Design elements on your website that are killing your SEO
How healthy is your site? Now that is one odd question. Your site can look fabulous, seem superbly functional, and yet lack SEO capabilities due to small faults in core codes. The graphic interface of a website is just as important as its core code. Therefore, we have seen websites confident about their HTML codes and CSS formats rank lower than they should. Somewhere, they forget that their website is for human users. Pleasing the bots and the search engines is not enough to secure a good rank.
Did you know, Design elements could become more powerful in dictating your SE rank than your website content? People trust sites exponentially more when the designs were professional. In a recent survey, about 94% of the people visiting a website referenced the design of the site as a cause of their mistrust. Only about 6% referred to the content or the lack of it as their reason for mistrust.
How is your website doing?
Therefore, how many people visit you each day, your bounce rate and your conversion rate, all depend on how your site looks. Just optimizing your content for the search engines and adding lucrative header tags is not enough for ensuring high organic traffic. The graphic design and content of your website should not clash. A children’s website should use fun and easy to use layouts in vibrant colors. Bakery sites usually go for powder blue, baby pink and white combinations, food websites rely heavily on green, orange and yellow tones. The content and your target audience will determine the design of your website. This will directly impact other aspects of your business including branding and sales.
What Google likes right now
Responsive design is something all bots welcome. Your SEO service for small business can create responsive website designs by using generous doses of CSS 3 with your HTML 5 code. You will need a little bit of knowledge regarding coding to turn your desktop site mobile friendly. However, if you are creating a mobile-friendly site from the top, you can directly go for templates that create websites for all devices. Very recently, Google has announced their intention to introduce an index between mobile users and desktop users for 2017. Along with the AMP project, this gives a clear indication of Google favoring responsive sites over static sites.
Our website design needs to reflect your brand, business policies and it should resonate with your audience. Thinking long-term is often beneficial for your business. Going by the latest trends may create more hoopla, but thinking of brand value building through website design is one way to make your online presence last longer.
Traditional is good
Always remember, when it comes to website designing – stick to the traditional schemes. The moment you shift from a traditional HTML-based website design, you are raising some obvious red flags with the Google bots. They are more accustomed to crawling regular sites, with regular core codes, with a dose of CSS and a nice slathering of SSL certifications. The best option for the smart builder is parallax design or parallax scrolling. WordPress has made Parallax more or less their monopoly. Search engines may have some initial trouble following this design, but it is more than just a fleeting trend. It looks like Parallax is here to stay. It creates a continuity that most of your users will like.
Design for the future
While making certain graphic design changes to your site, you need to remember that this is the time for AI. RankBrain is already in action, and it is the fourth most important factor for Google ranking. Designing for people and bots were the talk of the past. Now you need to think about designing for the future or the AI. Google is soon going to merge their current image recognition and SER technology with RankBrain. Here are a few factors that will affect SEO then –
- Websites with a great design that appeals to all judges will get an immediate boost.
- Relevant images with ALT tags and high-quality images will get the right boost.
- Alt Tags will need to be more specific. You need to be able to describe the purpose and content of the image via its Alt tag.
- Google may directly penalize deceptive images, deceptive content (this includes incorrect use of keywords) and author profiles.
- “Shop by image” function is on its way. This will revolutionize the e-commerce market. Similar to the “search by image” function, it will allow users to shop for highly specific or visually similar products.
If you want good traffic, invest in a good website design. Looks, layout, and content will determine a huge part of your SEO. Codes may be THE factor, which determines a site’s optimization, but looks do matter, says Drew Hendricks in Forbes.
Author bio: Vivian Green is an analyst with the leading SEO service for small business in the city. She has worked with the leaders of the industry and found the secrets to Google’s ranking system.
Your choice of blogging platform can help you get the most out of your writing. WordPress is popular with many writers as it’s so adaptable. If you want to customise the platform, these 15 tools and plugins will help you get the most out of it.
Yoast SEO:
This tool is designed to make it easy to track and monitor your SEO. It sits in your dashboard and helps you see how good your SEO is as you write. It will show you how strong your keywords are, how good your readability is, and more.
Floating Social Bar:
Social share bars are a must, but a lot can slow your site down. This plugin is designed to give you those tools without affecting your blog’s speed. Now your readers can share your blog on any social media site that they choose.
Easy Word Count:
Keeping your blogs short is one of the best ways to keep readers interested. This tool will help you keep them to the correct length.
Academized:
Plagiarism is a real problem online, and sites will be penalised by Google if they’re found to be using another writer’s work. This can happen if you don’t mean it to. Use this site to check your work before posting it.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer:
A good headline is crucial to getting readers to click through to your blog. This tool will give you data on your headline, and give suggestions on how to improve it.
