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Are you publishing Great Content? Try These SEO Tips

When you are writing articles for your website/blog, you have to ensure that you have got critical things covered so as to guarantee SEO-friendly articles. The aim of SEO is to ensure you optimize your content so that search engines can understand what your content is about and at the same time make it easy for your audience to find you. Having said that, there are no guarantees whatsoever that your content will rank well in search engines even if you write a mouth-watering SEO article. That is because there are critical components SEO article should have, besides producing a great story.

Post title and Meta title

The main difference between post title and Meta title is that the post title is what the reader sees as the title of the post while the Meta title is what the search engines use to display to your readers in search engine results. If you fail to create a Meta title, search engines will treat your post title as the Meta title. Have a keyword included in your Meta title to improve your ranking fortunes. Also, keep your Meta title less than 66 characters.

Meta description

You can add a short description to your Meta title to give your readers an idea of what your post is all about. In other words, the Meta description of your post acts as the sales copy of your post. If your post does not have a Meta description, make sure you include it to optimize your traffic. Your Meta description should not be more than 156 characters.

Include Image descriptions

The long and short of it is that Google can’t read images. So it relies on the image Alt description to understand what the image is about. When you upload images to accompany your article, remember to name your images appropriately. For instance, if you are writing an essay about invisible man and communism and you decide to include an explanatory graphic, you can name your image as invisible-man-and-communism-illustration.

Anchor and Interlink Text

Did you know that it is always good to link back to your other articles in your website? This enables readers to stick around for longer. This is particularly advantageous because search engines end up re-crawling the old posts. Interlinking your old pages also improves the sites readability and reduces bounce rates. When interlinking your site, remember to use appropriate anchor texts. An anchor text is the title of the link you are creating.

Heading

A good article should be easy to read. An article that comprises of blocks of long paragraphs are not desirable. No one has time for boring stuff. Use appropriate headings especially if you are drafting a long post. It is also good practice to include your keywords in your headings.

Length

Long articles are better than shorter ones. First of all, longer articles easily get noticed in search engines because it is assumed they provide in-depth analysis of the topic. Secondly, longer articles tend to have a wide range of long-tailed keywords spread throughout the content. It is difficult to achieve this with 200-word articles.

Write for people, not search engines

Search engines are becoming very sophisticated, so much that it is nearly impossible to cheat them. Google wants you to offer your clients great content instead of simply stuffing your keywords for the purposes of ranking. This means that you should ensure your keywords are not only relevant to the article but also provide value to the readers.

As you can see, writing good articles takes patience, skill and time. That is why many people prefer to outsource their SEO articles needs to writing agencies, which is perfectly okay.

by admin

Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Must Have

Why WordPress in the First Case?

Did you know that WordPress powers more than 60 million websites online? Generally, WordPress is a content management system that is rocking in the online world. As opposed to the traditional HTML websites that would require a lot of time and money to set up, WordPress has made work much easier for most bloggers and website owners. Perhaps this explains why a whopping 22% new websites launched are powered by WordPress in the USA. Apart from that, WordPress makes it convenient for your to manage your content, it is flexible, and it is SEO friendly.

The Role of Plugins

That being said, you also need cool plugins to go with your WordPress website. Having the right plugins can do a lot of things for you, which includes: improving your SEO and user experience, usability, and various conversions. The following WordPress Plugins are just what you might need. As a matter of fact, these are the plugins that have been given a vote of confidence by the online community; most of them are free.

1. All in One SEO Pack: This is exactly what any blogger or website owner would want. All in One SEO Pack has been downloaded over 15,000,000 times. What it does is that it automatically optimizes your blog for the search engines. It also generates Meta Tags automatically. All you need to do is just to download it and install it, and the rest of the things will work themselves out. If you are an advanced user, you are free to fine-tune its features. Another alternative to this plugin is the WordPress SEO by Yoast

Contact Form 7: you will love Contact Form 7 if there is need for you to manage multiple contact forms. You have the option to customize the contact forms to suit your unique needs. There is a CAPTCHA integration option for you to help you fight spam. Contact Form 7 comes in over 50 languages. If you need to create a fancy Contact Us page, Contact Us Page - Contact People, is the plugin for you. There are actually very few websites whose contact us page is stunningly vibrant.

