SEO is evolving with every algorithmic update, giving rise to new opportunities and challenges. Therefore, it is important for businesses to strike the right balance to take advantage of it. Proper understanding and updated knowledge can make a huge difference and allow businesses to grow and prosper seamlessly. Facts:

• SEO is one of the most effective ways to drive sales and build relationships with customers.
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the most effective tool for lead generation.
• SEO has become a key player in online advertising.

Here are a few SEO trends that will dominate the market for long: (AMP) Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Accelerated Mobile Pages is becoming more and more popular amongst SEOs and web developers. According to Google, “AMP is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimised content once and have it load instantly everywhere”. In a nutshell, it is an accessible framework for developing fast loading mobile web pages. Benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages:  

• Improved users’ experience.
• Faster load time.
• Helps to lessen the risk of high bounce rates.

Content marketing Today, more and more businesses are using content marketing to influence their users. Now, they use various formats to disseminate their content, such as:

• articles
• blog posts
• case studies
• whitepapers
• videos
• tweets
• images
• presentations
• e-books
• e-guides
• online tutorials
• infographics
•  press releases

Tips:

• Learn simple tactics to craft relevant and focused content. (In a crowded content marketplace, the key to stand out is by providing a unique perspective, through a lens only you can offer - Hootsuite)
• Learn the art of storytelling. (Good stories change the way you think. Great stories change the way you feel - Pressboard)
• Identify and learn the essential attributes of a clear call-to-action.
• Collaborate with like-minded marketers to develop unique and useful content.
• Never forget to track the effectiveness of content marketing.

This trend shows that online businesses are focusing on providing different types of content to improve their visibility as well as brand image. Technical Audit Technical Audit will rule the roost forever because it makes your websites clean. Technical audit includes fixing URL and server errors, creation and implementation of XML sitemap and robots.txt files, addressing duplicity between domain and main page as well as removal of Internal duplicate pages and much more. Optimising user’s experience Today, more and more businesses are trying to improve their user’s experience by making their website:

• Faster
• Secure
• Mobile friendly
• Easily navigable

To be more specific, they make their websites mobile friendly and optimise them for better output. Statistics:

• According to Google, more searches take place on mobile devices than on desktop.
• Google introduced mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor for search engines on April 21, 2015.
• 83% of the #1 search results are mobile-friendly.

Mobile apps Mobile friendly websites are in vogue, hence, more and more businesses prefer it. (According to Wikipedia- A mobile app is a software application designed to run on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers) Facts: Mobile applications help businesses to engage customers and boost the bottom line. Benefits of mobile applications:

• Support loyalty rewards programs.
• Help to target location-specific users.
• Help to assist users.
• Offer the best payment solutions.
• Foster communication and connectivity.

It is difficult to predict the trends of SEO, because they change abruptly; however, these are some of the most essential elements that will remain at the core.

Today, more and more marketers use social media sites to improve their brand’s visibility. However, to remain visible, they need to utilise the most powerful social media management tools because these tools simplify the task. Most of the marketers are yet to discover the latest social media management tools, their advantages and their functionalities. This article will help them to develop an understanding of the big advantages of using these tools. To monitor social engagement With the help of social media brands marketers can reach out to their targeted customers easily. Whether it’s asking questions or gaining support, brands now have a direct channel to get feedback from their customers, and no doubt, they are taking full advantage of it. However, the situation becomes critical, when it comes to checking nearly thousands of social interactions. This is the time when social media management tools come into the picture, because they help them to view and track all social interactions at one place. To manage many social pages Businesses often have many social profiles on multiple social platforms for marketing, which makes it difficult for them to manage all profiles simultaneously. Social media tools can assemble all the messages from all your profiles into a single place. This saves both time and efforts of social media marketing managers. To build and maintain relationships Every customer is unique and valuable for businesses. Businesses cannot afford to lose them at any cost. That is why they always want to keep track of every single customer; their interaction and their needs/demands. This is a complex task; however, achievable with the help of social media management tools. Social media management tools allow managers to take relevant notes as and when required and respond to customers accordingly. To align collaboration It is difficult to streamline an inbox when many people are handling multiple accounts. A powerful social media management tool can help you to streamline your task of listening and responding to your audiences. It can help you to clear your inbox and keep everything in order. To analyse performance In order to plan a future course of action, it is essential to study posts to determine what worked and what didn’t. Effective social tools help at this stage and provide you with comprehensive insight into industry. This will help you to develop your marketing strategy in an aligned manner. Social tools provide comprehensive data so you can:

• Monitor the performance of your keywords as well as posts
• Study the rate of users’ engagement
• Gather competitive intelligence
• Traffic sources

Social tools are all about augmenting strategic social media management and getting the full value from your existing strategy. Statistics:

• There are 2.3 billion active social media users.
• 91% of retail brands use two or more social media channels.
• Social media advertising revenue will reach $9.8 billion in 2016.
• 70% of the U.S. population has at least one social networking profile.

