thing is to make sure the site content is targeting the right keywords. Understanding what potential customers are looking for and applying that insight with a content creation and promotion strategy is instrumental for optimal search engine visibility.
The second thing to do is to apply the keyword research you’ve done to the web site and content being published to the web.  Make sure each web page contains unique, descriptive text using relevant and popular keywords. The key on-page influences of keywords on search engine rankings include:
* Keywords in the title tag
* Keywords in text links to your web pages from other relevant web sites
* Keywords in the copy of your web pages
* Keywords used in links between pages of your site

The last thing I’d recommend (I guess this is 4, not 3 tips) is to tell other sites related to your topic about your site and attract links. The bottom line recommendation with link building is to create content worth linking to. But then you need to tell other web sites about it or they won’t know to link to you. This is especially true with new web sites.
Be a resource for your industry and create content of value to potential customers to make the job of finding, evaluating and buying your products/services easier.  It’s also important to create the kind of content that other influential web sites and blogs will want to link to.
The top 3 or 4 things to focus on for improved search visibility (in my opinion) are:
1.            Make sure search engines have no difficulty in finding and understanding your web site
2.            Research the keywords that are most meaningful for your customers
3.            Use those keywords in your content
4.            Create content and promote content that makes it easy for customers to buy and easy for influential to link to your resources


White Hat SEO And Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies used to get higher search rankings, and breaking search engine rules. Black hat SEO focuses on only search engines and not so much a human audience. Black hat SEO is typically used by those who are looking for a quick return on their site, rather than a long-term investment on their site. Some techniques used in black hat SEO include: keyword stuffing, link farming, hidden texts and links, and blog content spamming. Consequences of black hat SEO can possibly result in your site being banned from a search engine and de-indexed as a penalization for using unethical techniques.
White hat SEO refers to the use of techniques and strategies that target a human audience opposed to a search engine. Techniques that are typically used in white hat SEO include using keywords, and keyword analysis, doing research, rewriting meta tags in order for them to be more relevant, backlinking, link building as well as writing content for human readers. Those who use white hat SEO expect to make a long-term investment on their website, as the results last a long time.
Effectiveness of white hat vs black hat SEO
SEO is part science, part art. There is a wide range of opinion[1][2] in the SEO practitioner community regarding the effectiveness of white hat vs black hat techniques. Most agree that white hat techniques take longer to improve search rankings.
Consequences of Black hat vs White hat SEO
Even though quick results make black hat SEO tempting, it can get your site banned (de-indexed) or heavily penalized for use of unethical practices. It is widely believed that the risk is not worthwhile for websites that plan to be operational over the long haul. Moreover black hat SEO methods give only short term results. White hat SEO can get your site ranked higher by use of ethical techniques, good content, appropriate keywords and a combination of smart marketing angles providing long lasting results.
Panda
Google's Panda update rewards websites that have high-quality content. After this algorithm update, low-quality pages on the site affected not just the ranking for those pages but for the entire website.
Penguin
Google's Penguin update was targeted specifically at black hat SEO techniques using which some website owners had accumulated thousands of links from "link farms". Thousands of such websites were penalized due to the Penguin update. Webmasters were encouraged to remove bad links pointing to their site. In some cases, they were able to do so successfully but often webmasters cannot control who links to them.
Negative SEO
Because you cannot control who links to your site, it's possible for a competitor to pay link farms to point "bad links" to your website from poor-quality sites. Google's algorithms could penalize you for these links, which would hurt your search engine rankings. Bing has a tool that lets webmasters disavow bad links pointing to their website but Google does not. Some analysts have criticized Google for letting their algorithm be gamed with negative SEO.