3. Clicky Web Analytics: You’ve got to love Clicky Web Analytics if you have a lot of Google data you are handling in Google Analytics. Unlike the Google Analytic tool which is so cumbersome, this plugin is so refreshing, and it provides a clean interface for you to view your data even if you are the type of person that likes checking your statistics more than once a day.

Secure WP: this plugin gives you thorough security check and makes a number of changes in your WordPress installation so as to make it as secure as possible. For instance, it hides your WordPress number version.

5. Buddy Press: BuddyPress lets you build a community from your visitors by enabling users to create profiles, send messages to one another, and interact through chat. It is a kind of creating a social network in a box.

6. Feedweb: Every website owner needs to get feedback from the audience on how they getting on with the content. This plugin will allow you to receive feedback from your visitors on how they are experiencing your services or who they feel you can improve on the content.

7. Members: Members is a plugin that contributes to making WordPress one of the coolest Content management systems for web sites. It extends your control a little further by letting you control the roles of members of your blog. It allows you to create, edit, or delete the roles played by various members. It gives you powers to control permissions of the members as well.

8. Social Gallery Lite: This is a great way for you to boost your social network for your blog. The Social Gallery Lite is your Ultimate Social Lightbox Plugin which is a good substitute to vanilla image lightboxes.

Tumblr Importer:Tumblr importer helps you to import blog posts from a Tumblr blog. This is the ultimate Tumblr Importer that will maintain the format of the blogs, as well as the backgrounds. It can also import drafts and pages.

Hotfix: Hotfix will fix common WordPress without having to wait for next WordPress core release. In other words, you’ll fix bugs quickly even if you have not updated your WordPress.

There are actually countless plugins floating in the online sea. The type of plugin you need depends on your specific needs. However, there is no need to install every other plugin you meet as this can slow down your WordPress site.

by admin

Why and How to Use Social Media for Local Business

Whether you are an individual entrepreneur, or part of a small, medium or giant business set-up, you certainly know that your customers are using social media. Therefore, there is no reason why you shouldn’t use it too if you want to reach them.

The good news is that it costs almost nothing to use social media, and it is easy to get started, yet it has the potential of having an enormous financial impact on your business. Another reason why you need to establish an online presence through social media is that it is a timely way of obtaining feedback from customers.

Social media is also used to market the business’ brand and products, as well as build relationship with customers. If used well, social media can also help in SEO performance of your site. A research conducted by Pan African University provided the following interesting statistics:

88% of fortune 100 companies use twitter daily to connect to their customers and 85% of companies worldwide use twitter at any stage of their recruitment process.
Facebook has over 500,000,000 users worldwide (although this figure could be more because many people have since signed up).
45 billion of content is uploaded daily on Facebook.
Twitter has over 156 million users.
YouTube is the 2^nd most searched site after Google.

Moreover, In an Altimeter Group survey of 700 executives and social strategists in 2012 found that 100 percent of participating enterprise organizations run to varying extents an active social media strategy.

How: Strategy and Tactics

As you can see, social media presents a fertile ground for you to register your business presence online. The next thing is to learn how to launch your social media presence. The truth of the matter is that it is difficult to succeed in social media without using strategy and tactics.

Strategy and tactics are inseparable here. You can’t design a successful online presence through social media without deep, firsthand knowledge of the tactics you’ll be using. Strategy will guide you on how to implement the strategies. Otherwise, aimless actions might not yield much. Here is how to go about it.

Know the Market: some market research will be critical. This will help you to understand the market, where your target audience is, as well as understanding the competition. Once you know the market, you can now begin penetrating it with the right messages.

Time and Quality Updates: Providing your audience with good updates, engaging contents, and timely news will enable your media presence to grow to unprecedented level. The more regular your updates are the better; don’t give updates every month. You also have to make a schedule so that you are consistent. For instance, you can issue updates twice a day, once a day, and so forth.

