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Web Design & Development

7 Ways You Can Maximise Your Content’s Impact On Your SEO

“Content. Content. Content.” That is the mantra you will often hear from any SEO expert who says that you need to create excellent content to achieve higher rankings in Google. They are right because when Google’s spiders go out into the internet and analyse your website, they are looking for content.

Content not only lets Google know what your website is about and, thus, what keywords you are trying to rank for, but it also contributes to the experience of your visitors. User experience is one of Google’s key differentiators, and it means that the better your content is, the more Google will reward you in the only way they can…better rankings.

One problem that some website owners have is they think simply publishing content is enough. It is not. Content needs to be optimised, not just for those who read it, but also for Google’s spiders. Thankfully, most content optimisations are easy to implement and better still, some of what you implement optimises your content for both the user and Google. Based on the marketing knowledge from the professionals at Oxygen Marketing, here are seven ways to enhance your content for SEO purposes.

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5 ways to boost your SEO score

Although SEO (search engine optimisation) is becoming increasingly competitive, it’s still more than possible to rank well for keywords that are relevant to your website. After a discussion with SEO expert, Peter Brittain, we found you need to make sure that you’re ticking all the boxes in order to help your SEO score.

With this in mind, I’ve looked closely at the hundreds of factors that search engine crawler bots take into account when analysing your website. From this, I’ve developed a list of the top 5 ways to boost your SEO score. These include:

  1. Focus On Creating High-Quality Content

The SEO experts at seosydneypro.com.au say one of the most important parts of search engine optimisation is creating high-quality authority content. You need to make sure that your content is relevant to the search terms that people are going to use to find your website.

Similarly, you need to make sure that your content is engaging and interesting. The longer people spend on your website – known as the “dwell time” – the better your SEO score will be.

  1. Make Sure You Use Outbound Links

While you’re creating content for your website you need to be thinking about ways to bring value to your readers. One of the best ways to do this is to add outbound links to respected, authority websites in your niche.

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Setting Up Your Basic Digital Marketing Campaign

There’s a quote from the 1989 movie ‘Field of Dreams’ that goes ‘Build it and they will come’. Unfortunately, that is the attitude many business owners have about their digital marketing once they have a website live and online. They are under the misconception that by having a website, flocks of customers are going to come knocking on their home page door. They couldn’t be more wrong.

This is not to say you shouldn’t have a website. Of course, you should. But its mere presence means nothing if you don’t back it up with a properly thought out digital marketing plan.

Your marketing plan doesn’t have to be particularly complicated, as there are few basic strategies which can be implemented to make the most of what the internet can offer in terms of traffic and potential customers.

The first action must be the creation of an email subscriber system. If you did nothing else this action alone can, not only be the foundation of your online business, it can be the catalyst for its success. There have been hundreds of online millionaires created purely down to the fact that they have a list of email subscribers, and they market to that list effectively.

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How to Write for Mobile So That Google Puts You Ahead in the SEO Game

There’s no escaping the fact that unless you have your website optimised for mobile devices, no matter how good the rest of your SEO tactics are, you are going to be playing catch up when it comes to rankings. Since mobile overtook desktop for online searches in 2015 Google has made it clear the emphasis of their search engine results would be moving towards mobile sites, which is something to consider when developing a digital marketing strategy.

With them producing their first mobile search indexing, it means if you have both a mobile and a desktop version of your online business website, (and if you don’t, why not?), the mobile version will be considered the primary site over the desktop version.

What these means that just as we have had to ensure that our content was everything it needed to be in terms of quality and keyword relevance on desktop, the mobile version needs to be likewise. The key here is that it’s not enough simply to make your website mobile compatible but that the content used is more appropriate for being consumed on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet.

We mentioned consumed there and this should really be the first thing to discuss because you need to be aware of how content is viewed or read on a mobile device. There is a tendency for a user to read or view content in a more evenly distributed way than eyes being drawn to the top-left or F-shaped reading pattern of desktop users.

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Unleash the Power of Search Engine Optimization to Improve your Website Rankings

One does not necessarily have to be a history buff to testify that search engines have been around for as long as the Internet in some form or the other.

With the introduction of a number of algorithms with different names, search engines have evolved so much that they are now considered as the backbone of the digital marketing landscape. Almost the entire web population relies on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to search for the information they are looking for to satisfy their needs.

It is generally believed that grabbing the top position on search engines is only possible through excessive keyword usage and link stuffing. However, search engines like Google are very smart for that – any illegal or inappropriate optimization tactics used on your website can backfire on you and it takes only a fraction of time for Google to pick on these and penalize your rankings, you need to stick to the recommended guidelines.

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Social Media Marketing – The New World of Promotional Techniques

We’re in 2015, and social media marketing has swiped the Internet off its feet to become a primary platform for online marketing after SEO. Social media marketing is much more than posting a status update or sharing your content. It’s about creating a unique experience that reduces the traditional friction and barriers of communication between the business and its customers and potential customers.

Social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest allow marketers the flexibility of marketing their brand, products, services, and content in the most effective way possible. Let’s take a look at how marketers today are using social media marketing to sell, get qualified leads, and increase website traffic.

Engagement & Connectivity

In August 2015, Facebook became the first social network to cross 1 billion active monthly users. Twitter meanwhile, has 316 million active monthly users, while Pinterest is the fastest independently launched platform to cross 10 million unique monthly users. In other words, engagement on social media has only increased over the past few years, and some of the credit goes to the increase in mobile social networking.

