SEOs And Bloggers - What To Say When Someone Asks What You Do lol

As a webmaster or an SEO, you might find it's fairly hard to define what you do, and that it's even more difficult to explain it to others. Whenever I'm in a new group of people and the discussion turns to 'what we do' I find myself somewhat anxious about having my turn. Sure, I do SEO and run a website, but does anyone really know what that entails? And will they think I'm actually just a bum?

More to the point, is it even really an accurate description of what I do? Sure I am a webmaster, and I do do SEO, but that's far from being the whole story. Here are some of the solutions I've come up with…

'I Work Online' 

This one is vague enough that it's always going to be true, no matter what percentage of your time is spent selling affiliate products/doing SEO/creating digital art etc. The downside though is that it's also vague enough to raise suspicion. This is the response that caused my Grandma to promise me that what I did 'wasn't illegal'…

'I'm a Writer'

Technically you do a lot of writing as a webmaster/SEO, so why not just call it what it is? This is perhaps the most accurate way to describe what you do for the biggest majority of your time, so in that regard it's the best response. Of course though people will then ask what magazine you write for, you will then say 'I write for websites' and they will then ask the age-old question: 'how does that make any money?'.

'I Run a Website'

This sounds like a legitimate job, and oddly most people won't ask too many questions about how it makes money (even though they don't understand when you say that you write for websites). It's a bit of an oversimplification and quite vague though.

One way to make this a bit better is to say 'I run a website on fitness' or 'I run a technology website'. That explains a bit more about what you're into, what you do, and the kind of person you are.

'I'm an Internet Marketer'

I would advise against this one. Sadly, too many black hat SEOs and 'social media gurus' that don't know what they're doing have given this term a bad name, meaning that people will generally assume that if you're an internet marketer, you're also as dodgy as they come. A shame, because as you know that's not really the case at all.

'I'm an Entrepreneur'

This is the honest truth. I mean most of us SEOs will also sell a few eBooks on Kindle, have some apps on the app store, have a website offering proof reading services, resell blank CDs… and when you look at this objectively it does fit the description of what it is to be an entrepreneur. There's only one slight downside to this one, and that's that it sounds terribly arrogant and self involved. Look, we can't help it if our job is really cool okay?

Tips & tricks to creating a gorgeous travel website

Sadly, how “gorgeous” your travel website looks is not going to rank it up through the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) on Google, but it will go some way to helping you to keep people on your website when they arrive, and may even help you to save a few holidays.

Take a look at your website from an outside perspective

Your first thought is going to be that you want to save money, but your second thought is that you are going to want value for money. For this reason, you should not sell your holidays on price. The price should be an after-thought, for after the user has decided that he/she wants to go on your holiday.

Make a list of the mistakes your competition are making

You can rest assured that your website is littered with mistakes. If that were not the case than you would not be looking at a website article for improving your travel website. However, you can also rest assured that your competitors also have travel websites that are littered with mistakes too.

You need to make a point of visiting your many, many competitor sites and listing down all of the mistakes that they have made. From things such as having images that are too dark or inappropriate images for what they are selling. Look for slow loading times or slow render times, and consider how easy it is to jump from page to page. Are the prices highlighted over the substance, etc? List all of the mistakes that you see and routinely eliminate them from your website.

Have the background match the location

This is a fairly easy trick that many travel websites ignore. It takes a little bit more web building, but is good for creating the right tone and atmosphere. For example, pages dedicated to Alaska or Greenland should have wintry scenes and a decoration on the background of the website. Similar tricks could be used for places such as Corfu or Brazil.

Lots of images of various places

Most holidays are sold on the back of the images that people see when they look at your website. This is why you need to include a lot of images on your website in order to really sell the holiday. It is also going to make your website appear more friendly and “gorgeous.”

Keep some of the images more personal

One mistake that travel websites make is having their websites too impersonal. They show all the locations, pan shots, sky shots, but fail to show people the smaller and more personal aspects. The best that most travel websites will do is show a few pictures of the hotel. But, people want to see what the holiday destination looks like from the ground level. They want to see how the beach looks when you have your back to the water. They want to see the side streets and people from the street level in a way that their own holiday photos are going to mimic.