One of the biggest advantages of using social media tools is that they also have their mobile applications that allow managers to manage everything remotely.

Aligning online businesses is not always easy especially when it comes to deal with social media sites. It is quite tough for those businesses that have little knowledge about different types of social media sites and their functionalities. Therefore, it is important to develop a deep understanding of these sites and devise a strategic framework and adopt tactical approach before choosing any powerful social site. To learn how top online businesses handle these sites and improve their brand visibility, read this article. Here are a few top social media sites that must be used for brand building:

• LinkedIn – This is a powerful social networking site for businesses. Both B2B and B2C companies use it to improve their brand value and visibility. It is helpful in targeting your audiences in a professional way. However, you need to analyse it carefully using it according to your businesses objectives.
• Instagram – Use Instagram to establish your brand identity and increase customer engagement. Share user-generated content, images of trending topics and other images to attract audiences.
• Snapchat –This platform helps you to connect with your widely distributed audiences. You should try creative techniques such as Q&A sessions, contests and giveaways to engage the maximum number of audiences.
• Pinterest – Use Pinterest to share your images and attract audiences. It is easier to showcase your products in an interactive way.
• Twitter – Use Twitter to popularise your brand, connect with audiences and spread your word out. This is an amazing platform to engage customers. Tweet your blog posts, articles, industry news and much more.

So, include these social media sites in your marketing strategy to build your brand. Quick tips:

• Share industry related articles, job opportunities and company news on LinkedIn.
• Use LinkedIn Ads and InMail to connect with audiences.
• Build your brand’s authority by publishing substantial articles on LinkedIn.
• Use Hashtags to get more exposure for your Instagram posts.
• Pinterest is all about your images, so share quality visuals.
• Use "Rich Pins" (app, movie, recipe, article, product, and place.) for instant visibility.
• Try to "reply", "like" and "Retweet" as often as possible.
• Join Twitter Chats for better results.

Quick stats:

• LinkedIn is responsible for a staggering 64% of all visits from social media channels to corporate websites.
• 37% of Twitter users purchase from a brand they follow!
• 79% of Twitter users are likely to recommend brands they follow!
• 30% of millennials in the U.S. use Snapchat.
• Twitter users are nearly 5x more likely to share stories than Facebook users!
• 51.8% of social media users are on Instagram.
• 27% of U.S. population uses Instagram.
• 42% of female internet users are on Pinterest.
• 52% of online adults use multiple social media sites.

Cut throat competition, customers’ demands, and peer pressure compel online business owners to embrace out-of-the-box internet marketing and SEO techniques. Most businesses follow the guidelines of SEO; however, when it comes to its technical aspect, they fail to understand its implications and complications. All these make the competition difficult. Here are a few SEO techniques and on-page factors that need to be considered:

• Use Google Search Console – To make your website technically strong, you need to access Google Search Console. It offers you exact insights and relevant information about your site’s usability and ranking factors.
• Remove errors – Download a detailed list of crawl errors from Google Webmaster tool and fix them immediately. This will increase the speed of your site.
• Audit backlinks – SEO is all about building quality backlinks. If you are building backlinks, you should check and filter them regularly. Check Google Webmaster tool also to check your links and analyse associated domains.
• Use Google Analytics – Use Google Analytics to monitor your website’s traffic. Check your site’s visitors, acquisition statistics, behavioural statistics and much more. (Tip- Analyse the performance of your web pages as well as specific keywords.)
• Check site’s speed - Use Google’s site speed test tool to check how quickly your website loads. This tool also provides suggestions to improve the speed of your site.
• Create an XML Sitemap - This helps crawlers to crawl your website accurately. However, you should remove dead URLs from sitemap to make it more effective.
• Social media integration – Install right social media buttons and social plug-ins on your website for the maximum possible exposure.
• Choose https - HTTPS is a protocol for secure communication over a network. Choose it instead of HTTP.
• Internal linking – Use internal linking to improve your website’s performance. (Internal links are links that go from one page to a different page on the same domain.)
• Address pagination - There are 2 prime issues that need to be addressed in pagniation: duplicate content issue and crawling issue. (Tip – Use command “rel = prev” and “rel = next” or “rel=canonical” to solve this issue.)
• Case Sensitive URLs – If your site has both upper and lower case URLs, it would be considered as duplicate by Google. Solve this case sensitive problem by re-writing the URL.

