Digital Business Strategy

The Ultimate Guide To WordPress SEO

March 16, 2018 No Comments

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is an extremely important thing to consider when it comes to building your own WordPress website. Search engine rankings are becoming more and more competitive every day, and it is becoming harder and harder to get listed on the first page of popular search engines like Google.

It isn’t enough to just chuck a couple of keywords in the right places and hope that the search engine bots will look favourably on your site. You need to put a lot of work in, focusing on specific areas within every page on your website in order to maximise your search engine rankings.

Following are just a few of the most essential things to do when it comes to optimising your site for search engine crawlers:

Make Sure You Use A Decent Plugin

SEO plugins are a great way to make sure that your content is conforming to SEO best practices. One of the most common plugins is Yoast SEO. The free version of the Yoast plugin includes a number of features which can be very useful to inexperienced web developers, including:

It allows you to create a XML sitemap at the click of a button (more on that later).
It offers advice on your content, especially with regards to keyword implementation, meta descriptions, and URLs.
It helps you optimise your images.

As you can see, just having a plugin like Yoast SEO can help you get the most out of your website. Best of all, it’s free – so why wouldn’t you have it?

Web Design

It’s a Level Playing Field for All

February 18, 2018 No Comments

With the modern era upon us and advancements in IT, businesses have adapted accordingly. Over the past few years, E-commerce has acquired mainstream status. Capturing the focus of existing and new firms, E-commerce is the new method of conducting business.

Roughly defined, E-commerce or electronic commerce is the realm of all business transactions that take place on the internet. This includes online shopping to auction sites, and appears to have no limits.

As all transactions take place over the internet, there are no limits except those defined by you!

Location, time, target markets, type of product or services, etc. Everything is established by the business when they are setting up. Your capital, expertise and will determines how successful you get and what market you capture.

As this field is explored further, unchartered territories emerge, creating avenues for anyone willing to seize the opportunity at hand.

As this industry has an extremely low barrier for entry, each and everyone with internet access has the capability to dip their toes in the E-commerce waters.

SEO

Why A Backlink Audit Is Essential To Your SEO Strategy

February 1, 2018 No Comments

It is possible your SEO strategy has produced excellent results so far in terms of your website’s ranking. You may have done excellent keyword research, looked at your competitors, optimised your website, acquired lots of backlinks to your site and making the most of what social media can offer.

With your website sitting high in the rankings you may think it is just a case of sitting back, relaxing, and only occasionally tweaking what you have done thus far. However, there is one action that you must complete and that is conducting a backlink audit. Without one your website could be in danger.

Everyone knows how important backlinks are, albeit there are conflicting theories as to how backlinks to a website should be acquired. You may have acquired your own backlinks in several ways, which can include social media, guest blogging, articles, third-party services and even paid services.

Branding

Using Storytelling To Enhance Your Brand

August 1, 2017 No Comments

Let’s be honest…we all love a good story. If we didn’t JK Rowling might still be a researcher and Stephen King could yet be working as a janitor. Given how stories are so popular it isn’t surprising that many successful businesses use storytelling to enhance their branding. The question is how can storytelling be used effectively to help your branding, either as an individual business person or as a company?

The first element of storytelling is that it stirs up emotions within people, and the range of possible emotions is very wide. This is a fine line that must be trodden carefully, as there are some emotions you definitely do not want to evoke such as anger, envy or even hatred. So, whatever stories you plan to tell as part of your branding exercise, make sure they cannot possibly be misconstrued or interpreted in such a way that might invoke a negative emotion.

Ideally, you want to create stories that are interesting, but also allow for anyone hearing or reading them to create a connection to them. The best way to do this is for the story to contain situations or scenarios which most people can relate to or at least have some recognition of.

Email Marketing

Should You Email Your Subscribers Every Day?

January 14, 2017 No Comments

One of the most asked questions regarding email marketing is, ‘How often should I email my list?’, and the simple answer is as often as you like if your email campaigns are working. This answer might seem like a bit of a cop out, but the truth is there are very successful marketers who email their list at lots of different frequencies.

Some businesses send emails once a month, some fortnightly, some weekly, some every few days, and then finally there are those marketers who email their subscribers every single day. It is this last option to which many marketers raise their eyebrows and decry that emailing every day is too often. Try telling that to those successful businesses who email daily and would never contemplate changing that.

So, lets’ look at three main advantages of emailing every day and why daily emails can bring you positive results.

#1 Subscribers Grow To Expect A Daily Email

This might seem like a totally obvious point, but the fact is that once your subscribers get used to you emailing them daily, they come to expect it, and it almost forms part of their routine. Once it is established that they are going to receive an email from you every 24 hours, it won’t seem that unusual to them.

Google AdWords

How To Create Your Google AdWords Campaign Effectively

September 22, 2016 No Comments

Using a Google AdWords campaign to create traffic, leads and customers is an intelligent move, however it must be done correctly and with some thought. To do otherwise risks not only an abject failure in terms of the campaign but also a considerable waste of your budget.