Thursday, 9 November 2017

Adwords Tips & Tricks

There have been big changes to organic and paid search over the last couple years. Google removed the siderail advertisements from their search results and added a 4th paid advertisement spot to the top of the search results. This extra ad spot, more use of search features like local packs and featured snippets has lead to a massive decline in the amount of traffic going to organic results. As a result, paid search is more important than ever. We manage millions of dollars in ad spend, and we know all the secrets to get the most out of Adwords. Here are 5 tips that will save you money and reach your target customer.
1. Never Use Broad Match
The default match type in Adwords is broad match, and it is the only match type that you should NEVER use. It’s bold, italic, and caps for a reason. Don’t do it. With a limited budget, it is important to have your targeting tight to reach people who are your core customers, and broad match will not do that. You should start with broad match modified which means adding + after the words in your keyword phrases. This will make your targeting tighter.
2. Use Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are an important way to further avoid bad clicks and wasted budget. Negative keywords tell Google that if a specific word shows up in someone’s search query that matches your keywords, you don’t want it to show.
Let’s say you’re a New York City locksmith, and you are bidding on the keyword NYC+ Locksmith+. (see that broad match modified?) If someone types in “NYC locksmith school” or “NYC locksmith training”, your ad will show. And they aren’t potential customers, so when they click on your ad, you’re wasting money. By adding “school” and “training” to your negative keywords, your ad will not show for searches that contain those terms. You should come up with a long list of negative keywords, so you’re only paying for ads that could generate business, and you should check your search terms report regularly to find new negative keywords.
3. Use Your Search Terms Report
This is one of your most important tools when it comes to refining your Adwords campaigns. It shows you exactly what people searched for when they clicked on your ad. Your keyword may be NYC+ Locksmith+ but the person could have searched for “the best NYC locksmith there ever was” and then clicked on your ad. It is important to go through your search terms report regularly to find new negative terms as well as specific search terms you might want to target directly.
4. Use Geo-Targeting
This whole post is all about saving you money and reaching the right customers. And if you’re a locksmith in New York City, you don’t want people in California seeing your ads. Google offers very advanced geo-targeting options, so you can limit who sees your advertisements to people who are located near where you are. You can target by city, state, zip code, and distance away from your location among others. Because you want to target only your most likely customers, You should keep your geo-targeting tight. If you’re not getting enough traffic, you can always expand your targeting later.
5. Small Ad Groups with High Lexical Similarity
Google wants your ads to be as relevant as possible to what people are searching for. To continue with our Locksmith example, let’s say you work in Brooklyn as well as Manhattan. You should create an ad group with your Brooklyn locksmith keywords and then another ad group with your Manhattan locksmith keywords. This way, you can create ads that are targeted to people who are looking for a locksmith in Brooklyn and then create ads that are targeted to people who are looking for a locksmith in Manhattan. This will improve your Quality Score which means you’ll pay less for your clicks and have a higher click through rate.

