Tag Archive for: web design

No Social Media – No Business

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Website design telford social-media

Without social media no modern business can survive. This might seem extreme, but as a business owner you need to know that without it your company will struggle. It’s not a question of how good your product is. It doesn’t even come down to good old fashioned customer service. No, you need social media because that is the forum for modern communication. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and many more – all of these social media providers are used by millions of potential customers every day. With each user connected to an exponentially larger number of people, this is the 21rst century equivalent of word of mouth, and without it your business won’t be relevant at best, and at worst, no one will ever hear about the great products or services you provide.

It’s not all doom and gloom. A little knowledge goes a long way, and before you know it you could be reaping the rewards of an effective social media campaign.
Share and Share a Like
No, that’s not a typo. Social media is based on likes, shares, and tags. Every time a user clicks that like button or uses a hashtag, their friends and family see this on their social media accounts. It’s a form of endorsement and one which goes a long way to creating confidence in a brand, product, or service.

Just look at these statistics:

• A massive 93% of consumers are influenced by social media when making a purchase.
• Each day 135,000 users join Twitter.
• 50% of Facebook’s 500 million active members use the service daily.
• Tumblr hosts over 99 billion unique blog posts!

These figures are only the tip of the iceberg with other social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Pinterest reaching a huge audience in of themselves.

The takeaway lesson here is that social media provides your business with a sea of opportunities; millions of customers waiting to be impressed by expertly crafted social media campaigns. All you need is a talented social media expert who’ll use their knowledge to put your business front and centre. A little goes a long way, and with just one effective social media campaign running, your sales could be transformed over night.

If you would like MAWebdesign to set up your social media accounts just call us or contact us using our contact form!

 

LEARN SEO

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Get Google to fall in love with your website – With these tips from MAWEBDESIGN

The more often your website gets crawled, the sooner your new content can start appearing in the search results, and bringing in traffic and sales.

The meaning of this is clear: if you aren’t at the top of page one, you need to boost your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO).

To help you successfully build your business using SEO tactics, we have compiled the following tips and strategies to help build your business online presence, drive traffic, generate leads, enhance exposure and increase conversions to getting better rankings on search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo etc.

Create more content
Creating new content is good for a whole range of reasons. Website users love it, and so do search engines. Every time Google crawls your website, it looks for stuff it hasn’t seen before. If it can’t find any it might wait a little longer before visiting you again next time. But if it does find new stuff, it’ll probably come back sooner.
Try to update your content as often as it makes sense to do so. (Remember though: quality is better than quantity. So don’t just create content for no reason make sure it’s about the page you are updating)

But don’t duplicate content
Yes Google likes seeing lots of content, but it doesn’t like seeing the same content over and over. So don’t duplicate your content.

Write like a human.
None of the above matters if you create content that sounds like a robot wrote it.
Write great stuff, follow the steps above, have patience, and you’ll see results.

Mention keywords where they matter most.
Include your “one thing” in the site title, domain name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page content.
If you’re on WordPress, you can change a lot of this in the General Settings or through a plugin like All in One SEO Pack.

Add a sitemap
Create a sitemap for your website and submit it to your search engine webmaster accounts.

Use a permalink structure that includes keywords.
Some sites have “weird” permalink structures that use numbers to identify pages.
Don’t do this. It’s bad for SEO and just doesn’t look good.
Use a URL structure that includes text, and make sure you include keywords in your URLs.

So instead of having a page’s URL be this:
http://domain-name.co.uk/?p=20

It should look more like this:
http:// domain-name.co.uk/offers/

Get links
As well as improving your rank, bringing in more traffic, links potentially get your website crawled more quickly. Why? Because when Google crawls the web, it will find (hopefully) lots of links to your site littered throughout it. The more times it sees other websites pointing to you with links, the harder it is to stay away.

Fix broken links
A search engine can only index what its spiders can crawl. Broken links within your site will stop a search engine in its tracks and lower your ranking. Make sure every link on your page works and points to the right place.

Remove anything that slows down your website.
Page load times are important, so get rid of any non-essentials that bog down your website.
These may including music players, large images, flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins.

Know your crawl rate
Finally you should monitor your crawl rate. After all, that’s what we’re talking about. Google probably won’t crawl your site all at once at regular intervals: it’ll do a few pages one day, a few more the next. But these are just details. You want Google to crawl as much of your site as often as possible. So to find out, log into your Webmaster Tools to check your crawl rate.

Use keywords in your images.
Include words that reflect your site topic in the image title, description, and alt attributes.
Also, re-title the file name if it doesn’t reflect your main keywords (e.g. products.jpg instead of image1.jpg).

Bigger isn’t always better
Your camera might take images at high resolution, but when it comes to your website, downsize them. A resolution of 72 pixels per inch will give you an on-screen display that is almost identical to a much higher resolution, but with a much smaller file size. This means a faster loading time for your website.

Add video to your site
YouTube is the No. 2 search engine (ahead of Bing), and since Google owns it, video content hosted on YouTube improves your page rank in searches. Plus, it’s a powerful way to communicate the excitement and beauty of travel through visual stimulation.

Make sure your website is indexed in search engines.
A lot of search engines will automatically find and index your content, but don’t count on it.
You want to be sure engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are crawling your site, so that people are finding you online. (You can add them directly, if they’re not.)

Responsive design helps SEO
Mobile searching is growing faster than desktop searching, with the expectation that it will overtake desktop searching in the next few years. Making your site fully responsive means that mobile search users can easily navigate your website.

Bonus tip! Use Google+
Your final top tip to get your site crawled more often is quite simply, to share it on Google+, Google’s social network. Remember, one of Google’s motivations for creating a social network was to get access to real-time data. So, if you share your new content on Google+, it’s likely to get crawled more often.

Your online platforms should be integrated so you can easily control them and see how they work together to bring visitors to your site and drive sales.

How has our SEO tips helped increase your business results and profits?

Need any help contact us