Using SEO & Social Media Together

Search Engine Optimization has been there since the earliest days of building websites. With the growth of Social Media,Social Media marketing has grown in importance for not only Social Media but SEO as well. It’s important to use the two together to get ahead of the competition. One of the basic things that should be done for your SEO is to get an SEO audit of your site as a starting point to take care of the basics such as optimizing title tags, descriptions, meta tags and so on.

For millenials, almost their entire waking life is spent online and on Social Media. It’s normal to wake up in the morning and log into Facebook straight away, check your Twitter, and LinkedIn feed for the latest news. For the millenial generation, Social Media recommendations and what is being said online by their trusted networks carries tremendous weight.

The Social Media marketing aspect of your website begins with maintaining a presence on all the major Social Media platforms: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, YouTube, and many others. All the pages of your website and all the posts on your blog should have Social Media share buttons for easy sharing of content. Your blog should be frequently updated with new and awesome content that people enjoy reading and sharing. Google loves new original content and this is the drum that they have been constantly beating. Maintaining regularity in posting new content will help you develop a loyal readership. Post updates to all the social platforms on a regular basis.

As an example, Pinterest is very image-friendly; hence, post pictures of your product if you are a business to Pinterest. All this engagement with social media will help you gain more followers, likes and so on. Once a thriving community comes up that loves your website, Facebook page, Twitter handle and so on, they’ll spread your message around and act as volunteer brand ambassadors. Search engines love these sort of social signals and they’ll in turn reward your site with greater authority and higher rankings. As Google+ becomes more integrated with Google’s search results, the value of creating Google+ local business pages (and letting customers write reviews, rank the business on a scale from 1 to 5) has grown. These activities will directly affect local search results in Google. With Google local carousel spreading to more and more categories after starting with local movie, hotel, and restaurant searches, the weight of Social Media signals will only increase over time.

Smart businesses use their Social Media platforms to engage with their customers. Consider an airline facing unexpected flight delays caused by bad weather (something happening ever more frequently); the airline can post updates to all their Social Media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ apart from traditional channels such as SMS/e-mail. This will likely be appreciated by their customers. As an example, if you are an online retailer you can offer surprise gifts to customers who share their experience on a company’s Facebook page. This not only works with your brand ambassadors but also your unsatisfied customers as well. Address the concerns of your customers whether they complain by a Facebook post or a tweet. Engage them and try to resolve the matter as you would be quite surprised the power of Social Media and connecting with your customers online.

Overall, optimizing and engaging in Social Media is a key part of the SEO strategy in 2014. The likelihood of your online marketing strategy being a success grows manifold when both SEO and Social Media marketing work together rather than working in silos. If you need any help or have any questions regarding your SEO or Social Media, feel free to get in touch with the team at Mind Digital Group.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/using-seo-social-media-together/

Activities A Search Engine Optimization Specialist Performs

Search Engine Optimization has a lot of mystery surrounding it and there are many people who do not understand what exactly a Search Engine Optimization Specialist does. While the technical details of this process are certainly not very interesting to someone who lacks technical knowledge. The misconceptions surrounding this industry often cause people to get scammed by unscrupulous SEO professionals who claim to be a Search Engine Optimization Specialist but provide their clients little or no benefit. In addition, sometimes clients hire a SEO specialist who partakes in black hat SEO which is looked down upon and can seriously hurt your rankings. It is important that you know what an SEO specialist really does in order to help your website get a good search engine ranking so that you can avoid being scammed. In addition if you understand what an SEO specialist does, it can help you pick a good SEO company out of the many options presented to you.

Basics of SEO
You do not need to become an SEO expert in order to tell which SEO company will provide you the best results. As long as you have basic knowledge of what a Search Engine Optimization Specialist really does, you can safely pick a quality SEO professional to assist you with your rankings. SEO is divided into on page and off page optimization and before you delve deeper, you need to understand what they are.

✓ On page Optimization – Any changes that a Search Engine Optimization Specialist makes to your website are part of the on page optimization. Usually this involves ridding the website code of errors and ensuring W3C validation. In addition, an SEO specialist will also add proper tags throughout the website and complete all metadata so that search engine spiders can analyze and classify your website with greater ease. He or she will place to correct tagging on your site so that the search engines know what your site is about as well as what to rank your site for.