Basics Of Online Reputation Management Part – I

If you are in business, you already know reputation management is vital to your success. When everything is going your way and the press is positive, life is good. When it is not, well… You may have heard the saying “Nothing is so good that someone somewhere will not like it.” Bad reviews, an angry customer, even a typo can affect your reputation—and your bottom line—in a negative way. Because of that, when it comes to online reputation management, your motto should be “Expect nothing. Be ready for anything.”
While you are doing that, be sure your marketing and social media strategies secure the best-possible reputation for your company on a consistent basis. These fundamentals of online reputation management focus first on day-to-day practices, followed by the basics of crisis management.
Establish and Own Your Online Reputation
Control your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) with best practices in SEO.
•             Maintain as much property as possible on the first page for all your keywords.  This is where we find having a comprehensive online strategy in place can be the most helpful.  This can include press releases, your own site pages, your blog, and potentially other extensions to your online brand.
•             Keep your eyes focused on great online communication while also staying abreast of ever-changing search engine algorithms. We have learned that time and again the strategies that work the best are just solid marketing communications versus trying to leverage the latest tactic.  The long-term strategies are the ones that always win out.
•             These trends can help you adjust your strategy to accommodate your consumers’ wants and needs.
•             Stay Socially Active Online.  Engagement is key. Promote your brand with a constant and constantly growing online presence. Use a blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and press releases to engage consumers with regular updates and timely responses to your followers on all social media platforms.
•             Be creative in your approach for maximum engagement.  This is probably the most difficult part of the entire strategy because you really have to dig deep to determine what is going to work best for you and your brand.  What works for a retail business is probably not going to work for a B2B focused business.  There are some common themes that you may want to consider.  Host contests. Encourage followers to share videos or photos that demonstrate how they used your product and how it worked for them. Consider event sponsorship and partnerships worth promoting. Most importantly, an active blog does wonders to perk up a static website.
•             The blog’s domain name should reflect your brand. Content should provide professional, brand consistent information about your company and its products, trends in the industry, success stories and available support. Incorporate videos and images into your website and social media, and make your topics relevant to trending news whenever possible.
•             Maintain a Dynamic PR Strategy
•             “Unique” gets noticed. Fresh, informative content on a consistent basis is key to keeping your online reputation heading in a positive direction. Revisit your PR and social media plans on a regular basis, using reliable analytics to adjust your strategy when necessary. Always “Expect nothing. Be ready for anything.”
•             Create a Crisis Strategy
•             Do not wait for the bottom to drop out before outlining a strategy to handle issues with the potential to damage your reputation. Your first line of defense is to minimize the damage.
•             Create a supportive and encouraging environment for your employees. They will respond by providing good customer service. Happy, thriving employees will support your brand at the most critical moment—when customer meets company. It is wise to train your team in the use of social media tools, the benefits of social media and the caution required when responding on any social media outlet.
•             Monitor Website and Social Media Activity Around the Clock
Technology can fail at any time, in any capacity. It is wise to have a back-up system that alerts you to website failure and viruses as well as social media glitches. When something occurs that affects your
community’s ability to access information, you need to respond quickly and effectively.
•             As you can imagine, technology issues are often much easier to repair than negative perceptions of your company and product.
•             Respond to Negative Issues Immediately – Except When…
•             You must respond immediately with a message, even if it is simply to acknowledge there is a problem and you are on the job. Make your employees aware when you change the message so they can respond
accurately. Apologize for the inconvenience, error or whatever caused the issue. At this point, it is all about consistent, clear and encouraging communication.
•             There are times though when responding will only aggravate an already tense social media situation so carefully consider your response or if you should even respond.  For example, one client received a scathing comment to a video they posted.  The commenter pointed out how the video showed what appeared to be immigrants in the video working on an assembly line.  The commenter said that the company was hiring illegals (a statement that was completely untrue) to work on the assembly lines.  The internal legal team told the company not to respond, but the core company stakeholders who are all second generation immigrants used this comment as an opportunity to set the record straight and also talk about how the company and brand are a living showcase of the “American Dream”.  This response created a groundswell of positive company support.
•             What can frustrate some brand managers is when no response is the best response especially when it involves legal issues or personal attacks.  In these situations, a direct (non-social media) response might be the most productive.  One expert social media person mentioned to us that you always have to ask if your response is going to inflame or resolve the issue.  If your response might inflame the issue you may want to consider delaying the response to see whether you are dealing with an isolated issue or a larger issue that must be addressed.
•             Use social media to support your response to these issues, letting your followers and potential customers know everything is back on track and what you have done to avoid the problem in the future. Sounds like you are ready for anything!

