Author: Reginald Chan

  • 5 Common Technical SEO Issues and How to Solve Them

    5 Common Technical SEO Issues and How to Solve Them

    A comprehensive SEO strategy will include not just on-page SEO (which is often the most emphasized) but also off-page SEO and technical SEO. The effectiveness of your approach will depend on how well you address the issues that arise as a result of all three. In this article, we will consider five of the most common technical issues and how you can solve them. That easy? That’s right.

    What is Technical SEO?

    Technical SEO includes everything that is done to ensure the technical elements of your website match the requirements of search engines to improve your organic ranking and improve your online visibility. Technical SEO allows search engines to crawl and index websites more efficiently. It includes four primary elements:

    1. Site structure
    2. Crawling
    3. Indexing
    4. Rendering

    Any issue that affects any of these elements will affect your site ranking and negatively influence the online visibility of your business (and you will agree this is bad). In fact, any attempt at on-page and off-page SEO without technical SEO will not yield a significant result. This means that against popular practice and focus, you should first deal with technical SEO issues before addressing others.

    Common Technical SEO Issues and How to Solve Them

    There is a multiplicity of issues that affects your technical SEO. Here are five of the most common and how you can solve them.

    1. Site security 

    Sites that do not have HTTPs are considered as not secure. An insecure website will affect your ranking. To check if your website is secure or not, type your site address into Google. If your site is secure, then it will show a ‘secured’ message. If it is not secure, it will display a gray or red background with a ‘not secure’ warning. To fix this, you will need to buy an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority and install the same on your site. This will convert your site to HTTPS and make it secure.

    2. Mobile-friendliness 

    Most people now conduct their searches on their mobile devices. A site designed for use on a larger screen will not work well on mobile if that wasn’t taken into consideration from the outset. This makes it less user friendly and invariably reduces how well you can rank. To fix this, make sure you use a responsive design on your site. This kind of design allows your site to adjust the way it displays its content depending on the type of device being used.

    3. Outdated sitemaps

    Search engines use sitemaps to understand the architecture of your site so that its links can be crawled by search engine bots. The longer a site has existed, the more likely the site structure has changed. Any update to your site structure and links will not reflect if the sitemap is not updated and the bots will end up crawling across broken links. You can easily solve this problem by using a dynamic sitemap generator or by updating your sitemaps and submitting through Google Search Console any time significant changes are made on your site.

    4. Site speed 

    From 2010, the speed with which web pages load became a factor in how well a site will rank. It is estimated that if your site doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less, users will go to other sites. Google Bots are rendered unable to crawl every page on your website if it loads slowly meaning some of your pages will not be indexed. Also, you can use my site auditor’s page speed option to scan your website. You can also use Google Page Speed Insight as my site auditor alternative to identify specific problems with your page speed.

    Ways to fix this include image compression, browser cache, and response time improvement, minifying JavaScript, etc. The specific method will depend on the identified cause. You can just talk to your web developer about this issue.

    5. Duplicate content

    Content is duplicated all over the internet all the time and it isn’t necessarily a problem. However, duplicate content becomes a problem when different URLs on your website lead to the same content. What this causes is that you lose crawler cycles so that there will not be enough resources to crawl your unique contents. To fix this issue, you can

    a) Set your URL preference (www versus non-www) in Google Webmasters so that Google treats any site that links to something other than your preference as if it is still linking to your preference.

    b) Use the canonical tag while sharing your links. All pages with the canonical tag that have similar content will be counted by search bots as links to the original page.

    c) Use the Noindex tag so that search bots do not index duplicate pages.

    Conclusion

    SEO when done properly can help position your business for greater success. You must make handling any technical SEO issues you identify a matter of priority, starting with the ones we’ve mentioned.

  • How to Boost Your Social Media Platforms

    How to Boost Your Social Media Platforms

    In the 21st century, where once before friends and family met up in person and communicated over the phone, we now meet up and communicate with social media. Social media has, undeniably, changed the world, and the way that we know it. Social media use is widespread and you would be hard-pressed to find a single person in the modern world who does not or has not used it. It can be a great way to turn a profit, a great way to meet friends, and a great way to meet potential romantic partners.