Before switching on your AdWords campaign, you must establish what goals you want it to achieve. Is it designed to build your brand awareness? Are you seeking subscribers for an email marketing campaign? Do you want customers who will buy from your website? Whether it is any of these or the myriad of other possible objectives, the point is you must decide which one it is. Only once you have taken this first step, can you move on.
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Now you know what your objective is, you now need to consider the audience you are trying to reach. Remember, that one of the benefits of AdWords is that you can set them up to target specific keywords, and as such a specific audience. Keywords like ‘for sale’, or ‘discounted’ are going to appeal much more to a buying audience, than those who might not be at that stage. By determining your audience, you can also write copy within your adverts which will resonate more, than if you simply wrote generic sales copy to a general audience.

Email Marketing

Does Email Marketing Still Exist?

November 18, 2015 No Comments

Emails are to electronic marketing what DVDs are to media; we still use them but prefer later technology. Email marketing has had to evolve and get smarter so it can remain effective.

Gone are the days when each email was carefully read before it was sent to the “Junk” folder. Now the service providers themselves segregate unwanted emails and prevent them from reaching the customers. In the modern day and age, Email marketing has taken a more patient and methodical approach.

With an exponential increase in the use of internet over the past couple of decades, the amount of phishing scams and cyber-thefts have also increased. This has resulted in more cautious and disbelieving customers.

Marketing your products or services requires a longer, more comprehensive route to their attention. Using the vulnerability created by cognitive dissonance, the customer’s trust can be obtained in order to pave way for Email marketing.

Instead of having customers exposed to a barrage of emails, you grab their attention via Ads on the internet.

Branding

Your First Front; The Logo

April 4, 2015 No Comments

An underrated, yet possibly the most important part of an organisation’s existence is the design of their logo. From Apple Inc. to McDonald’s, the initial point of recognition for any brand or organisation is their logo. As the first point of contact between your company and the customer, these have an important role in building a strong relationship.

Even though it is the job of a graphic designer to produce the logo, the higher management must have a clear idea about what they want it to look like. The following basic rubric should always be kept in mind:

Do not bombard the logo with text

The logo itself is meant to remind viewers about the tagline or description. Most logos are glanced upon and passed by and no one is expecting to read more than a couple words underneath a logo. Adding words eliminates the main purpose of the design, not allowing the audience to process what they saw and move on.

Be clear

Get straight to the point, your logo design should either reflect the name of your firm or indicate what market you are a part of. Unique and totally out of the box ideas carry extremely high risks and are destined to fail on majority of the occasions.

Web Design

7 Reasons Why a Professionally Designed Website is Good for Your Business

June 8, 2014 No Comments

Why would a good formal dress be imperative for a business seminar? And why would a firm hire professionals for its IT structure when simply the tasks could be carried out by employees serving in other departments (at a lower cost)?

Professionalism speaks for itself be it in the form of formal attire or programmers managing the IT functions of a firm.

Professionally designed websites are also of the same nature, they tell tales of professionalism and credibility of a business apart from being aesthetically appealing. When brand recognition and viewer engagement is concerned, it is vital to have your business website designed by professionals to avoid the impression of unprofessionalism or anything near.

Digital News

An Awe-Inspiring Website Attack: RFI

November 18, 2012 No Comments

RFI stands for Remote File Inclusion. We’ve seen some captured demos here and there, but this one is one of the most impressive yet. The example shown in the post Bots Galore! is worth reading – in fact, studying! Look how it ends, with a simple GUI for controlling your site. Chances are, there’s eight or nine of these scripts floating around on underground file sharing networks right now.

Wikipedia gives an excellent description of the RFI attack. Briefly, you used PHP’s “include” function to include whatever file was specified after the ‘?’ prompt in the URL. Guess what? We’ll just include our own file from some other server there and look at your web page that way! No password cracking, no muss, no fuss, and not even any trace left.

Guard against this! Turn off “register_global” on your server if it isn’t off already, and just plain don’t allow URL-include in the first place. If you have several pages of code that have to link together, include the file specifically by name in the code itself.

Digital News

An Attempt To Spot Visionaries

October 28, 2012 No Comments

An interesting quote at 37Signals leads to a blog post over at an investment firm answering Why We Prefer Founding CEOs. The names of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ev Williams (Twitter), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are bandied about.

If you do any kind of work in the eCommerce sector, you prick up your ears whenever you hear the names of the most successful web entrepreneurs. They’re the examples to follow. Hitch your wagon to their star and they’ll lead you to riches. But the trouble is spotting them early enough. Wouldn’t it have been great, for instance, to get in on the ground floor on Twitter? The first person on the scene can scoop up treasure with both hands that the rest of us have to hustle just to get a scrap of.

The reasons given for favoring founding CEOs boil down to the fact that they were the people with the original vision and passion, and know their company and their business in the most comprehensive way. But the fact is that all the good ideas are not at all taken – you probably have ten or so sitting around waiting their turn. It’s just that the time has to be right for each idea to reach its maximum potential. And knowing that time, and being there right when it happens, is the stuff that ecommerce legends are made of.