WPData Tables:
This plugin helps you create responsive tables for your blog. It’s easy to use and helps you create visual interest in your posts.
The Noun Project:
This plugin gives you icons for almost anything you can think of. You can use them as identifiers, or as images in their own right. They can bring a lot of interest to your blog without the effort.
Buy essay:
Proofreading is an essential part of blog writing. This tool helps you find an expert to check your blogs for you before publication.
Playbuzz:
This plugin is designed to help you create interactive elements, such as quizzes and polls. It’s a tool that you can use to increase engagement. You can also use it to gauge what your readers want from you.
Australian Help:
If you need an editor to polish up your blog ready for publication, you’ll find one here easily. They’ll edit it according to your notes, and send it back to you ready to be used.
Cool Timeline:
As the name implies, this tool enables you to create embeddable timelines in your blogs, good if you need more visual interest.
Link Patrol:
Links are important, as they will show readers that you’re a well-researched blog. This checks that all the blogs you’re using are legit.
Big Assignments:
This writing service is capable of putting out different types of writing, including blogs. Give your writer the topic and any info they need, and they’ll get it written. It can save you time when you’re looking to hit deadlines.
Followerwonk:
This tool helps you find new trending topics to include in your blog. This is helpful when you’re out of ideas, or want to use a trend to launch a blog.
YARPP:
This tool will help you retain readers after they finish, by sending them to a related post.
These tools will help you get the most out of your WordPress blog. Give them a try, and you’ll see just how much your readership and engagement can grow.
Brenda Berg is a professional with over 15 years of experience in business management, marketing and entrepreneurship. Consultant and tutor for college students and entrepreneurs at Resumention and UK top writers. She believes that constant learning is the only way to success. Besides, she regularly writes for her blog Letsgoandlearn.
Gone are the days when businessmen and website owners used to foster their business through obsolete marketing tools. In recent times, people have changed their perspective of marketing and are now employing contemporary tools for the same.
The right choice of the tool for marketing your WordPress business is the most crucial step in this direction. The right Plugins, Content Marketing expertise, and Email marketing are some of the greatest tools. Through this blog post, we will help you explore some of the best marketing tools that can help you boost your WordPress business and achieve its goals in real time.
WordPress Marketing Plugins
The WordPress repository is full of awesome plugins that can assist a website owner or an admin to impart great functionalities and creative features to their website. These attractive additions drive in the audience and increase engagement on the website. Here are some of the best plugins to help you with your WordPress marketing tasks.
Just the very way its tagline reads, Jetpack helps you increase your website’s traffic and secures your website. Providing the social media sharing management through your WordPress website’s dashboard, the plugin can be aptly used to share the content that you are about to post on your website. This plugin is a must have for all the website owners who want to publicize their content.
- Related post plugin
When visitors land on your website through their research for a post, you would want them to navigate through your site for a while, instead of abandoning it in a few seconds. The one of the most effortless ways of doing so is to use a plugin for showcasing related posts just followed by the post that the user was already interested in. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) is a good choice for the same.
Many bloggers and website owners specifically focus on the current set of posts or updates that they want to float around. However, they completely forget that re-circulating the old popular posts can drive in a significant number of visitors for their WordPress blog or website. This plugin works seamlessly to serve the purpose. Its keeps your content alive and includes link backs to your website.
The Google XML Sitemaps plugin helps in creating an XML sitemap of your website and allowing Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. to effectively crawl it and retrieve information. Rated as one of the best WordPress plugins, Google XML sitemaps notifies the search engines about every new post that goes up on your website.
Crafted specifically for marketers, this plugin helps you increase your website subscribers by capturing the right lead. You can create amazing opt-in forms along with floating header and foot-bars, slide-ins, sidebar forms, after post forms, mobile specific forms, inline-forms, welcome forms and much more.
It is the most downloaded plugin for WordPress, it can optimize the search engines like Google and Bing. This tool helps the bloggers and website owners to promote their brand across the globe. With features like advanced canonical URLs, Automatic META tag generation, Google Analytics Support, Duplicate content prevention; this plugin is multi-lingual too.
This plugin also helps in affecting the SEO ranking of your website by scanning the posts, pages, and comments on your website for any broken links. It scans and displays broken links in a different manner so that you can select them and make the necessary changes.
Social media marketing helps in increasing the visibility of your website to numerous users. So, social media selling is generally a larger chunk of marketing.