Social Media Tools: learn how to use a variety of tools to make your social media campaign an easy and effective way of reaching your audience. For example, you can use micro blogging tool to simultaneously your messages to the masses. A number of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn apps are available. If you have a website, remember to include your social media comment/like/follow tools.

by admin

7 Ways to Increase Your Social ROI

William S. Woodside and David J. Reibstein (Professors of Marketing at The Wharton School) boldly claimed that “If an ad doesn’t increase brand awareness, it's not doing its job”. Any CEO, marketing executive, and business owner knows very well that marketing is the integral part of any organization/business set-up. Without it, there is no business.

Ridiculously, in times of economic difficulties, the marketing budget is normally among the first culprits of cost-cutting strategies. In other words, if your marketing budget is not bringing in the returns, its importance will diminish. With the social media here with us, marketers are utilizing the social media platform to drive up their brand awareness, and advertising. Trust me, businesses spend lots of dollars in social marketing. But how do you ensure that each dollar spent in social media marketing plays a part in bringing in customers or create brand awareness?

Here are 7 ways to increase your social ROI:

Make it a Team Effort

It is tempting to imagine that advertising on social media is a piece of cake. Behind every Facebook like; every YouTube view; every twitter follower, there is an effort or cash expended. This can’t be done by one person, nor can you depend on your ads alone to do the job, you must ensure that every person in the organization is contributing towards the campaign. A survey conducted by openforum.com shows that about 53% of people engage in social media marketing campaign alone. If you are a small business owner, make sure that your employee, suppliers, distributers (and family members if possible) are contributing.

Be Authentic

This is what Sid Shuman, who runs social media for Sony PlayStation had to say “You can't fake it online; they can smell that a mile away." You can’t hide behind your monitor and run a marketing campaign you don’t believe in. you might dismiss this as a ‘pastor’s sermon in church’ but is the truth simply because it has been tried and tested. Before you spend your cash in social media campaign, you’ve got to be part of it; you’ve got to believe in what it is you are selling to them. Only by doing so will you be able to answer your fans’ questions and engage with them.

Put Your House in Order

Make sure your social profiles are in shape. Make sure they look professional and attractive. Your social profile is your social shop-front. Don’t expect customers to jump through muck just to come and listen to you. Also, make consistent list of the tasks you’d like to accomplish on a periodic basis. For instance, you can draft a list of twitter updates to send every 6 hours, each day. You can re-tweet interesting updates, share interesting photos, or descent jokes. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to a serious stuff.

Target. Target. Target

Your time is very precious. Your followers/fans’ time is precious too. Don’t waste any of it by engaging in nihilities. There is no way you are going to realize a ROI in your social marketing activities if the message is not reaching the targeted people at the right time and place. Poor advertisement strategy is like a boy winking to a girl in the darkness.

Engage

Don’t just listen to the audience, engage with them. Treat their feedback seriously and let them know that their views are being integrated in the process. Organizations can use social media tools to improve their services and products. In fact, social media is now an important too in brand development. It starts with listening to the customers’ complains/complements/suggestion through intelligence gathering, analyzing the information, implementing where necessary and appreciating them for the contribution.

Identify influencers

Social media is about trust; whether you are talking about casual chat or business marketing. Invest in research that will determine what customers appreciate and trust. You’ll reap better fruits if your produce a product that your customers have endorsed. It is important to pay heed to what the customers are saying, what their fears are, what makes them happy, what annoys them, and so on. Your team of marketers need to extremely alert to changes in market trends and customer psychology. Rather than being reactive, being proactive is the safest road to success.

Know Your Budget

If you don’t know your budget, how else will you be effective in what you do? Knowing your budget will enable you to plan, improvise, cut unnecessary expenses, and concentrate only on useful activities. If you don’t know your budget, you might find yourself spending a lot of money and time on non-essential things at the expense of the essential ones. You will also be in a better position to know whether your social media activities are producing the right rate on investment.