    Because of its popularity, it is no surprise then that people should want to boost their social media presence and get as many followers as they possibly can. You may want to do this for many reasons; to bring awareness to your business; to meet new people; to impress your friends, or to get more likes on your pictures. Whatever your reasoning for wanting to improve your social media presence, look no further than here; this page has it all. You will find out how you can boost your social media presence and increase the number of followers you have on your platforms by the end of this article. Here is how to boost your social media platforms.

    Follow Backs

    One of the first ways you should get started on increasing your social media presence is follow backs. This works by following as many people as you can at one time (while keeping track of who you follow, so you can unfollow them if they do not follow back). Often, this will yield huge results and you will end up with, depending on how many people you followed, thousands of new followers (or hundreds). Follow backs are one of the best ways that you can boost your social media platform – and a great starting point. Some people may be dubious about strangers following them and might question you, however, and others may accept your follow request and not follow you back – so be on the lookout for both of these. You can find recommended followers in your platform’s search area, and through there, follow as many people as you possibly can. Just keep clicking follow after follow until your fingers begin to hurt. Within a week of using this method, you should develop a very large follower base.

    Buying Followers

    What’s even better than relying on follow backs is buying followers. Buying followers is a fantastic way to get followers and can be very effective. Buying followers, if you have the money, can give you tens of thousands of followers overnight, thereby increasing your follower-base dramatically. The results that this method yields undeniably makes it the best on this list – it is just unfortunate that many people cannot offset the cost to buy followers. According to the people behind https://www.leoboost.com/buy-instagram-followers, buying followers can increase your exposure, visibility, and your follower count massively. If you are looking for the best method of gaining followers – you might have just found it right here.

    Influencers

    Social media influencers are very popular social media figures who act almost like celebrities. They quite frequently have tens of thousands of followers and their pictures often yield tens of thousands of likes and comments. Influencers make quite a lot of money from social media and it is in a sense their full-time jobs. Influencers can be used to great effect when you are attempting to boost your social media presence and increase followers to your platforms. They will very often collaborate with other social media users (potentially you) and exchange shoutouts. These shoutouts will see the social media influencer posting a picture of you saying, ‘follow my friend X Y Z’ and you return the favor by posting it on your page. Your followers will follow them – and theirs to you. This is a great way to improve your presence.

    Competitions

    Competitions on social media, providing you are a business or service (or hopeful influencer) can be another fantastic way to bring attention to your social media page. Social media users often love competitions and enjoy getting involved in them. Competition could be a great way to draw followers in.

    Giveaways

    Following on from the last point, not only do social media users love competitions, but they love giveaways too; if you offer competition with a giveaway attached to it, you might just see the popularity of your social media page skyrocket overnight. Giveaways are a very successful way of improving your social media presence and are one that you absolutely should try if you are an aspiring influencer, businessman, or social media service. Giveaways are undeniably one of the most attractive things to most people – so definitely try out a social media giveaway.

    Content

    Second, only to buying followers, creating and sharing content is a great way to yield thousands of followers. Social media has become so popular around the world solely because of the content that is on offer on the platform. Many people start out to make their social media pages by simply creating fun and interesting content that people want to read about. These pages that offer content become very popular, often overnight, and can draw in hundreds of thousands of interested viewers and followers. When you make the shift from content to a personal page, you may lose some followers, but a lot will remain.

    Advertising

    Advertising your page can work very effectively. Many do this by posting on the pages of popular influencers and social media figures, with things like ‘follow me – I do X Y Z / am interested in X Y Z’. Advertising your page may annoy some people, but will definitely work on increasing the number of followers that you have on social media. It is certainly something worth trying out – it can’t hurt you can it? Advertising your page should be done moderately, or you may find yourself blocked from many pages.

    With the help of this page, you now know how to increase the size of your social media follower-base, and how to boost your platforms. Social media is the in-thing right now – so it’s only right you want to become more popular on it. Good luck!

