Month: January 2016

Most Popular FAQs on WordPress SEO

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Even someone with no programming knowledge can set up a blog or website in a matter of minutes. A lot of third-party plug-ins and themes are also available to be embedded with the regular wordpress platform to boost its functionality and appearance.

Read also:How to Choose the Right SEO Expert for Your Company

In this blog, we will discuss some of the most frequently asked questions about doing search engine optimization for wordpress.

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform and CMs used by over one quarter of the world’s popular websites. The most loved feature that makes wordpress popular is its simplicity of use.

Q.1. Does WordPress come Search Engine Optimized?

No, it doesn’t. There are only search engine friendly content management systems, not search engine optimized ones. WordPress is a search engine friendly CMS. Still, there are a lot of manual SEO processes required to be able to rank your website or blog on Google’s top list.

Most CMS sellers publicize as though these platforms come with an inbuilt fully automatic SEO system that manages all the necessary SEO activities and all you need to do is a one-time install. Sadly, this is too far from what’s reality.

SEO doesn’t just happen automatically. You have to assign this job to a specialist or a digital marketing agency where a team of committed, qualified SEO professionals constantly monitor and devise plans and procedures that will raise your website/blog ranking from among the pile of other party websites.

Q.2. Where should I install WordPress actually? —On a New Domain, Sub-domain or Subfolder?

Great! You have finally decided to choose wordpress over other available CMSs. Now, you have to take yet another important decision regarding the best installation domain for wordpress- a new domain, a sub-domain or a subfolder. Well, all these three options are viable. But it is recommended that make your decisions based on the actual purpose behind your CMS installation.

When you have a temporary web marketing requirement it can be a wise idea to choose a new domain for wordpress. But when you want to host a new blog, although you can use new domains and sub-domains, it is always a better option to install wordpress in a subfolder of your website. This will give you the best SEO results.

Q.3. I am planning to install a Wordpress SEO Plug-in. That Means I don’t need any further follow-up with SEO, Right?

After creating your blog or website for the first time, you might have focused on ways that could take it to the front line and thought it was a good idea to install an SEO plug-in to suite all your websites/blogs SEO needs. But is it really enough? This is a very good question to ask when you are done with the preliminary steps.

Recommended read:How to do SEO in 2016?

As told earlier SEO is not a one-time setup and it will manage itself procedure. It is not a piece of cake as so many would think. SEO is a continuous, run all year round process. No plug-in comes loaded with every functional elements needed for SEO. You are only taking your first step when you install your plug-in.

Constant status checking and updating the tools, procedures and methods used are one of the most important aspects when considering your SEO success. That is why you should consult a professionally qualified person who can understand what’s best for your website or blog to come up. The primary focus of any digital marketing agency will be on making a search engine friendly product.

Q.4. There are a lot of free WordPress themes available. Will it harm my blogs visibility if I use them?

Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. It all depends on the particular theme that you’ve got installed. You can get thousands of free themes for your wordpress powered websites and blogs. It’s tempting and anybody would like to give it a try. And your users are going to appreciate it. But there is always the risk of posing SEO problems. When considering theme revision, check the following details:

  • Your theme is updated and there is no security threats posed.
  • The theme is reputed.
  • It adheres to Google’s quality guidelines.
  • There is no link spam associated with the theme.
  • The coding is written well and it follows all standards

Q.5. Does using/not using a user’s native language have any effect on SEO?

Directly, there is no dependency for your SEO on the language you use on WordPress. But the language you use can indirectly affect SEO. Using the visitor’s native language can increase the user experience, which in turn benefits SEO. WordPress is already available in many languages. It is also important that the extra plug-ins and themes used should be translated to the same language.

The most expected feature of a website or a blog is that they are search engine friendly. Although there are a number of other CMS and development platforms available, when you want to create a blog or a simple website, it is always recommended that you use wordpress. With the help of a good digital marketing agency, you can always get your website/blog top the search results.

6 Tips to Create Kickass Infographics

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

 

Do you have to convince your audience about topics which are complicated and confusing; which are important but boring? Every digital marketing agency is faced with this problem. Infographics is the best solution for effectively expressing complicated information.

It lets you pack information in less space intelligently. Often, a digital marketing agency will have to create efficient information presentations focusing on a lot of facts and figures. Over the years, comparing things like prices or representing a long list of serial data has seldom been practical that you had to put them into written content. With infographics, you can distribute data in a visually appealing way.

Read Also: Role of Visual Content in Digital World

Let us look at some tips that will help you create kickass infographics.

1. Catchy Headline

Your infographics headline is extremely important. It is the backbone of your presentation. Since the amount of content in an infographics is ideally kept to the possible minimum, the attention

Your infographics headline is extremely important. It is the backbone of your presentation. Since the amount of content in an infographics is ideally kept to the possible minimum, the attention

2. Include Visual Representations for Your Data

Infographics as the name suggests, lets you represent information visually. The info that is represented should be clear-cut and accurate because discrepancies are bound to get noticed faster when you represent data visually. There should be a balance maintained between the written content and graphical data that goes into your infographics.

Though visual elements are important, do not overload it with too much designs or flashy colors. Limit the number of different colors used to three. Use appropriate images, charts and diagrams. Whenyou want to represent lengthy data, use line graphs and when you want to represent proportional data, use pie charts. Use compact and standardized designs for more serious topics.

3. Keep it Simple and Focused

The main reason infographics is widely adopted is due the simplicity with which data could be represented compared to the written content. Overloaded data and design complexity can create confusion and it will get misinterpreted by the viewers. To get a simple design, you should concentrate on things such as limiting the number of colors and font sizes used, readability of font types selected etc. Also use simple understandable language and appropriate charts.