Social Media Optimization For Small Businesses

Social media optimization for small business. What can it accomplish? What exactly can social media optimization (SMO) do for you? The short answer is “a lot.” The longer answer is a little more involved, but don’t worry, we’ve broken it down into a few key areas that all local, referral-based small businesses should care about.
Social media optimization can …
Enhance your referrals. The cornerstone of any healthy small business is a strong referral pipeline. Some people think that word-of-mouth referrals and online social networking are two completely different things. Not true. They are absolutely connected. People’s online social interaction is often an extension of their real-world interaction – a faster, 24/7 way of communicating with people in their personal and professional networks. So if you run a referral-based business, you need to be encouraging those referrals through social media. A good SMO plan can supercharge your referrals by strategically connecting your business, your customers, and hundreds (or thousands) of potential new customers in their networks.
Personalize your outreach. Unless you run a ubiquitous franchise store, your business has a unique identity. That identity has value, and it offers great opportunities for online promotion and SMO. This is particularly true for a business with a recognized personality as part of its identity – for example, a lawyer, a dentist, a physical therapist, a photographer, a surgeon. Don’t lose that identity in impersonal mass marketing. Today, effective outreach is all about personalizing communications to individuals. Social media optimization helps you maintain your personal connection to your customer base. It’s all about talking with your customers instead of shouting messages at them.
Show up in personalized searches. When people search for a business online, the connections of their social networks strongly influence the results. The general term for this is “social search,” and it’s part of the search engines’ increasing personalization of search results. Basically, search engines want to give you the most personally relevant search results for every query, so they will tap into your social connections to personalize results based on the people, places, and businesses to which you are connected. With Google+ becoming a bigger force, and with Facebook’s new Graph Search feature, the principles of social search have never been more important. It’s almost as if these social media giants want to get into the business of supplying you with personal referrals (actually, that is exactly what they are doing). And as we discussed above, social media and personal referrals work hand in hand. Ask your SMO company how to craft an online presence that connects you to more people in more meaningful ways.
Focus your local search. Online search is not only personalized, it’s localized. Part of search engines’ emphasis on personalized results is an emphasis on localized results. And guess what; it’s also tied to your social media connections. When possible, they combine a localized search result with a personalized result that takes into account social media connections. So you get a search result that ties into your current location and your social media connections. Google+ Local is a big factor in how companies rank and appear in results. Facebook is becoming a bigger player in this area with some relatively recent changes to how their business pages appear on mobile devices. If you’re using Facebook on your mobile device, and you search for a local coffee shop, they want to show you suggestions that are not only near your current location, but also “liked” by your Facebook friends. It’s like a local giving you a recommendation.
Beyond the social side, there are various local search listings and directories that can help enhance your local search results. A good online marketing company with both SEO and social media knowledge can help you optimize your presence both on the social and local listing side. If you run a business with a physical location, you really want to do this.
Communicate with customers on their terms. Want a wider referral base? Want to enhance your customer service? Try engaging customers in the spaces that they prefer. Businesses that show flexibility in how they interact with their customers are generally perceived as being more customer service oriented. If your customers are commenting about your business on LinkedIn, get on there and interact. If you can respond to customer service issues immediately via Twitter, then do it. Particularly when it comes to complaints, many people just want to be heard, and to know that you are trying to help them. That goes a long, long way in improving the public perception of your business. And if you’re blessed with customers who want to sing your praises on social media, then  you’re sitting on a potential 24 karat referral source. Thank that person, interact with her, connect her to more of your network. The trick, especially for small businesses, is managing all of this without spending every second on social media. Don’t worry, there are services out there that can help with this day-to-day social media management for very reasonable rates. A good SMO company should be able to provide these services or refer out for them.
Boost your call to action. Is your website converting prospects into new customers, or is it an online black hole? If it’s not a good conversion tool, then the first thing you need to do is fix your calls to action. Make sure your home page and other key pages tell your visitors exactly how you can help them, and what action they should take to receive that help. Then you can tie these calls to action to a coordinated social media campaign that expands your reach to a much wider audience. Want to assess how this social media outreach is working? Create landing pages for specific campaigns and/or channel traffic from specific social media campaigns to certain pages on your site so you can track the engagement. After all, the ultimate point of all this outreach and communication is to generate more business, right? And yes, you guessed it, a good SMO plan not only drives more traffic to your website, it optimizes your site to increase your conversions.

Thursday, 2 November 2017

Drupal - Advantages And Disadvantages

The name Drupal was adjusted from the Dutch word ‘druppel’, or water droplet, and was named accidentally by Dutch creator Dries Buytaert when he misspelled the Dutch word for village ‘dorp’ while checking a domain name. Upon further consideration Buytaert thought his misspelling of Drupal simply sounded better, and kept it—giving us the name Drupal. Since its initial inception as a message board Drupal has come a long way as the accidentalness stopped there.

Drupal has since developed into one of the most complex open-source content management systems (CMS) on the market and is represented by an array of top notch sites, including: The Economist, Examiner.com, The White House, Popular Science, Harvard, MIT, Ubuntu, Sony Music and more. Drupal now displays contents in 182 languages by over 538,813people in 228 countries.

Advantages:
All the Basic Features you need:

Drupal Core is their standard release of features, which includes: user account registration and maintenance, RSS-Feeds, menu management, system administration and page layout customization. These basic features can be used to create simple sites, single or multi user blogs, brochureware, forums, community websites and more.