  • Common Mistakes to Avoid When Trading Online

    Common Mistakes to Avoid When Trading Online

    Whether you are trading cryptocurrency, forex, or stocks, it is important to be aware of some of the common mistakes even the best traders make, to learn from them, and make sure you avoid making them. If you have been in the business of trading for even a small amount of time, then you know how costly a mistake can be, and unprofitable things can get, particularly with the ever-changing landscape and volatile nature of the markets. And while the risk and chances of loss are unavoidable, that is not to say that they cannot be mitigated. So here are some of the most common mistakes to avoid when trading online, to increase your chances of success and improve your profit margins.

    Changing Your Trading Strategy

    From the moment you start online trading, you need a clear plan and a proper trading strategy. Having a proper trading strategy will allow you to determine when to go long or short, and ensure that you have a strategy to refer to the moment you realize emotions are taking over. The problem with formulating a proper trading strategy is that it requires a high level of expertise and years of practice, and although you might employ the services of a financial expert, there is no substitute for self-knowledge. 

    The money you are making these investments with is yours, and accordingly you need to be aware of all parameters of the equation and make the decisions yours. While formulating your own trading strategy may take time and a few losses, it is very important that you stick to that strategy. It is normal to realize a few losses with your strategy, but your strategy is a result of your learning, so stick to it and eventually you will start making gains.

    Diversifying with No Experience

    As you become more proficient in online trading, your confidence grows, and that is great. But what is not great is when you do not realize that you are becoming overconfident, which can be pretty easy, particularly if you have been realizing a lot of gains. This is certainly true when you start to think about investing in other segments in the market. 

    Diversifying your portfolio and investing in other segments of the market as a result of overconfidence is a common mistake. You need to be aware that the reason you have been successful so far in your segment is that you carefully studied it and gained proper expertise in it. The same needs to be done in other market segments, before you enter, if you are to succeed.

    Throwing Away Caution

    Caution and a fear of loss are an important thing to have. They keep you alert, and in this case minimize monetary loss. It is common for enthusiasm and excitement to get a hold of even the best online traders, but the moment this happens, they are no longer the great traders they are. All plans, strategies, and rules of the game are forgotten, and bad decisions start being made, strictly because caution was thrown down the drain. 

    Of course, sooner or later, you start making serious losses, and it does not end too great. Caution must also be exercised, even when you are at the top of your game, and are playing by the rules of the game. Why? Because the game does not actually have any rules. Unexpected news, or a sudden market collapse might happen at any point in time, leading to major losses. The folks at Tradingonlineguide.com discuss how a stop-loss order can minimize your losses in the face of a volatile market. So it is important that you are always prepared with your stop-loss orders, and a proper back-up plan, to ensure you weather whatever comes your way.

    Losing Sight of Important News

    As you develop your trading strategies, you come to rely on technical or fundamentals, and attempt to make your trading moves based on quantifiable data. While it is important that you work on your trading strategies, to develop them into profitable one, you must never lose sight of the importance of the news. At any point in time, you need to be aware of and track news pieces that are relevant to the market segment you are trading in. That is not to say that you should trade the news, but rather acknowledge its importance and how it can sway prices, no matter what other indicators read.

    Admitting You Were Wrong

    Online trading is a business that is all about risk, meaning that avoiding a loss is close to impossible. What this really means is that whether you like it or not, you are going to make a mistake, and that is okay. What is not okay however, is sticking with that mistake and to the wrong decision you made. Admitting you were wrong, particularly to yourself, can be difficult. In online trading, this can be the difference between losing hundreds or losing thousands. When you make a trade, you need to know where your stop-loss is at. Do not let emotion overtake you. Just cut your losses and move on as fast as you can.

    Forgetting About Volume

    As an online trader, you need to be able to differentiate between data and information. For instance if the price of a stock goes up by 10%, well that looks great, but that is just data. When you couple that with the volume traded, then it becomes information. For example if the volume traded was only 5,000 shares, then you know it is not a strong move; it is just hype. The volume traded validates the price change, and being aware of both will equip you with the information you need to make a profitable trade.

