Blogging
How organic web traffic can stunt business growth- By Adegboye Adeniyi (2)
Last week I discussed on this platform four things you should start doing in order to increase your web ranking and therefore your traffic. Before we go into things you probably stop doing right now if you want to increase your ranking and get more traffic, I need to state again that no matter what you do, the building block of any successful ranking starts with a proper on-page optimisation.
On-page Optimisation or what is really known as search engine optimisation is the only way to get search engines spiders to crawl your website and understand it.
So let’s talk about four things you might be doing that can affect your ranking and traffic without you really knowing it.
A mindset of getting links at all cost
Links are an essential part of search engine optimisation and the best way to increase your ranking is too acquire more links. Links that help your ranking are those that can send you referral traffic and are do-follow links. This is one of the reasons Google does everything hard to make sure that it penalises websites that try to manipulate their ranking by buying links. So the links you should seek should always be relevant links that are do-follow and will send you referral traffic. These days I am beginning to see bloggers with the mentality of link to me and I link to you in the aim of increasing their ranking. Massive reciprocal linking is an act that can get your website penalised.
Lack of good social media presence:
Social media do not directly affect ranking but remember that social media is a great way to drive traffic to your website. If the overall aim of links and ranking is to increase your organic traffic, then establishing your brand on social media is a good way to start. As people discover your brand on any of the social media platform, they will in turn visit your website, refer your brand and ultimately link to it on their blogs. Remember the French blogger case we discussed in the first series of this article last week. Yes. You need to build quality followers if you want your brand to gain fast traction. Social media may not directly affect ranking but it is a part of the equation.
Lack of good content:
One of the major disasters of ranking and traffic is when people attempt to increase or rank a website that has lean or poor content. As the search world becoming increasingly content-centric, website that ranks over others will be websites that have quality pages amongst other factors on their website. Quality pages are pages that contain information that are useful to the web visitors. One way to address this problem as most of the essential pages on your website that you want to rank will be stalled at one point or the other is to start a business blog. As you begin to blog, you have the added advantage of making your website more discoverable if you follow best practices.
Absence of a standard website:
Why did I bring this down here? Should it not be the first thing I should have mentioned? While if not for anything, I want this last point to stick in your mind as this series is rather a long one. As you either start building your website or re-designing it. A standard website is where it all begins and I am not talking about spending thousands on a good design. No. What we are focusing here are things that will hurt your website as you design the pages. First is focusing on the use of excessive heavy graphic, images or videos. When your website is too heavy, it indirectly affects your site load time. This therefore means that people with lower internet connection will find it hard to access your website. If you live in this our environment you already know that the broadband quality is low. So why punish your web visitors more.
The second take home point from this factor is the use of frames or other practices like excessive scripting that make your home content appear lean.
If you have all the contents in the whole world but hide them inside a frame, the search engines will find it difficult to read your content. This means your website becomes “lean” to them which translate to lack of content. Lack of content means your website will be pushed further down the ranking table to give way to website that have “more” contents.
Conclusion:
We have seen practices that we need to engage in to increase our ranking. If you put in mind that the ultimate aim at all times is to delight your visitor, a lot of these problems are half solved.
SOURCE : PUNCH
AWS today announced the beta launch of Amazon Honeycode, a new, fully managed low-code/no-code development tool that aims to make it easy for anybody in a company to build their own applications. All of this, of course, is backed by a database in AWS and a web-based, drag-and-drop interface builder.
Developers can build applications for up to 20 users for free. After that, they pay per user and for the storage their applications take up.
“Customers have told us that the need for custom applications far outstrips the capacity of developers to create them,” said AWS VP Larry Augustin in the announcement. “Now with Amazon Honeycode, almost anyone can create powerful custom mobile and web applications without the need to write code.”
Like similar tools, Honeycode provides users with a set of templates for common use cases like to-do list applications, customer trackers, surveys, schedules and inventory management. Traditionally, AWS argues, a lot of businesses have relied on shared spreadsheets to do these things.
“Customers try to solve for the static nature of spreadsheets by emailing them back and forth, but all of the emailing just compounds the inefficiency because email is slow, doesn’t scale, and introduces versioning and data syncing errors,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “As a result, people often prefer having custom applications built, but the demand for custom programming often outstrips developer capacity, creating a situation where teams either need to wait for developers to free up or have to hire expensive consultants to build applications.”
It’s no surprise then that Honeycode uses a spreadsheet view as its core data interface, which makes sense, given how familiar virtually every potential user is with this concept. To manipulate data, users can work with standard spreadsheet-style formulas, which seems to be about the closest the service gets to actual programming. ‘Builders,” as AWS calls Honeycode users, can also set up notifications, reminders and approval workflows within the service.
AWS says these databases can easily scale up to 100,000 rows per workbook. With this, AWS argues, users can then focus on building their applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
As of now, it doesn’t look like users will be able to bring in any outside data sources, though that may still be on the company’s roadmap. On the other hand, these kinds of integrations would also complicate the process of building an app and it looks like AWS is trying to keep things simple for now.