Add in short video tours

This is a way of building on the idea above. You should show people how walking the streets and traveling around will look. They want to see the church across the water in Venice and the guinea pigs crossing the road in Peru. You should take a look at the videos that Disney World put out. They often have images from a high elevation, but they also have lots of shots of people walking around, of happy faces and happy encounters within their theme park. They do not show Mickey Mouse in a suit waving to a child because people are unaware that he is there.

Does your site lack substance?

There needs to be as much information as possible, but this does not mean create a user guide. That sort of thing (such as airport advice, money advice, etc), comes as an after sales product. What you need to do is show people what it would be like to be there right now. Do everything you can to make it very easy to picture yourself in that specific location.

Copy the things that work on your competitors’ websites

As you make your list of things that work from your competitors’ websites, you should also look for page/decorative elements that do work. Consider stealing their ideas in order to apply them to your own website. It may be anything from a web page theme to a full web page programmatic element.

About the author:  Kate Funk is a professional blogger and writer at www.speaken.net. She specializes in topics of interest to techno geeks and networking enthusiasts.

Business growth With Online Marketing

Most of the businesses reach a point in their growth where they want to expand and establish themselves as a bigger body. With the tools and applications that internet is providing, it is rapidly changing the ways in which business is carried out online. All the online media evolves by bringing in changes in marketing and behavior practices carried out online. To keep up with these continuous changes might be a little difficult for small sized and medium sized business’.

Trends in Online Marketing:

Mobile Commerce:
As the mobile and internet technology converge it is now possible for many consumers to access various websites, buy and pay for many items on their mobiles itself. Most of the manufacturers are now including QR codes to product packaging as they are looking forward to increase their mobile sales. You need to keep in mind that your company website is optimized so that it is easy for users to view it from the mobile phones if they would like to captivate the ever increasing mobile consumer market.

Social Marketing:
Social media platforms are the most forms of inexpensive ways for you to promote your business in the market. Their viral capabilities give you a lot of exposure giving you the opportunity to serve your existing customers and get in touch with your potential customers. While your presence in various networking sites will boost your business growth, some of them will have to focus primarily focus on few yet powerful networking sites like Google Plus and Facebook. Facebook now has more than 700 million users. It is predicted that it might have about a billion people by the end of 2013. Do you know that this social networking goliath is considered as the world’s 3rd populated country? So, I guess you must be able to make out how you can promote your services on such a large platform as this. On the other hand, Google plus has various marketing tools for building reputation, advertisement as an authority. It also enjoys the support of the Search Engine Herculean Google.

Rise of Social Consumers:
Online consumers these days are very much occupied in marketing campaigns, social media popularity, making decisions for purchasing items based on positive feedback from consumers. Search engines are now using the feedback from consumers of various products as search results display. Thereby, managing your brand reputation online has become even more important these days.

Online marketing strategy:

Market Research:
Having passion alone will not fetch you success in online business. You need to know if there is a market which needs the services and products you would like to offer. You need to study the market. Recognize and then target a section of the market. You will need to learn everything about your potential clients or consumers i.e., their needs and their language. Understanding the market and the potential customers clearly is fundamental for content creation and smart keyword research.

Goal Setting:
You won’t know where to head to if you don’t know where to get to. Evaluate your business’ current status, what it has accomplished till date and what should its goals be. Your business goals should be consistent with your website. You can increase conversions as you improve your sales copy and landing pages to encourage many to purchase your websites services and products. You can increase your leads by using list building methods like publishing useful content, adding a squeeze page or an email capture form or by offering freebies for email address. You can earn income by targeting better customers or by increasing prices.

Content development and content strategy:
Posting valuable content with the right keyword placement and keyword density promotes your site by flooding in visitors and the existing ones returning to your site. Quality content advances linking and sharing of the content, it stimulates follows, likes, comments and +1’s which is a crucial factor to gain search engine rankings.  An effectual content strategy when implemented consistently is liable to boost a website’s immunity against sudden alteration in search engines algorithms.