Implement these SEO techniques to make your website technically strong and competitive.

URLs are prime ranking factors. A proper URL structure improves a website’s rankings and makes it more user and search engine friendly. So, use it as a starting point to empower your website. Here are a few technical aspects (URL structure) that should be included in your SEO:

• Keep your URLs simple – Keep your site’s URL as simple, logical and readable as possible. Complex and too long URLs can confuse users as well as search engines. (Tip – Keep your URLs short and memorable to improve crawl rates.)
• Use hyphens – Punctuation is important. Use hyphens in your URLs rather than underscores. This is important to gain rankings in SERP. (Google recommends hyphens.)
• Consider URL case – Developers often ignore this concept. You should use lower case version in your URL patterns. (Tip – If you have both the versions on your website, prefer redirection to the lower case URLs.)
• Avoid using a, an, the in your URL structure – These are known as "stop words" and should not be used in URL structure of your website. So, avoid them.
• Include keywords – Add keywords or key phrases in URL structure to gain prominence from search engines.
• Use robots.txt – Use robots.txt to stop web crawlers to crawl certain pages of your website. This file also helps you to improve the experience of web crawlers.
• Use Webmaster tool – Use Webmaster tool to check manual actions, HTML improvements and duplicate titles.
• Session Ids – Avoid using session Ids in your URLs. You can use cookies instead of session Ids.
• Redirections - Never use too many redirections because it may confuse users as well as search engines.
• Avoid keyword stuffing – Some optimisers stuff their keywords in URLs, which is a bad practice. So, keep your URLs logical.
• Avoid parameters – Always avoid unnecessary URL parameters to keep your URLs clean and clear.

So, follow these URL structure rules to strengthen your website’s architecture. Quick facts:

• Pages that use URLs with keywords often rank higher.

Quick tips:

• Use hyphens to separate words for readability.
• Use Open Site Explorer to research backlinks, identify top pages, view social activity, and analyse anchor text.
• A URL should always be shorter than 2083 characters.
• Use actual words in URLs rather than long ID numbers.
• Session Ids can create massive amounts of duplication, avoid it.
• Trim unnecessary parameters.
• Avoid using high number of slashes in URLs.

Real-time communication platforms like social media are widely used by businesses today; however, they fail to manage it wisely. That puts online businesses at risk of losing credibility and customer base. Therefore, to mitigate such risks and maintain online credibility, businesses must use advanced social media tools. These tools help businesses to manage their social media marketing efforts. Here are a few advanced social media tools to be considered:

• Sendible – This is one of the most powerful social media management dashboards. It helps to engage customers, monitor social mentions and grow your brand’s visibility. (Tip – Use Sendible to schedule your posts in advance with photos or videos attached.)
• MeetEdgar – This tool allows you to organise and schedule content to make sure that your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) never run out of content. You can use it to grow social traffic. (It is a library of your social media posts.)
• SocialOomph – This smart tool allows you to schedule content on social networks, monitor and analyse your social activity, track keywords and find right people to follow.
• CoSchedule – This is a helpful tool to create, organise and schedule social posts. You can easily organise, plan and promote your social media or content marketing strategy. (Tip – Use it to plan, create, and publish all your content.)
• Facebook Insights – This is a powerful and efficient analytics platform for Facebook Pages. It offers relevant insights to business owners for making informed decisions. You can use it to analyse your competitors.
• BuzzSumo – Use this tool to identify the most shared content on social media channels. It helps you to monitor your competitors and analyse their content.
• Audisense – This tool allows you to analyse your Twitter followers, their region, their interests and much more. It also allows you to select the best time to tweet.
• Stencil – This is a useful tool to create visual content. It offers more than 700,000 backgrounds and 200,000 icons to create the perfect image for your social post.
• AgoraPulse – This is an effective tool to manage your Facebook and Twitter presence. It offers customer relationship management software, applications, analytics reports and more.