Great Building Tools and Templates

Drupal offers you the basic building blocks of websites in a module-styled format where content and rules can be created quickly. Through the use of templates and themes there is no need to start from scratch—no matter if you are building a simple or complex site. Pre-defined configurations of site features help users build fairly complex sites rapidly, allowing them to use their time to build in extra features.

Flexible Yet Robust Content Creation

Drupal’s bread and butter is in its content creation. Drupal allows its users the flexibility to create and manage different content types including: video, polls, user management, text, blog, podcasts, real-time stats, and revision controls.

Advanced Administrator Controls

Administrators have the options of setting up new user accounts and user permissions. These permissions can be designated per role or group and offer fine-tooth comb-style, allowing users to help create your content for you. Drupal’s new release of version 7 allows for easier administration and greater controls.

Create Your Own Dynamic Designs

While Drupal offers themes and templates that are easily recognizable to the public many users like to use its design tools to create their own dynamic designs. The system’s presentation layers allows for easily usable and interactive experiences.

Organize Content Easily

One of the difficult parts of many CMS tools is the ability organize your content for later use and recall. Drupal allows you to categorize your content through path urls, create custom lists, associate content and create defaults. This structure helps you to organize, structure, search, find and reuse content.

More Plugins than you can Shake a Stick at

Drupal has over 7,000 plugins and extensions available to boost your building capacities. As the program is open source you can both use plugins and create your own, adding to the abilities of the Drupal platform. 

Allow your Users to Collaborate with you

Drupal is commonly mistaken for a blogging platform due to its incredible ability to publish socially. Drupal-based sites engage users to contribute while giving the administrator the ability to create, view, publish, administer and otherwise control the social content published to the site.

Tools that make it Easy to Connect with your Audience

The most important part of a site is connecting it to users, other sites, social networks, and search engines-- and Drupal makes this simple. Through increased network integration, feeds, search engine optimization tools, aggregation and other connecting tools, Drupal helps connect you to your viewers.
Disadvantages:

Usability

Drupal is not the most user-friendly platform and it has a high learning curve. Platforms like WordPress and Joomla are significantly easier to use, although they don’t offer the power and options that Drupal does. The good news though is that the new release of Drupal 7 is addressing some of the usability concerns and should be an easier adaptation for newer administrators.

Backwards Compatibility

Drupal is a relatively new system and is not backwards compatible with other software so if you have other content, systems and programs in place that you have become accustomed to then Drupal might not be the system for you.

Performance

In terms of loading and scalability Drupal is one stroke behind that of WordPress. The slow loading is simply because of the breadth of tools and capabilities. If you have a slower computer, or are simply a microwave generation kid and need things to work quickly then consider a zippier platform. Advanced users have however found ways around its problematic performance indicators, but with the big learning curve this takes a significant amount of time.