Keyword Research:
Including the appropriate keywords in websites’ text content and technical elements gains your website top search engine rankings and search engine visibility. Thereby, increasing traffic to your website. For example, if you are looking forward to start a PPI Claims Firm or a Cosmetics Firm, you will have to insert all the keywords related to it in your web content. This will surely help you boost traffic to your website.

Social Media strategy:
Generating quality backlinks to your website will also boost search rankings and traffic to your website. Social Media is useful for getting in touch with people who can share website content and create links to it and also for uncovering market problems and needs. Press releases can also help as most of them spend their time sharing, commenting and reading new articles they see on internet.

Coping with the accelerated advancements in online marketing might be a challenge. A proper digital marketing strategy must be very simple and easy to comprehend. It must be able to provide clear directions for the manger or owner to implement.

Written by: Joanna Luis. She has 2 years of experience in business in UK markets. She provides many suggestions for investors who were just beginners. In her free time, she writes articles related to business and finance. Presently, she is focusing on income support, a kind of income benefit and Online marketing trends.

What is a good interface?

When designing a website, the user interface should be one of your priorities. A well designed user interface means that content can be found quickly, and can be structured in such a way through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to load and run dynamically without slowing down the loading times of the pages. In this context, what are some of the different areas that you should be focusing on if you want to get the most out of a website interface for your next project?

Usability should always be the focus when designing an interface, as should functionality so that a page is coded as cleanly as possible for loading. Some of the basic principles of web design, which can include using negative or white space, CSS styling for elements to increase visual style without loading up HTTP requests, and simple JavaScript to ensure that the user experience is as smooth as possible.

Good interfaces can also be customisable, whereby users have the option to adjust colour schemes, hide some content, or change the language of a page without having to rely on external browser support. Integrating interactive features and unobtrusive help buttons and chat windows can also help a page to be easily navigated without having to overload a user with extra tabs and pop-up windows.

Taking a generally minimalist approach to a website’s interface can make it much easier to future proof your basic layout; sketching out what should be on each page before coding can similarly allow you to avoid anything more than the most essential content to be included. A site map can be used to keep content clearly organised if it’s not already marked out on a page. CSS3 properties used with HMTL can also be useful if you want to increase loading times for buttons and styling elements.

Good user interfaces can be familiar without having to be bland or template generated. Remember that users will likely be viewing a site on multiple devices, so make the interface as clean as possible so that it can be negotiated on different screen sizes. Responsive design using CSS3 media queries can be particularly effective at allowing you to set minimum and maximum parameters for screen sizes and the layout of your site.

Ultimately, then, the best user interfaces are all about balancing minimalism with functionality, and creating a markup that’s not going to slow down transitions between pages. Web development companies like Webigence offer examples of how these kinds of clear but functional sites can be created, as well as how you can benefit from optimised images, responsive design, and pages that are suitable for viewing on mobile as well as desktop and laptop screens.

About the Author: Rosette has interests in multiple areas of web design and the best ways to improve site usability.She has been writing about web design for several years, and recommends using companies like Webigence if you want to receive a high quality custom development service for a new project.
 

5 Little SEO Tricks You Can Use To Improve Your Rankings

SEO is full of very competitive people who are all going after the same keywords as you, so what are you going to do about it? Are you going to do the exact same things as everyone else? Most people just write a 500 word article then try to build backlinks to it. There is definitely nothing wrong with that and you will see success, but sometimes you need to take your game to the next level.

There are certain SEO techniques people don't use. Maybe they don't know them, or maybe they don't think these techniques are needed. I want to share some of them with you today because if you start using them they can bring quick success. Sometimes doing something different is the only way you can compete with people who have years of SEO experience behind them.

Write longer articles

When you write a short article it means people don't get enough quality information out of it. You might be a great writer, but I don't think you have the power to blow someone away within a few hundred words. That is usually the same length as an opening paragraph in a novel or magazine article. If you want to increase your chances of getting better rankings you should write more words.