In a nutshell select the most suitable social media tools to improve your online presence and credibility. Quick facts:

• 77% of B2C companies have acquired new customers through their Facebook presence.
• Facebook accounts for approximately 21% of ALL social media referral traffic in the world.

A website needs two key ingredients: perfect SEO strategy and its implementation plans. It means researching competitors and understanding undercurrents of online environment. Online marketers often devise powerful SEO strategies; however, they miss certain essential elements that should not be ignored. Here are a few essential SEO elements that should be included in an SEO strategy:

• Focus on RankBrain - RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system, which helps Google to process search results and provide relevant search results. Therefore, you should create useful content that answers unique queries to help users.
• Optimise your local presence – To grab the attention of local audiences, you need to optimise your Google My Business page. Create a unique description of your business and choose the right categories for optimum benefits.
• Optimise for voice search - Voice search is growing like never before; therefore, you should optimise your website for it in a simple language.
• Implement AMP - The main aim of AMP is to ensure a fast rendering of your page. This improves the efficiency of a web page as well as overall mobile experience of users.
• Optimise for mobile – You should optimise your website for mobile users to enhance their experience and improve your rankings.
• Optimise your social presence – If you are on the web, you should also be on social media. Use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as well as other powerful social sites to establish better communication with customers and improve brand image.
• Use Yelp – This is one of the most effective platforms that connect people with local businesses. Use it to improve your local visibility. (Tip – Provide complete information of your business for optimum advantages.)
• Follow SEO practices – Use SEO tactics to promote your website and attract new customers. SEO makes your website usable, visible and reliable.
• Link building activities – Adopt the most proactive link building activities for your website. Develop industry-related articles, business-specific press releases, blogs, case studies, and videos to achieve quality backlinks.

Include these SEO elements in your internet marketing strategy to grow your business. Quick facts:

• By 2019, mobile advertising will represent 72% of US digital ad spending.
• 61% of CMOs say search engines are an effective marketing channel.
• 89% of customers begin their buying process with a search engine.

PowerPoint presentations help businesses to represent their information in an interactive and compelling way. Businesses use them to convey their messages but, only few businesses are able to use them in a right way. Therefore, it is essential to create PowerPoint presentations in a systematic way to gain better exposure. Here are a few tips and techniques to create creative PowerPoint presentations:

• Create your own design – Don’t use ready made templates. Always create your own design according to your business objectives and industry theme. (Tip - Use your business’s theme and logo for the maximum impact.)
• Colour combinations – Never use bold colours; use normal colours to make your slides unique and readable. (Tip – Use contrasting colours to gain an edge.)
• Good fonts – Always use good fonts to improve readability of your slides. (Tip- You can use Helvetica font for good visibility of your messages.)
• Text – Use as short text as possible on your slides. Avoid using lengthy paragraphs because it may distract your users. (Tip – Use bullet points to clarify your messages.)
• Images – Images catch the attention of users, hence include images throughout your slides to grab attention. (Tip – Good images make your message more powerful and effective.)
• Sequence – Make sure your slides are logically arranged to provide complete information of your products or services.
• Include CTAs – Use CTA on every slide of your presentation so that your readers can take actions.
• Infographics – Use infographs to represent your information in a practical way. Use factual and precise information in your infographs to make it more beautiful.
• Study your competitors – Analyse your competitor’s presentation techniques.
• Share wisely – Today, there are many PowerPoint presentation sharing platforms, you must use them wisely to get instant exposure and prominence.
• Social media – Use top social media platforms to improve the visibility of your PowerPoint presentations.
• Growth – Examine the growth of your business and adjust your presentation marketing strategies according to your objectives.

Follow these tips and techniques to create creative and visually attractive PowerPoint presentations to:

• achieve your goals,
• make your brand valuable

Quick facts:

• SlideShare receives 500 percent more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
• 70 million professionals trust SlideShare.
• PowerPoint presentations can contribute to a business’s growth and raise its visibility.
• SlideShare is one of the top 100 most-visited websites in the world.