This social media marketing plugin enhances the social sharing functionality. This premium plugin helps in upgrading the social media presence of the client. It shares the content on over 20+ social media channels within a few minutes.It also shows how many times a page has been shared on social media.
Other key tools
Marketing is a tactile technique like tech blogs Technoven. It incorporates descriptive, appropriate and engaging activitiesthat can aid in focusing on and attracting the targeted audience. Only this way, can quality leads be generated.
- Creating awesome content that engages the audience:
Irrespective of the type of industry your website or business belongs to, you can never ignore the importance of great content. In fact, marketing has been dealt differently in the content arena. As a part of content marketing ethics, you should create relevant and creative content for your website or blogs. The content should be error-free, non-plagiarized and readable. To make sure that content is truly apt, you can use tools like the Hemmingway app and Grammarly.
- A speedy website
You cannot expect visitors to pour in if your website or blog is slow loading. So, optimize your posts and pages in a manner that optimum speed is delivered. Also, using the best hosting service is a crucial step.
- Making sure that updates are scheduled regularly:
Once you begin to enter the marketing spiral, it is highly recommended to stay regular with your practices. This is so because if you are planning to engage your audience, you must give them sufficient matter to absorb.
Always schedule your posts on a prior basis so that the flow is maintained and no hitches or breaks come through. For instance, before going on a holiday, you should set up a schedule so that interested subscribers are not disappointed. For this purpose, you can use the Editorial Calendar plugin.
Bonus Tips:
- If you are setting up a new blog or a website from the scratch, you must make sure that your website design follows the latest design trends and looks attractive yet classy.
- You can collaborate with your industry relevant Influencers and bloggers to populate and market your website content products and services. They have a substantial following and their audience will trust your business through their words.
- Pay most of the attention to Email marketing because if your website does not have subscribers, your marketing plan will eventually die.
- Keep a track of your marketing efforts so that you can be sure that the tools are indeed working. Use tools like Google Analytics to track the user engagement on your website.
Wrapping Up:
WordPress is a great platform for your content and when employed with a certain level of expertise, you can build your business, market its services and create the necessary brand awareness for your website.
With this detailed guide to the best marketing tools for your WordPress site, we hope that you will be able to embark on your marketing journey and bring out the best results.
Author Bio:
Catherrine Garcia is a freelance blogger and web developer. She is currently working as a freelance writer at MarkUp Trend and managing content. You can follow her on Twitter.
If you are looking to create a website for your business or personal content, WordPress can be a great design tool. It’s simple layout and user-friendly interface makes it a great choice for any website builder regardless of experience or skill level.
When you create your website, you will want to gain as many viewers as possible. Most website viewers gain access through search engine results. Your placement in a typical search can be hugely impactful on the traffic that visits your website. This is where the role of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. Fortunately, if you are using WordPress as your web design tool, it can help promote your website SEO. WordPress has many options that can help to drive web traffic your way.
Yoast Plugin
This is a popular and effective plugin for SEO on your WordPress website. It is simple to download and provides many benefits. Yoast will offer reminders for you to take steps such as enabling permalinks that will promote your SEO. It also has very advanced functionality that makes it a crucial plugin for anyone running a WordPress website.
RB Internal Link
Another great plugin for WordPress sites, RB internal link serves to promote internal linking. It creates links based on the post name rather than its URL. This makes it an effective tool for internal linking and the promotion of SEO.
Simple URLS
This plugin offers the benefit of tracking outbound links. This is an important part of SEO. If you include links on your WordPress website, you can use Simple URLS to track the clicks and views that occur from your visitors.
NextGen Gallery
Images are an important part of SEO and your website in general. As you plan your website and devise SEO approaches, you will want to place your images and manage them carefully. NextGen Gallery offers superior image management. With the use of this plugin, you can control the title and alt tags of your images and promote them through SEO. This will help you make your images work well for viewers and use them to promote your website traffic.
Lightbox Plus
Lightbox plus is another SEO plugin that relates to images. It is used to control the image overlay in your WordPress site. With the help of the Lightbox plus plugin, website viewers can access images, slideshows and videos all through the overlay it provides.
Widget Logic
Widget Logic is a great WordPress plugin for controlling widgets. It lets you easily determine which pages a widget will appear on. By using Widget Logic’s conditional tags, you can place your widgets exactly where you want them.
Gravity Forms
This is another WordPress plugin that can be hugely helpful with your SEO. Gravity forms is a contact plugin that works easily with other applications such as paypal. If you are using your website for any business functions, gravity forms can help you tailor it in a way that will facilitate communications with your website visitors.