Honeycode currently only runs in the AWS US West region in Oregon but is coming to other regions soon.
Among Honeycode’s first customers are SmugMug and Slack.
“We’re excited about the opportunity that Amazon Honeycode creates for teams to build apps to drive and adapt to today’s ever-changing business landscape,” said Brad Armstrong, VP of Business and Corporate Development at Slack in today’s release. “We see Amazon Honeycode as a great complement and extension to Slack and are excited about the opportunity to work together to create ways for our joint customers to work more efficiently and to do more with their data than ever before.”
Blogging
Olaotan Richard Ceo Aims Digital Network Speaks On 5 Powerful Tips To Digital Marketing Success
Digital marketing is unarguably one of the most effective and strategic marketing tools that the internet has brought to our doorstep. Businesses all over the world are churning in millions and even billions in returns each year. Digital Expert Richard Olaotan, the CEO of Aims Digital Network, gives some powerful and winning business tips for digital marketing.
1. Visual Elements
Everyone is attracted first by what they see. Having visual elements in business is key because people can only buy what they see. And on the average, a prospective client has got to see your product or service ad about seven times before they make a purchase. Whether it is your business logo, mascot, color theme or font you are choosing, the whole idea is to catch the attention of the audience, while also maintaining that attention enough for them to remember your brand. When advertising on social media, visual creativity is key. You must, at all times, ensure that whatever it is you are putting out there is as relevant as it is eye-catching. Your digital ads must appeal to the aesthetics of viewers and will be remembered. Using images that have consistent aesthetic and gives your campaign that familiarity every time it pops up is key.
2. Invest wisely
Truth is there are several digital marketing tools and services out there, but not all of them will create the same level of impact you desire for your kind of business. So, take time to analyze your business and the service or product you wish to put out there, the age demographic you are targeting, and the location too. Afterward, you can go through the various digital marketing platforms available and select the ones that will most effectively achieve what you desire.
3. Understand the buyer process
If you can understand the journey of a buyer, you will know what marketing strategy to present at each stage. Through buyer analytics, you can deduce the actions a visitor takes throughout your website, and use this information garnered to make the buying process easier for them. For instance, Google analytics gives user history that can help you better understand where they are in their buying phase.
4. Understand your target audience
Before delving into employing digital marketing tools, it is highly advised that you have a clear understanding of who you are targeting to make your bulk purchasing audience. Everyone is a potential buyer of your product or service; however, an age range or designated people of certain classes are the best benefactors of your product or service. Those are your target audience, and in digital marketing, you engage marketing tools strategically to send unique ads to this audience.
5. Analyze your social media metrics
To see the digital marketing tool that is most effective for your product or service, Olaotan Richard advises that you analyze your data and tie it back to the direct result it produces. The best SEO company in Chicago or anywhere else would first help you find what promotes engagements for your business niche. With their finding, they can easily suggest which tool or ad style is most effective for you.
Blogging
Social media giants, Facebook urges publishers to leverage creative content for improved revenue
Social media giants, Facebook, has called on publishers to leverage on creative content for better revenue generation.
Facebook’s Strategic Media Partnerships Manager for Sub Sahara Africa, Jocelyn Muhutu-Remy, made the call while speaking at a session tagged ‘Art of monetizing good storytelling through the social media’ hosted by The Guardian during the Social Media Week at Victoria Island, Lagos.
Muhutu-Remy urged social media publishers to avoid clustering on already competitive content publishings.
“Propose what is different and unique to you. It is not about the followers you have but the uniqueness of your content. I advise starting by promoting your page using your location to reduce pay.”
Muhutu-Remy cited an example of a publisher on Instagram whose main contents were on natural hair care and maintenance for women and urged social media publishers to follow suit.
She added that brands would only be attracted and convinced to partner and invest in a publisher whose contents is specific and specialized.
Storytelling is about engaging your audience and ensuring they can relate with your content subject,” Mutuhuru-Remy said.
Other speakers at the session moderated by Guardian Life editor, Chidera Muoka, were Instagram publishers, Sisi Yemmie, a food blogger and Comedian Wofai Fada.
Wofai Fada, a comedian, said passion is key for any publisher that wants to thrive in the digital publishing space.
“It comes easy because it’s something I love doing. Passion is necessary to push one further.”
She advised publishers to be consistent and continually renew strategies to communicate with their audience.
Sisi Yemmie, a food blogger, said specialization in Instagram publishing has given her an edge in digital publishing.
She urged other publishers to harness Google analytics tool to examine the interests of their audience, as well as means to grow their platforms.
“Your social media analytics helps you decide what types of contents you should post and what time of the day you should post. You need to be aware of what type of content is to be promoted, but be creative and dynamic too,” Sisi Yemmie said.