Another important thing that you need to focus on is the ‘focus’ itself i.e., the idea represented in the infographics should be focused. Do not drift away from the subject under discussion. Cut elaborations and unwanted references. When you have a lot of data to put into your infographics, divide them into sub-headings and put them in separate infographics that focus on each individual idea.

You May also Like: Ways Digital Marketing Will Change In 2016

4. Create a Natural Flow

When presenting the information in an infographics, it is best advised to be arranged in a sequential format. Do not dump the ideas together or throw them randomly without any connection between them. Ideas should be integrated and should flow from one to another in an ordered fashion.

5. White Spaces are Important

Spacing the content is important for readability and cognition of the data. The right arrangement should have the perfect balance between used space and unused space in the infographics. Overly packed graphics could repel the viewer from reading through the content, and too much negative spacing will generate the opinion in the reader’s mind that the infographics is not worth reading.

6. Check your Facts and Figures

It is important that you always double check the facts and figures. An infographics reader could pinpoint contradictions and errors more accurately since there is more readability of the facts and figures. Once viewers find a single inaccuracy, they will resort to thinking that the whole information presented can probably be wrong. Keeping a close check on these tips is crucial for the success of infographics created by your digital marketing agency.

Email Marketing: Still Far from Over

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

 

The status of email marketing is a popular topic for debate in every Digital Marketing Agency. Is it dead or alive as of now? Well, email marketing is something that will never ever leave its place in the world of digital marketing. Its importance and presence can never be ignored. Email marketing is not dead, definitely not, and neither will it die anytime in the near future.

A simple statistic will prove the importance of emails in our everyday lives: Over 200 million emails are sent out in a single minute every day. So, you see how heavily email is used as a communication platform for brands, marketers, and even consumers.

There are even more numbers to prove this fact. Over 72% of the adults in USA have stated that they prefer the companies to communicate with them through email rather than any other platform. 91% said they would love to receive promotional emails from the companies that they do business with. As far as the companies are concerned, 72% of them have said that they use email marketing as an integral part of their business and marketing efforts. 25% of the companies consider email as the top most priority and channel for an advantageous return on investment.

Read Also: 14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

If you are still not convinced and doubtful about the existence of email marketing, here you have three major reasons why email marketing is not going anywhere. Go through them and decide for yourself.

  1. The advantages of social marketing

Social media has a lot of fancy and exciting options to it. This is why there are several rumours that it is slowly killing email marketing which is more of old school. Well, even though social marketing may seem to be more effective in certain case, this one marketing medium is not able to do anything alone by its own. This is one point you need to keep in mind. Vanity metrics and other hollow impressions usually give the marketers a sense of false satisfaction about social marketing. There are simply distracting you.

There are a number of marketers who try their best to gather attention through slightly spammy tactics on social media like filling out Twitter feeds with automated tweets all round the clock, blasting their pages on Facebook with completely irrelevant posts and updates, sending direct messages that are nothing but automated, and also using a huge number of cat memes and circulating them. They do not understand how annoying these techniques can be. Spamming only reduces your followers. They tempt the users to click the unfollow button, and you do more harm than good.

Email marketing, on the other hand, provides useful and relevant content to the audience. This audience consists of people who have willingly subscribed to receive newsletters and other informative emails and would love to learn more. As per data collected in 2012, nearly 90 percent of the internet users have an email account while a smaller number of just 70 percent have an account on any of the social media networking websites. This proves that email is still reigning as the top most form of communication. If you want to reach a majority of the audience and increase your reach, then email is definitely what you need as it is the most effective method in this case.

  1. It is evolving at a higher rate

With emails, brands could get the power to drive customer engagement by monitoring, testing, measuring, and tweaking the emails sent out as newsletters or targeted offerings. The whole game of email marketing has now changed and evolved to a greater extent. Slowly, it is ceasing to be a medium purely for communication purposes to a complete platform that could help the different brands deliver their experiences across various channels.

Here are some of the key email trends that have been explored by Liga Bizune in a recent article that illustrate how emails are slowly evolving to become more than just a channel for communication:

  • Wearable technologies are evolving. This will slowly change the way brands communicate with the email subscribers.
  • A new technique of email marketing will surface, which will be hyper-targeted and also location based. The credits for this goes to the integration of proximity and geo-location applications into emails.
  • Behavioural email marketing will start to get driven by predictive analysis.
  • As emails are transitioning to mobiles, it has become more necessary than ever to develop better and more creative content. This is the only way to capture the attention of the audience and keep them hooked on.
  • Videos have started to evolve and find their own place in the world of marketing. They will start playing an even bigger role in email marketing. A bigger emphasis needs to be put into this aspect.

You May Also Like: 10 E-mail Marketing Hacks That Every Marketer Should Know

  1. Correct execution makes it most effective

Emails need to be used properly and effectively to make it more than just a passé. The biggest challenge you face in case of newsletters is that only a small part of the subscribers actually care to open and read the email newsletters you send out to them. This does not, in any way, imply that email is dead or dying. It just points to the fact that your newsletters are not able to make the mark among the audience. They either fail to create the interest in them or your calls to action are not effective enough. Ask yourself a few questions to get your answers:

  • How is the tone of your content? Is it purely promotional and impersonal, or is it helpful and friendly?
  • Are you making an effective and meaningful one on one engagement through your content?
  • Are you striking up a conversation with the reader, or are you just talking at them to get your job done?

These questions will help you understand where you are going wrong. Understand the effectiveness of email marketing to be able to use it in the best way possible.

One thing you need to remember is that email marketing is not going anywhere. Each and every Digital Marketing Agency makes sure to emphasise this point. If you even believe that emails are dying and there is no point in marketing via emails, you will surely start missing out on the wide range of opportunities that this platform has got to offer you. Do not make this mistake, and keep your place in the digital world.