Mjrvisuals can help you increase your reach out of that content in your website through our expertise. ROI is definitely going to scale up if you invest on this kind of marketing for your business, We run the gambit of visual imagination including video production, digital marketing, video editing, print design, advertising, graphic design, graphic animation, motion graphic and media design. Be part of our portfolio of clients and let us tell your story to the world. Click here to visit our website: mjrvisuals.com/

by admin

How to Create a Smashing Brand: 5 ideas to refresh your online branding

Did you know that a strong identity helps your customers to remember you and makes you stand out in the marketplace? However, here is some news for you: branding is more than just shinny logos and a fancy name. Branding essentially involves helping customers to have a sense of belonging and attachment to your products, services, culture and values. If you want to create an unforgettable brand online, it needs to be consistent, recognizable and should appear across all aspects of your online presence. Learn how to create an unforgettable brand using these five tips.

Are you prepared to spend some money?

When it comes to online branding, you cannot avoid spending some money. If you want to make more money, you have to spend more money. It means you will have to spend in things like social media, Ad Words, and content creation.

Identify and convey your purpose

In order to create a powerful online brand, you need to create a defining purpose that will act as your compass. Sometimes it is good to go back to the basics. Why are you in this business in the first place? Does your mission and purpose translate into your online presence?

Keep it real

Sometimes small businesses suffer into oblivion because of their insistence to look ‘big’ and corporate like. The truth of the matter is that you don’t have to. If you want your brand to stand out online, do not hastate to put your personality behind it. People are more receptive to people. For instance, try to include your picture in your company profile. You could also infuse some humor into the content. Authenticity should be your goal regardless of whether you are new in the market. Be passionate and you will attract passionate clients into your online business.

Revisit your target audience

Do you really know who your target audience is? You need to know who your target audience are and where there are or where you can find them. Therefore, you need to make sure you can consistently target your audience so that your audience find content when they expect it.

Conduct yourself professionally

Whatever you do, remember that this is business. So you should pay a close attention to how you conduct yourself. Avoid being remembered for the wrong reasons by ensuring you post or publish credible and factual content. Go for quality over quantity. You have probably heard the saying that goes: it is not what you say, but how you say it that is essential when it comes to marketing. Although your personality reflects on your startup at the beginning, the personality of your startup will become an integration of voices that write for your brand.

It is important to keep in mind that what is being said about your brand is very important; therefore, it is important to make sure you listen to your audience.

Mjrvisuals can help you increase your reach out of that content in your website through our expertise. We run the gambit of visual imagination including video production, digital marketing, video editing, print design, advertising, graphic design, graphic animation, motion graphic and media design. Be part of our portfolio of clients and let us tell your story to the world. Click here to visit our website: mjrvisuals.com/

by admin

Common mistakes while choosing a web host

Are you in the process of searching for the appropriate web host for your website? Here are some of the common mistakes that you should be aware of.

Going for the cheapest web hosting plan

The cheapest hosting plan is not always the best because it has some drawbacks, which may be limiting to one’s business. What people should actually be aware of is that when someone offers a cheap plan, there is something they take back and that they may not offer everything else that others get at a higher cost. In other words, it is not likely that you will receive the same level of service as those who pay more because if it was possible to receive the same level of service, everyone in the planet would go for the cheapest web hosting providers. This then makes sense why we have coupon hosting for those who are involved in reseller hosting.

However, it does not necessarily mean that the most expensive hosting plans are always the best options. But it definitely means that the less you pay, the less services and features you get. When you choose a cheap web hosting, expect to experience many downtimes and poor server infrastructure and this may translate to poor quality customer service.

Looking out for freebies

It is obviously advantageous to look for freebies, especially if you are a first timer. However, it is important to note that looking for the maximum number of freebies in one web host can make you lose focus and ultimately make the right web hosting decision. Most web hosting companies give away freebies to attract customers, but is upon you to look careful what the catch is. Some of the freebies are as good as they seem but they end up luring you to make a buying decision which could prove expensive in the long run. Therefore, ensure that the most important factors are right with host before you look at what freebies they are offering. Some of the factors to look at include: server speed and up time, great customer support, reasonable price and domain name registration policy (let us look at this next).