    The business of online trading is a difficult one. Traders with decades of knowledge and expertise are still susceptible to making major losses, what with the risky nature of trading. To get better at trading and ensure bigger profits, it is very important that you learn the “do’s” of the business. It is however equally important that you learn the “don’ts” as well. Make sure you avoid these common mistakes, to mitigate the risk involved in your trade and potentially reap the rewards.

  • Top Tips On How To Do Digital Marketing For A Medical Spa

    Top Tips On How To Do Digital Marketing For A Medical Spa

    In this day and age all types of businesses need to have a digital marketing strategy and a strong online presence. Without either of these your business will struggle to attract new clients as well as keeping existing ones.

    But what are the basic things you can do to start improving your digital marketing?

    Well let’s take a look through some ideas and tips to get you started.

    Improve Your Website

    A new customer’s first port of call is normally always by finding your website, so it’s vital that your website is not only easy to navigate but also looks and feels fresh.

    Your home page or landing page makes the first impressions your potential new customer is going to see, so you want them to be impressed.

    You ideally will want your website to also be mobile friendly. As more and more people now use their smartphones to browse the internet, your website will need a compatible mobile version.

    Having an amazing looking website is all well and good but if you haven’t spent time or money improving the SEO of your site you will inevitably struggle to get good placings on all the search engines. If you are new to SEO then it’s probably a good idea to hire someone who can help improve this for you for best results.

    Paid Advertising

    A very good and quick way to try and find new customers for your medical spa is to use paid ads either on the search engine pages such as google alongside ads that can run on social media such as facebook, twitter and the like.

    If this all seems like too much hard work or too complicated for you to do yourself then you should look for a company that can help such as PracticeBloom, a digital marketing agency serving med spas.

    Paid advertising, if marketed correctly,can really get good results but is something that works better over a long sustained period of time so don’t expect amazing results overnight.

    Social Media Pages

    Alongside having a good website, all businesses now need a strong social media presence. As more and more people use social media to discover new businesses, having a facebook page, a twitter account and all other social media pages is extremely vital.

    Using social media to engage with your target audience will really help in attracting new clients to your medical spa. It’s important to be very active with all your social media accounts but posting good content that reflects your business.

    As a medical spa practise you should be posting content and pictures that relate to your business and treatments. If you currently have any special offers on prices or new treatments you are now offering, post about this on your social media to let your followers know.

    Social media is a really powerful tool to drive more people to your medical spa business and if used correctly will only help you gain new customers and keep your existing ones.

    Email Campaign

    An email campaign can be a very effective way of getting new customers into your business. This should link into your website, having a sign up page where you can extract new clients email address alongside doing the same on all your social media pages.

    There are many companies online that can provide the service of sending out mass emails to your collected email database or if you have the time and patience it is something you can run yourself.

    But just sending out a basic email will not work, you will need to have a strategy in place to try and get people to respond to your first email and then have second and third emails to entice them more.

    Your first email needs to draw in your audience so that they will want to respond and find out more, so make sure your email stands out from the competition. You don’t want a generic boring email so try and be a little different.

    You could possibly run some kind of promotional offer should the client respond to the email in a set time, such as twenty percent off a treatment if they reply and book in the next twenty four hours.

    To Summarise

    Digital marketing is an important element to drive more business in your direction and without it you may struggle to attract new clients.

    Although it may seem a lot of work to begin with, it will be worthwhile in the long run whether you organise and run the digital marketing strategy yourself or have another specialised company do it for you.

  • How to Plan a Digital Marketing Campaign for Your Business

    How to Plan a Digital Marketing Campaign for Your Business

    Marketing professionals know that they are likely to find more potential customers in the digital space than on any other platform. Digital marketing opens your brand to a huge marketplace where you can promote your brand. The aim of marketing is to connect with potential clients at the right time and place. With more people spending their time on the internet, a digital marketing strategy will help you target specific audiences and thus enable you to achieve your brand objectives.