Sprinkle long-tails around

Because you're writing longer articles it also means you have the chance to sprinkle more long-tail keywords throughout them. This would happen naturally, but if you go into some keyword research software and look for a bunch of easy-to-rank-for keywords you will obviously see better results. Sometimes you can rank for them just by mentioning them inside an article, so your traffic will keep snowballing.

Manipulate link juice

Everyone should have powerful pages on their site that contain some of the best information they have available. These pages should be used to try ranking for some of the most powerful keywords in a particular niche. If you have these pages on your site you need to make sure lots of links are pointing to them from other pages because it will mean a lot of link juice flows through to them.

The rule of 200

You definitely can't expect everyone to link to your new articles until you've built up a great reputation. In the beginning you have to do everything yourself and this is what separates the winners from the losers. Email 200 people every time you publish an important article and let them know their readers would enjoy it. You won't get 200 links, but you might get 20.

Easier to find

We've already talked about powerful pages, but this is another technique you can use. Make sure they are easily visible on the homepage. It means more people will be able to find those pages and read them. Then they can share them on social media or in forums. Backlinks will be getting built at a faster rate and your rankings will increase because of it. Pages with a lot of traffic always become super successful.

About the Author: Jenny Wadlow is a freelance blogger. She recently wrote an article for Rank First, an SEO studio. She has a keen interest in the latest advancements in the field of digital media. To know more about her opinions follow her on Twitter @JennyWadlow.

5 Web Design Myths You Need To Forget About If You Want To Succeed

There are a lot of weird myths floating around the web design world at the minute and people are suffering because of it. Any professional designer will know the truth because they have a lot of experience, but most people who decide to throw up a website and start a business don't have a clue what they should be doing.

Maybe people are still preaching tactics from 5 years ago because they don't know any better. If you're not having great success it could be something to do with your design. I know that sounds crazy, but it's most definitely possible. Take a look at some of those horrible design myths you should forget about before they screw you over.

Nobody scrolls down anymore

This is something you should definitely be aware of because too many people are still stuffing things above the fold when it's not needed. When the internet was relatively new everyone would click from website to website without stopping to take a breath. Now that we're more experienced it's much more likely we will scroll down. Putting things above the fold still works, but you will definitely see success if something is below the fold too.

People will look for something

Nobody is going to spend a long time searching around your site looking for a sales page. They definitely won't attempt to find your opt-in box when you can't make it easy on them. I don't know why most people screw up their site's navigation because it's not easy to do. Just make sure all the important pages are within one or two clicks away from anywhere on the site. You should also stop labeling things with smart-ass names because nobody will know what page it's sending them to.

Design isn't important

Content is not king. Repeat that to yourself a hundred times and you might start to believe it. We all know content is very important, but design is important too. Some people will tell you design is more important. I'm not sure I would bother arguing over which one comes out at number one. You just need to make sure you always have a great design. You don't have to spend 10K on a professional designer at the moment, but don't go the cheap route and use a free theme. 

Learn what your readers want

There is no way in the world you will ever know what someone wants no matter how much you know them. You don't even know what your husband or wife wants when they land on a website. The only way you will ever know what someone wants is by testing it. If you perform A/B split tests you will be able to tweak your design in order to improve your conversion rate. Please test everything because guesswork will give you inferior results.

Everyone loves sexy features

I can't believe some websites still play music when you land on them. This is probably the best example of why sexy features suck, but there are a lot more. The main reason people decide to include these features is because they're not thinking straight. A website shouldn't be there to impress anyone. It should be there to make you more money, so stop being fancy and from now on you should try to keep everything as simple as possible.

Do you see where you're going wrong?

I hope you learned a lot today because it means you were doing things wrong. That is a good thing because once you make some changes to your site you will see an improvement right away. Go away and correct your mistakes then watch your profits improve overnight. 

About the Author: Michael Todd is a part of Pen Tech Consulting, a company offering SEO services and much more. Being tech savvy, he is well versed with the latest technological advancements. Click here to know more about him and his company.