✓ Off page Optimization – A large portion of time that a Search Engine Optimization Specialist spends on SEO for a website is spent on off-page optimization. Off-page optimization includes sharing links for your website on social networks, popular websites, developing links for your website and getting them placed on websites with a high PageRank. In addition SEO specialist submit articles relevant to your company on different sites, embed quality anchor text links which help you get high search engine ranking for the keywords that you want and more.

Summary
Search Engine Optimization is a time taking task that needs to be handled by trusted professionals who have the experience and expertise to deliver good results. It is something that is a long term task and cannot be done overnight. Any company or individual who claims to get overnight success will be using black hat unethical tactics which you should stay far far away from. If you need any assistance or advice with your Search Engine Optimization or any other digital marketing, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/activities-a-search-engine-optimization-specialist-performs/

Top 5 Reasons To Use A CMS System For Your Website

Since the beginning of the World Wide Web with Tim Berners Lee’s proposal at CERN in 1990, the technologies used to create websites have changed drastically. Initially, rudimentary websites were being created in HTML and then CSS and then Flash came along but now content management systems (CMS) have taken precedence over other means. There are many reasons for using a CMS system which we will discuss below:

1)  CMS is Easy to Use & Free
Most CMS systems are free and they let non-technical manage their websites. Since you don’t have to do any complex programming or HTML code, you get the job done way faster. Before you needed to have development knowledge to make changes to a site but now that has completely changed.

2)  CMS Allows Multiple Users
With CMS based websites, multiple employees of a business can contribute content to the website. Multiple users can be given user ids which they can use to access the CMS and post content onto the website. In addition, you can allow or block any parts of your CMS system that you want employees to have access to or not.

3)   CMS Allows Ease of Maintenance
Making site-wide changes or maintenance changes becomes easier when your website is built using a CMS system. You can update the CMS software or add functionality and so on without worrying about breaking the site.

4)  CMS Makes Design Changes Easy
If you want to update the look of the website with a CMS-built website it’s very easy. Since a CMS keeps the content separate from the design, making changes to the design does not bring down the website. Also, you can make global changes to the website by making a change just in the administrative dashboard of the CMS. With the growing number of smartphone users, a CMS-based website makes it easy to have a mobile-version of your website. You also have the flexibility to purchase themes and change the design of your website without any headaches.

5)   Many Other Benefits
The benefits of a CMS are far more than five. With a modern CMS, you will find it easy to implement an online marketing strategy as the CMS will offer SEO tools, email marketing, Social Media marketing, blogging tools and more. To survive the stiff competition in the modern business world, these are essential characteristics of a robust CMS.

With an E-commerce site, there may be a need for publishing as well as un-publishing content. You may have a Mother’s Day special or Valentine’s Day special offer for a certain duration but then might wish to remove all content related to that offer once the time period of the offer expires. This is where a CMS comes in handy — all you have to do is unpublished the content, the menus and links will update themselves automatically.

SEO-Friendly CMS
Since applying SEO techniques to a website after it is built can be cumbersome, it’s better to keep SEO in mind while choosing your CMS. Make sure that the CMS lets you set and modify meta tags such asdescriptions, Meta robots index/noindex, follow/nofollow, and so on. The CMS should optimize page loading speed since this is important from an SEO perspective. This can be done by making sure that the pages do not contain unnecessary or hidden content and HTTP-requests should be kept to the minimum.In a similar vein, CSS scripts should be at the top of the page while JavaScripts should be at the bottom of the page. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) should be used if required and no Flash or iFrames should be used.

Since duplicate content can damage a website’s search rank, the CMS should avoid publishing such duplicate content. Sitemaps guide search engines to all the pages of a website. Hence, the CMS should automatically generate and update an XML sitemap. The CMS should generate a meaningful 404 error page when someone tries to access a non-existent URL and the website’s HTML, JavaScript and CSS should be W3C compatible. The CMS should generate SEO-friendly URLs that should be readable, unique for every page and static. The URLs should avoid capital letters and special characters while the spaces between words in the URL should be separated by hyphens.