    Digital Marketing Campaign, What Is It?

    A digital marketing campaign can be understood as a calculated plan of action to use digital platforms to achieve marketing objectives. The strategy views users in the digital space as a marketplace that brings potential customers together. Various digital channels such as emails, websites, and search engines are used to target a vast audience.

    A sound digital marketing campaign can unlock endless opportunities for brands. This marketing strategy helps marketers design campaigns that are tailor-made for the specific needs of potential clients. If you are feeling that your traditional marketing campaign has not yielded desirable results, perhaps it is time to try digital marketing.

    Establish your online presence with the help of agencies such as Creatitive, an Arizona digital marketing agency.

    Why Use a Digital Marketing Campaign?

    • A digital marketing campaign is cost-effective and helps brands to save money. For instance, don’t have to struggle to pay huge amounts for expensive TV ads.
    • You will reach a vast audience at once, compared to the traditional marketing techniques.
    • Boost your conversion rates and increase your revenue using a digital marketing campaign.
    • Strategies in a digital marketing campaign are easy to measure and adjust.

    If you are planning a digital marketing campaign, consider the following steps:

    Set Your Budget

    You will need to set a precise and realistic budget for your campaign. The budget can be influenced by the strategy to be used and the assets to be deployed. Advertising on social media, for instance, can be very low for brands that have their own accounts. However, to reach a much larger audience, brands using paid adverts on social media platforms will expect to have a higher budget. Other digital platforms such as YouTube or Spotify also have different charges depending on brand needs. Organizations that engage influencers on digital platforms to promote their brands could end up paying more. 

    If you decide to hire a digital marketing agency, you can expect additional charges.

    Create Personas

    Marketing is aimed at connecting audiences with brands. Your focus is on the people and how to target them. When designing your digital marketing campaign, you will need to know who exactly your audience is. A buyer persona describes in detail the person you will be targeting with your campaign. This means that you will have to gather as much information as possible about them.

    In designing buyer personas, you can conduct research, interviews, and surveys to get real data about your target audience. You may also decide to go to their website to gather demographic data such as their age, income, job title, and location. Qualitative information such as their likes and dislikes, hobbies, and interests will equally help you design a correct buyer persona.

    Buyer personas help you to craft precise messages to your target audience based on their needs.

    Set Out Your Goals

    What do you want your digital marketing campaign to achieve? From the onset, it is important to ask and answer this question. The success of the campaign will be measured by the achievements at the end of the engagement. The goals for each digital marketing campaign will be influenced by the nature of the product. If the campaign involves other people, ensure that they are fully aware of the goals right from the start.

    Define your goals such as conversions, brand awareness, higher ranking on search engines, or increased web traffic. Brand awareness is a common target for most brands. The reason is before clients pay for the brand, they need to know it first. Brand awareness should therefore be among the main goals for your digital marketing campaign.

    Identify Marketing Channels

    The channels you use for the digital marketing campaign play a crucial role in achieving the set goals. The beauty of digital marketing is that there are numerous platforms ready to take your brand out there. Some platforms have larger audiences than others and therefore, channel strategy can give your brand a competitive edge.

    Using social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram can expose your brand to millions of users of these sites. Similarly, your brand can enjoy enhanced prominence using Google Ads. Email marketing and SEO can help to boost traffic to your website.

    If you are looking to maximize on digital platforms, you can carefully design your campaign to run on multiple platforms.

    Analyze Competitors

    What are you doing to remain ahead of the pack? What are your competitors doing to have that competitive edge? Every brand wants to be the best in the market. It is important to understand where your competitors are succeeding and what their failures are. You definitely don’t want to recycle the same old ideas in digital marketing. Fresh and brilliant ideas you get from competitor analysis can help you avoid major pitfalls.

    Develop Content

    You will need to craft the strategy for your digital marketing campaign to target specific segments. Content should appeal to the senses of the potential clients and help to achieve brand objectives such as awareness and conversion.

    Measure Performance

    One of the best things about digital marketing is that it is easy to measure KPIs and results. Analytics will help you to measure the results. Analysis results will tell you the aspects you need to adjust in your campaign.