There are many monitoring tools for checking a website’s health; however, Google Search Console is by far the most popular and powerful tool. It has certain extraordinary features that can transform a website. SEO experts should use it to understand and fine-tune their website’s structure. Fact:

• The Search Console is a dominant, free and vitally useful service offered by Google.
• Google Search Console helps to optimise a website to make it search engine friendly.
• Google Search Console helps you to monitor your website’s performance and identify critical technical issues.

Let’s discover how to use Google Search Console to fine-tune a website:

• Site Settings – You must set your preferred domain with the help of Site Settings. This will not only resolve your canonical issue, but also improve your site’s visibility.
• Change of Address – Use this if you have migrated your entire site to a new domain. This will help Google to index your new site.
• Structured Data - Use this section to identify how Google has structured your website and indexed it.
• HTML Improvements – Never ignore this section because it highlights the duplicate Meta titles and descriptions. It has an easy-to-use feature, which helps to optimise your website systematically.
• Accelerated Mobile Pages – This is a significant ranking signal. Study and analyse the report to make further changes in your website. (Tip- If you see errors in this section, fix them to make your site mobile friendly.)
• Search Analytics – Study Search Analytics to identify the amount of traffic driven to your website. This will also show you the organic position of your keywords. (Tip – Study your site’s average CTR, total clicks, impressions and average position of keywords.)
• Links to Your Site – Access this section to see important domains that link to your website. This is one of the best indicators of your site’s performance.
• Internal Links – This section shows internal link structure of your website. Use it to improve your internal link structure.
• Manual Actions – Always keep an eye on this section to check your website for any type of manual penalty. (Tip – If your website is hit by a manual penalty, understand the issues and fix them immediately.)
• Index Status – Study this crucial section to determine how many pages of your site are currently included in Google’s index.
• Crawl Errors – Use this section to identify total number of site errors, server errors, 404 errors, and URL errors. (Tip – If your website has many server errors, 404 errors, and URL errors, fix them immediately.)
• Sitemaps – Submit your xml sitemap in this section to allow Google to crawl all the pages of your website.

Hope this article will help you to improve your site’s usability and visibility.

Social Media Marketing is all over the place, no wonder more and more businesses use it to grow their business and achieve success in their niche. Social Media Marketing helps you to achieve:

• website traffic
• conversions
• revenues
• brand awareness

It is a fact that Social Media Marketing can help to achieve brand’s visibility. However, a proper social media marketing strategy should be devised. According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers claimed that social media marketing is essential for their businesses’ success. This shows the vitality and influence of social media marketing in today’s environment. Marketers also rely on it because it is one of the fastest mediums to establish and improve relations with audiences. Some of the most popular social media platforms used by marketers are:

• Facebook
• Google+
• Pinterest
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Reddit
• Yelp

Using social media in business marketing not only doubles a website’s traffic, but also assists businesses to reach more customers in less time. It provides a valuable platform where business owners and customers can share their opinions and understand one another. According to Social Media Examiner, 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media, which shows widespread adoption of social media amongst marketers across the globe. According to several online researches and surveys, businesses can easily improve their brand loyalty by using the most effective social media platforms. According to another study, 53% of Americans who follow brands on social media are more loyal to those brands. Social media marketing Facts:

1. Blogging is one of the best social media marketing tools.
2. Social media marketing techniques help businesses to achieve quick success.
3. Images, videos, and infographics are game changers.
4. Social media is a great way to build followers, fans, and loyal customers.
5. Social media marketing improves trust and reliability.

In fact, companies involved in social media activities have reported of converting more customers than ever before. In a nutshell, continuous interaction, daily posting of relevant images, articles, quotes and blogs can make a huge difference, especially when it comes to conversion. According to several studies, social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate. In addition to that social media platforms also help businesses to improve their trust and credibility, the next big thing for them to beat their competitors. So, are you ready to establish your credibility and presence? Social media marketing tips:

1. Always use a unique strategy tailored for each social media platform.
2. Always post industry-related articles, images, videos, etc.
3. Try to develop your brand’s visibility with unique content.
4. Keep your followers well informed.
5. Create effective Facebook and Twitter Ads.
6. Post special offers, discounts and other details for audiences.
7. Encourage fans and followers to share their views and opinions.
8. Focus on creating useful, instructional “how-to” videos.
9. Never underestimate the power of Location-Based Social Media Tools such as Yelp.

Today, many social media platforms are there, so choose according to your objectives. The sooner the better! Adopt social media marketing to extend your network and grow your revenues.