Free domain

Many web masters get attracted with the offer of a free domain name. But it is advisable to look beyond this domain name trick because it can inconvenience you in future should you decide to move to a better host. What happens is that while some companies offer free domain services, they ensure that the domain name is registered under their company and not under your name. what this means is that you may not be able to take it with you when you move. However, the good news is that domain names are not expensive and it is possible to get one at a very cheap price and make it your own. So before going for a free domain name, find out whether you will own the domain name or it will be registered with that company.

by admin

Customer Insights Every Business Owner Should Know

The key to success in today’s small business can be summed up in three simple words. “Know your customer.”

It is a perfect adage for today’s environment in which longstanding practices and realities are melting away to reveal a transformed landscape where opportunities are abundant, but often more obscured. In this new environment, customer insight is not only important, but also imperative.

It is no secret. Small business profitability is deeply connected to customer insight.

But what is customer insight?

Customer insight means having knowledge about customers and markets that helps structure thinking and decision making. It’s about having the whole picture, visible to the whole organization, from executive to customer service.

Customers expect you to know who they are, what they want, and how they want to be addressed. They want to converse with you. They want to be listened to.

Consider these recent consumer survey findings from the analyst firm Digital Clarity Group:

Only one percent felt their customer expectations were always met.
Around 89 percent had switched providers due to poor experiences.
A full 82 percent said that the company they abandoned could have taken steps to keep their business.

What does this tell us? It means gaining customer insight is one of the most important things in business.

The source of insight

The next question we should be asking is, where can we obtain customer insight data? Customer insight comes from combining data from a number of sources. It is about using all data sources and applying the correct weight to them.

Insight comes from compiling and combining evidence, from data, to paint a picture. Merging the market research and database marketing teams is a step in the right direction, but it’s only part of what is required to create insight.

Part of this process is to know your customer’s touch point data. The following are sources of important customer insight data:

These sets of data can be generated from the following channels:

Social media data
Enterprise data
In store talks
Email communication
Website logs
Phone communication
News media
Syndicated research data
Forums and review sites

The challenge most business owners face is leveraging the data they collect in order to create the right marketing mix. They struggle to aggregate the data to form the right customer insights and disseminate the right actions.

Customer insight requires that small business owners address the following points.

Who are your most valuable customers (MVCs)
What do they want to purchase?
What motivates them to purchase?
Beyond transaction, how can you interact with your MVCs in a relevant and profitable manner?
How can you customize aspects of your product or service in order to meet the individual needs of your MVCs

Indeed, having the answers to the above questions is no longer a luxury. Small business owners must not only find answers but also act on those solutions in order to drive growth and profitability of their businesses.

The ability of firms to understand customers one at a time across multiple channels will mean the difference between success and failure because customer-based strategies are the key to competitive differentiation in today’s business world.

Knowing how, when and what to offer a customer can mean the difference between a profitable versus an unprofitable business.

According to Data Mine, you know you are on the right path and have the right customer insight in place when you have adequately answered the following critical questions.

What is the aim of this organization?

Why was the organization formed? It is important to have the big picture even as you go about your daily duties. Unfortunately, many small business owners get consumed with daily tasks that they forget the mission statement of the company.

What is the organization’s customer acquisition strategy?

Every organization must have a marketing strategy. Doing business without a marketing strategy is like driving in the dark without the headlights. You risk not only getting involved in a fatal accident, but you also risk moving in the wrong direction.

What do we already know (not think we know)?

Obviously, you already know a few things about your customers. It is important to be aware of what you already know so that you can have a starting place.

What do we need to know?

Now that you know what you know, it is time to know what you need to know. Identify the knowledge gaps and get the right information. Find out what data you need to collect and what tools you need to collect the data and collect it.

· How are we going to priorities what is needed?

Bearing in mind the constraints of time resources, identify the most urgent needs.

How will we ensure insight is retained in the business?

After gathering the customer insight, you need to ensure that it is retained in the business.

In short, insight is provided when the right questions are asked and solutions provided. The following illustration illustrates this very well.

The building blocks of customer insight are:
· Clearly defined company aim and objectives
· Customer driven marketing
· Organized and accessible data
· The right people in the insight team
· Knowledge management

In order to achieve customer insight, people must work collaboratively in the organization and have a clear data strategy.

Customer insight is not employing an analyst, or even a team of analysts. It requires organizational commitment to change. If it was easy, every organization would have customer insight sorted.

by admin