The CMS should also allow the use of breadcrumbs and provide keyword suggestions. It is a great help from an SEO perspective if the CMS is able to generate an overview of back links and also offers an opportunity to manage those back links. Lastly, the CMS should support responsive design and have mobile/tablet-specific templates that are optimized for speed. These are just majority of the aspects that should be kept in mind when choosing a CMS system that makes sense for you.

Top CMS Platforms
Once you’ve decided that you should go for a CMS, you have to make a choice of which one to choose? Below, we will discuss three CMS systems that are widely used across the World Wide Web today:

WordPress
It is the most popular CMS platform on the Internet today by a long shot with over 60 million websites built using it. It has enough themes, plugins and add-ons for you to choose from as you seek to make your website unique. You do not need to be a technical wizard to use WordPress to create your own website. CNN and Sony are but a couple of famous brands that have websites powered by WordPress. WordPress is absolutely free, has a great support community, is SEO friendly, and has a lot of great functionality.

Drupal
Drupal is a fully open source CMS and quite popular. Drupal can be used for simple blogs as well as extensive content portals of large corporations. It doesn’t hog quite as much resources as WordPress does as it is the most technically advanced among the three CMS systems in our list. Drupal tends to give a website improved performance such as quicker loading of pages and faster response times compared to WordPress or Joomla. It is highly customizable with a plethora of plugins, themes and other configurable options. The White House website is one among many famous websites built using Drupal. It is a good option if you are larger business looking for a secure, reliable, SEO friendly and robust CMS system.

Joomla
Joomla is another great option as a free open-source CMS with a comprehensive extension library. Joomla is used by E-commerce websites, corporate and non-profit websites, social networking websites and others. Joomla templates have CSS3 animation and also let you customize the typography included the fact that it’s easy to embed Social Media buttons such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Among the numerous users across the globe, Harvard University uses it as their CMS system of choice. Lastly, Joomla is also SEO friendly.

Conclusion
A CMS system is the smart choice for your small or large business. There are many options when it comes to a CMS system so do your research and see what’s available in the marketplace. Gone are the days where you need to be a developer to change or manage your website due to the ease of use that has been provided by using a CMS system. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you need any type of customizations that are not available within a CMS system, you can always get the help of a development expert to assist you. If you need any help or assistance with any CMS system or just general advice, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/top-5-reasons-to-use-a-cms-system-for-your-website/

Search Engine Optimization To Increase Your Web Traffic

The Internet and Ecommerce world has boomed faster than anyone ever could have imagined. As a result of this massive online boom, online business owners want to be front and center when people are searching for the products or services that they offer within the search engines. This has led to a huge increase in demand for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) service providers across the world. SEO is known as a technique or tactic in which you optimize your website so that its ranking high within the search engines such as Google, Ask & Bing. Factors such as content, tagging, user-flow, page-speed and many more aspects affect how your website ranks within the search results. Below, we will go through some of the reasons why and how SEO services providers can help your business:

✓ Increase Visibility
They are more than a billion Internet users across the globe today and a majority of them are using search engines to find products or services. As a result, if you work with a capable SEO services provider, you can increase your rankings online. This will increase the traffic and visibility you have on your website which will in turn increase your customer base. By working with an SEO services provider, you can increase the visibility that your business has across the world.

✓ Target Your Audience
If you have a business large or small, you also have a target audience which can be tapped into. When you work with a capable and experienced SEO services provider, they can target the type of customers you are looking for through the extensive keyword research they conduct as well as the SEO techniques they employ when working on your website. This will again generate you more web traffic and new customers to your website.

✓ Free Traffic
SEO is not easy by any means and is not something that will generate your results instantly. Content is king when it comes to SEO as I am sure you have heard a million times by now in the world of SEO. It takes time, effort and consistency to increase your organic rankings within the search engines. However, once your website is ranking high within the search engines, you will generate unlimited traffic at absolutely no cost. When you compared it to other forms of advertising, it can be very beneficial as it won’t cost you a penny. The SEO services provider you work will be able to guide you and help you increase your rankings within the search engines through the various techniques that they will deploy when working on your website.