    Today, marketers can use online tools such as Google Analytics, SE Ranking, and Woopra. Using these tools can give you accurate data on metrics such as the ranking on web pages, conversion rate, time spent on websites, and value per visit.

    If you are designing a digital marketing campaign, the above marketing strategies can help you unlock the immense opportunities to achieve brand objectives.

  • 6 Ways Knowledge Sharing Will Boost Your Bottom Line

    6 Ways Knowledge Sharing Will Boost Your Bottom Line

    At some point in your life, you might get the unfortunate opportunity to witness untapped talent. You yourself might possess intellect or special capabilities that could help take an organization to the next level, if only the right people engaged you in a meeting or gave you an assignment where you could showcase your skills. This can be irritating to witness, and chances are, employees won’t stick around for long. Creating a work environment that promotes the sharing of intel and unique information has many benefits in the long run, and here are just a few. 

    1. Improves the Quality of Products or Services

    The more an employee knows, the better he can execute. Formal education can provide a foundation of knowledge that the daily tasks of the job will simultaneously build onto. The experts at ecosecretariat.org/best-online-course-platforms/ can guide you through all the best online education solutions your company is looking for if you take this route. By providing your bottom line with fundamental knowledge, you can set the standard you want for your company and watch as the overall quality of your goods and services rises to meet your standards. 

    2. Stay Ahead of the Curve 

    We’re living in fast times. By the time something becomes popular, you can bet that somewhere, something is being developed that will take its place. Take the app Vine for example. This was a lovely little app where people could record videos and post them. It really added to viral culture and people were enjoying it… Until Instagram added the video feature to their already very successful app. Now since people could post photos and videos in the same place, they didn’t have a need for Vine. 

    This is why knowledge sharing is so crucial. If you can pool together all of the innovative ideas your employees might have, then you stand a better chance of staying relevant. If Vine had developed their app so that it offered something more unique that would separate it from the pack, much like Snapchat did, then they might still be up there as a major competitor in social media platforms. 

    3. Increase Company Morale

    If you’ve ever been the little guy, then you know how satisfying it feels to get the spotlight every now and then, much less get one of your ideas implemented. There are many ways to boost company morale, and maximizing the flow of information is one of these ways. Not only will it benefit the organization in the long run to have the best course of action or methods of production in place, but your employees will feel valued and respected for getting to share their ideas. This will result in a more informed staff and higher employee retention.

    4. Employee Retention = Skilled Staff

    As mentioned previously, allowing employees to throw in their two cents about ways to improve some aspect of a company betters the chances of them staying on board. What happens when employees continue to renew their contracts? They begin to grow and flourish into experts in their field and are extremely knowledgeable about the organization they’re working for. So, by creating a culture of sharing in the workplace, you will later see that your staff can grow into a group of highly skilled, loyal veteran workers. 

    5. Diversify and Expand Resources

    What is inside an employee’s head could possibly be the best resource an organization has. So many avenues of opportunity open up when you increase the flow of knowledge throughout your company. There could be a massive time or money saving method that is going to waste because the right people aren’t getting any spotlight. There are plenty of ways to practice resource management, but the one that’s disregarded the most often are the resources that each individual worker can provide. By including employees in the affairs of an organization, you diversify and expand your set of resources for employees, making an altogether happier staff. 

    6. Supportive Company Climate

    When colleagues communicate often, they tend to sympathize with each other and the challenges of each position more so than not. Increasing the sharing of knowledge within a work community, whether it’s information about a job or a client, associates will naturally learn how to provide a listening ear with no judgements. They will also get to practice solution-based thinking for both themselves and their team, resulting in a more proactive work environment that supports each other. 

    It’s astounding the changes that just a little more communicative practices within a company can cause. By sharing thoughts and ideas surrounding important topics in the workplace, you’ll soon notice the positive trickle-down effects it has on the production and office atmosphere. Implement a knowledge sharing philosophy in your company today and reap the benefits tomorrow.