Improve Your Online Reputation

Monitoring your reputation online is similar in many ways to monitoring what is said about you offline, with one major difference: news (good or bad) can spread like wild fire online. What starts today as a rant from a disgruntled customer could tomorrow have spread round the internet leaving your brand in tatters.
The following strategies can help you to exert a bit more control over what is being said about you online:
1. A company's brand and reputation will live or die by what is said about it online. By following a few simple rules you can ensure that your company will fly. Failing to track and react to what is being said about you online could be fatal for your company.
Track everything said about you online.
The first step is to track all mentions of you, your brand, your products and your company. There are numerous options, including our very own reputation monitor.
2. Build relationships - say thank you
For each positive comment you find online take the time to say thank you. Make your "thank you" real, personal and honest and people will appreciate it. The more conversations you can have with people around the internet the better. Building relationships and building your network is an amazingly positive side effect of improving your reputation online.
3. Participate in relevant online communities
Building your profile in online communities can be an incredible way to get your name known and to build a reputation. The golden rule is to go all out to help other people. If you are only in it for personal gain then you will not get any benefit from it.
4. Give away the farm
There is plenty of debate about how much information you should give away for free. Talking purely from a reputation standpoint, the more quality advice you can give away the more you will build your reputation online. Businesses have been built based on giving away information.
5. Track what is being said.
Failure to track what is being said about you online is asking for trouble. If you don't know what is being said, you can't respond, and if you don't respond and help to solve the problem the next thing you know is that the problem is out of all control and you will lose business because of it.
6. Say you are sorry.
When something negative about your company happens, take the time to say you are sorry - make sure it isn't a false apology.
Take the time to speak to them, if you can speak to the person on the phone do so. It is likely to have the best response. If you fail to speak to them directly try to send an email or leave a comment or anything, just make contact. Be very careful any time you put something into writing as it can easily be miss-interpreted.
7. Put the facts online
Quite often, negative online press stems from confusions or incorrect facts. You can often clear up confusions and incorrect facts through dialogue with the appropriate people, but in serious cases, where many people are getting confused, you may well want to make your side of the story available on your website.
8. Control the search engine results
Whilst the stat above about people's behaviour when faced with negative search engine results is based on British Consumers I suspect the story is similar around the world. One way of staying in control of the message people receive when they search for your company is to proactively seek to tell your story in the search engine results.
9 Stay ethical in your reputation management
Whatever the issue that you are trying to deal with (whether real or perceived, ethical or unethical), it is important to do no further harm with your attempts to manage your reputation. This is not about "getting things deleted from Google" or covering up bad things you have done. It's about presenting yourself and your company in the best possible light - almost every company needs some marketing, after all.
10 Listen to feedback
If you can take on board suggestions and criticisms from your customers and the wider community, you are a long way towards doing the best you can. In this mode, we'd like to invite comments and suggestions from you guys. Let us know what you think we've missed.

Benefits Of Using Drupal CMS

Drupal is an open source content management platform (CMS) which powers millions of websites and applications. There is no proprietary code, it's fully extensible and flexible and you have access to an active developer community worldwide. There's a huge market of Distributions, Themes and Modules available for Drupal which can help you quicky build and customise your next web project.
Here are the top 10 benefits of Drupal CMS:
1.            Rapid and Agile Web 2.0 Development is at the heart of Drupal. Out of the box, you have clean mark-up code, page and blog publishing, content management, search, polls, forums, user login modules and more. Development time is reduced from weeks to days.
2.            Thousands of free Modules (16,000+) are available in the community to help you quickly add specific features to your website. From CRM, Security, Social Media to SEO, Performance, Backup/Migrate and more. Think of modules as Lego Blocks -  quickly add them to build your online property.
3.            A huge community of theme designers have created feature-rich templates to quickly help you realise your website's vision. Aesthetics, fonts, responsive layouts, stock graphics, adjustable colour schemes and layout editors make working with 3rd party themes a breeze. You can always find one to suit your brand identity. Or simply build your own.
4.            Drupal CMS is massively scalable. You can start with 5 pages and grow to 5000 without ever needing to change anything. Performance and Security parameters can easily be managed from the Admin console. Some of the world's high traffic sites like Grammys, White House, Nascar all run on Drupal.
5.            It's 100% free. As open source software, you're not locked down with licenses, recurring fees or anything proprietary. Just install the CMS files on your server and you're good to go.
6.            Drupal CMS is known for its rock solid security, dependability and constant security patches and updates. Safeguarding you from any online code exploits.
7.            Clean code, powerful modules and modern web publishing make Drupal a very SEO Friendly CMS. There are of course a wide range of 3rd party SEO modules you can plug in to Drupal to take your SEO initiatives to the next level. (I'll publish a separate post on some Drupal SEO modules you can deploy in your project)
8.            Adding eCommerce modules and integrating payment gateways is a breeze with Drupal thanks to a lot of open APIs and Modules. There are also complete eCommerce ready drupal distributions available which have everything out of the box! From payment gateway, logistics handling, shopping carts to customer CRM, messaging and much more. 'Commerce Kickstart' is a good example.
9.            Powerful content creation and collaboration is at the heart of Drupal. Easily create and publish content, set user roles and permissions, choose who can view/edit/share content and more. You're in total control.
10.          Easily connect with the web's leading 3rd party services and APIs to extend your Drupal Website. Social networking integration is also widely supported to help you engage with a wider audience. Drupal also offers your site easy ways to interact with external media and file services.