The takeaway here is that more and more people are now connected on social media, which gives online marketers all the more reason to focus their efforts on Facebook and other networks. Through status updates, posts, surveys, tweets, videos, and other activity, you can boost engagement on social networks to expand your outreach.

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Ecommerce Activities – Are They Important for a Startup?

There are so many opportunities for startups today that one can feel overwhelmed regarding how to get started. However, if you are planning to start an online store, then ecommerce could be the likely solution to help you set up a virtual space. WooCommerce, Shopify, Volusion, and BigCommerce are some of the top ecommerce platforms today that help startups open full-featured online stores.

That being said, engaging in ecommerce activity is not really a necessity, especially if you want your startup to be involved in other online ventures. At the same time, an ecommerce website is not as easy as it sounds, and focusing too much on selling and marketing may lead you to compromise on networking, data storage capacity, and personally identifiable information (PII) of consumers.

The Case For

If you are planning on opening a full-feature store on the internet, then ecommerce is the most practical solution to your needs. By full-feature, we mean a store that has product categories, descriptions with images, virtual shopping carts, safe and secure checkout, various payments gateways, shipment methods, and much more. In other words, you must first have your bases covered in terms of merchandising and shipment to actually start an ecommerce store.

Remember that if you plan on running a full-feature store, you will have to have a promotional strategy for existing and potential customers. This could include flash sales, super deals, coupon codes, and more. Ali Express, the leading ecommerce platform today, is a great example of promotional success as the store has Super Deals running for different products at different times of the day.

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Building Blocks for Great (Website) First Impressions

It turns out that as humans, we’re pretty quick to make a judgement. There’s plenty of sayings and phrases that make this clear. Having a ‘gut feel’ or a ‘blink reaction’ are just two examples. Parents and teachers advising us to not rush to judge a book by its cover (because they know that this is something that everyone does) is another:

A lot of the time those snap judgements are about people or ideas. But that tendency to rush to judgement is also present in the online world, thus you should take this into account when you are designing and building your responsive website.

Snap Judgements

Some designers and web experts estimate that browsers will form an opinion about a website or app within one second of using it. That’s right: just one second. So that means that there is plenty of work to be done to ensure that the first impression you give browsers is a good one.

And to make that whole process simpler, we’ve collated some of the most relevant here.

Images Matter

There’s a reason that magazines thrived for a century, and why ecommerce didn’t really take off until we could upload high resolution images to websites. And that reason is images. Images, and their quality matter more than almost any other single element on a web page.

Humans are visual creatures. It’s estimated that most of the communication we do is non-verbal and conveyed through cues and tone. It’s the same online – ‘showing’ using pictures, graphics, slideshows and colours is far more effective than ‘telling’ using only words.

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5 SEO Tips For New Landscaping Websites

If you don’t already have a website for your landscaping or landscape design company, you need to get one. As a predominantly visual art, landscapers need somewhere to showcase their work to potential clients. A customised website offers just this, especially if it’s built well and used in conjunction with social media.

However, it’s important to create a website that people can find. If no one can find you, they won’t come to you for work. This is where search engine optimisation, or SEO, comes into the picture.

When creating a new website, you need to make sure that it’s optimised for search engine crawler bots to make sure that you get the highest search engine results ranking possible. There are a lot of different things to consider when performing SEO, but here’s 5 quick tips to help you get started:

  1. Focus on quality rather than quantity

When you’re creating written content for your landscaping website, it’s important to focus on quality rather than quantity. You should never rush your keyword research – make sure that all of your content contains relevant keywords and keywords variations, and make sure that it mentions the areas you work in from time to time. Above all, make sure that it’s free from spelling and grammar mistakes, otherwise you will be penalised by the search engines.

  1. Include high quality images

Again, make sure that you focus on adding high quality images to your website rather than adding a lot of images. People want to see your best work, so show them this. If you show potential clients sub-par work, then they will take their business elsewhere – it’s quite simple really!

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Three Questions You Must Answer To Create Great Sales Copy

Whether you are going to create all the copywriting for your business yourself, or are going to employ a copywriter, the only way that the sales copy which is written can be effective, is if three very important questions are answered beforehand.

The first is one which copywriters going back to the earliest days of advertising have wanted the answer to, and that is what is the product’s unique selling proposition, or USP as it is more commonly referred to. The simple truth is that a business owner wanting to sell a product or service, you must be able to identify what the USP is.  In other words, what differentiates your ‘widget’ from all the other widgets.

A simple way to identify it, is by the using the statement “This is the only ‘widget’ that ……”. What you write in the space after the word ‘that’ is the USP of your product. If you cannot think of anything to write in the space, then you must ask yourself why would anyone want to buy my product if it has nothing different to offer them from all the other products that exist already? This is where so many businesses fall at the first hurdle because they are not offering customers anything different from that which they can purchase elsewhere already.

The second question that needs to be answered is who is your market, or who are your potential customers that you are targeting with your marketing campaign? If you simply say ‘everyone’, then there is no way for any of the sales copy which is used in your marketing to speak directly to those customers. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific group such as a gender or social class. Instead, it could be ‘dog owners who are fed up with dog hair the rug’, or ‘over 50s who haven’t made a will’, for example.

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