Summary
The world of SEO is not easy to navigate and can be quite daunting to say the least. One of the biggest challenges when working with an SEO services provider is to choose a partner that has the experience and expertise to deliver you higher rankings for your website. Ensure that the partner you choose only follows white-hat ethical SEO practices as if they don’t, you can suffer drastic consequences. Conduct the necessary due diligence and reference checks before starting any work so that you are working with a trusted/ethical SEO partner. If you are looking for an experienced, capable, ethical and results-driven SEO services provider, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group for any of your SEO or digital marketing needs.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/search-engine-optimization-increase-web-traffic/

Having A Mobile-friendly Website Will Affect Your SEO Rankings

If the writing wasn’t on the wall before, well now it officially is. Google has said that as of April 21, 2015, websites that are not mobile-friendly will have an impact from a Search Engine Optimization and it will officially affect your website rankings online. There is a reason why the SEO company (at least any good one) has been telling you that you need to take mobile seriously if you haven’t already been or planning to. According to a recent ComScore report issued in Q4 2014, mobile searches and traffic have outpaced desktop’s officially. The reason is really simple, everyone wants convenience and not everyone can afford a desktop computer with Internet access in their home. Before we go any deeper, what is a mobile-friendly website? A mobile-friendly website is a website that automatically adjusts according to the device it is being accessed from. In this case, if your website is being accessed from a mobile phone for example, it needs to automatically adjust on a users mobile screen without panning or zooming. The Search Engine Optimization company you work with will more than likely be able to help you or advise on how you can get your website to become mobile friendly if you haven’t already done so.

Back in 2010, when some analysts predicted the boom of the mobile-phone, some people that it was naïve or even borderline crazy. Today, that has completely changed as Google the largest search engine in the world has clearly said that by not having a mobile-ready website, it will affect your Search Engine Optimization rankings which clearly shows how important it has become. Mobile has officially become the 800 pound gorilla in the room that can no longer be ignored. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website or are not in the process of getting on or even addressing this issues, you are really crazy. All the Search Engine Optimization companies or agencies including us at Mind Digital are not surprised by this official announcement. We have been theorizing as well as unofficially telling clients that we believe it is a ranking factor and by Google officially announcing it, we are relieved but not surprised at all.

A country such as India where not everyone can afford a desktop, a smartphone or an Internet-enabled phone is cheap as well as accessible to everyone. An Internet-enable phone for example will cost you as low as 50 dollars and you can gain Internet access via the many pre-paid or post-paid options from your local phone service provider. Internet access has become super-cheap and accessible to anyone no matter how much money they make or what social class they are in. Easy accessibility is absolutely essential and an Internet-enabled phone allows you to access the Internet easier than ever thought possible. Whether it’s the best restaurant locally to find or even the latest movie to go see with your wife or a holiday destination review, an Internet-enabled phone allows you to get information at your fingertips no matter where you are. Logically, if so much ease is being provided to consumers, they will access information from their mobile devices and you therefore need to give them a mobile-friendly browsing experience. From the perspective of an SEO company or really any digital agency for that matter, having a mobile-friendly website is an absolute must in todays interconnected world.

Another huge proponent or reason why the mobile Internet world has taken off so dramatically is Social Media. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram are just some of the reasons why the mobile world as a whole has taken off dramatically. From people checking in on Facebook at a hotel to Tweeting about an experience with a product or Instagramming a photo of themselves on vacation with family, Social Media is a huge catapult factor of the mobile-enabled world. As a result, when people have an Internet-enabled device, they will use it for other things naturally. Therefore, the use of a mobile phone will be natural and as a result people will access information websites from their mobile devices. These above reasons and logic are just some of the reasons why the mobile Internet has exploded and is something that can no longer be ignored.

Summary
It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee as the saying goes. If you don’t have a mobile website, you are doing a dis-service to yourself, your users and your business. Not only will it affect your SEO rankings or make the life of your SEO company more difficult to try to get you to rank if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you can drop in your current Google rankings. No one officially knows how much of an actual impact it will really have on your website rankings but if Google is officially telling you, it is something that can no longer be procrastinated or quite frankly ignored. A mobile-friendly website and your SEO rankings now officially go hand in hand. If you have a website or are looking to get one developed, ensure it is mobile-friendly and If you are looking for a company to help you become mobile-friendly, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital for any of your development or digital marketing needs.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/mobile-friendly-website-will-affect-seo-rankings/