In modern culture, the term social Networking is thrown around frequently. What is Social Networking you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Social Networking is the act of communicating with other individuals or organizations over some form of internet based platform. Social Networking is typically(and often wrongly) associated with young people. This, however, is not the case at all. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are growing at a rate which proves that their core demographic is in fact, everybody. YouTube videos receive over 2 billion views per day, whilst Facebook has over 600 Million active users, almost a tenth of the world’s population. Figures like these can’t be ignored so it is important that as a business you choose to embrace these new forms of communication and allow them to help your business flourish.
WordPress is the software I use to build websites. It allows the use of many plug-ins that allow you to integrate your site with the many Social Networking platforms, allowing you to build a following and let people know what your business is doing with ease. For example, a plug-in called “WP to Twitter” will automatically post a Tweet when you publish a new blog post. Another plug-in called “Share and Follow” allows for you to place share and Facebook ‘like’ buttons on your WordPress posts, meaning that should somebody find a post interesting, they can easily share it on a platform of their choice.
By utilizing just some of the many tools that WordPress has at your disposal, you can bring your site up to date with all of the latest Social Networking trends. Allowing people to share your website easily is a great way of generating web traffic and in turn, customers. If used to its full potential, Social Networking can be a great marketing device that will give you the edge over your competition.
1. A Sitemap is a web page that provides an organised list of all the pages on a given site. The reason for doing this is making user navigation as easy as possible. Sites with many pages can sometimes be almost maze like in nature, with different routes available to get to any given page. A Sitemap counters this by providing a simple and hierarchical index of an entire website that can be used to find pages “deeper” within a site.
2.The second type of Sitemap is an XML Sitemap. This is a very important part of having your website rank high in the search engines, as it creates a concise index of all your pages in a format that is easily understandable by the search engine spiders(software robots that discover and index web pages). The more efficiently your site is crawled, the more benefit you will get each time it happens.
The WordPress software I use has the ability to create both types of Sitemap at a high level. This means that neither the spiders or potential customers will have any trouble discovering all of the pages on your site. Both of Web Design Wolverhampton’s own Sitemaps can be found by clicking the orange button in the bottom right corner of the homepage, view these for an example of how they will look on your own site.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a method of delivering updates from a particular website, notifying users about any changes that have taken place, i.e blog posts, news updates etc. RSS feeds are viewable in all of the major web browsers and can be subscribed to at the click of a button without having to divulge personal information such as an email address. By subscribing to many RSS feeds, a user can have all of their favorite websites summarised into one easily viewable stream of updates, changes and new additions. This allows them to keep track of all their favorite sites effortlessly.
Advantages of RSS
Aside from the user side advantages mentioned above, there are also advantages for the website publishing the feed. The main one being that the google spiders(the software robots that index web pages) value sites with RSS feeds higher than ones without, meaning new pages and posts appear much quicker in Google searches.
WordPress and RSS
Websites built using WordPress include an RSS feed as standard. This will notify subscribers of any new services, news, products etc that are on offer. Web Design Wolverhampton even has it’s own RSS feed that shows all new blog posts as well as any new websites and posts added to my portfolio, have a look by clicking the orange RSS logo in the bottom right corner of the homepage.
Handheld devices such as the IPhone, IPod, Blackberry and other smartphones are becoming one of the primary ways many people access the internet, either on the move or simply out of convenience. The use of these devices has risen dramatically over the past few years due to the increased speed of mobile internet networks, coupled with the increased capabilities of the devices themselves. The steep incline shows no sign of levelling any time soon with experts predicting that the number of smartphones shipped worldwide will increase from 3.5 million to 90 million by 2012.
Why is it important to optimise for smartphones?
Smartphones are feature rich phones that allow for smooth and easy internet access from any location. The two most widely seen examples are the iPhone and the Blackberry, although the google nexus, HTC’s and the palm pre are other popular smartphones. Whilst these phones may be smart, they still lack some of the performance capabilities of a regular desktop PC or laptop and so certain areas need to be optimised accordingly.
Most entrepreneurs and business owners will use their phone as a way of making purchases and decisions whilst in between appointments on a busy schedule. For this reason having a site that runs perfectly on mobile devices stops being a luxury and becomes a necessity for successful e-commerce (buying and selling online).
This is where I come in. WordPress (the software with which I build most of my websites) has a handy add on called wp-touch which allows for a site to be perfectly optimised and simplified to run on mobile devices. This process takes nothing away from how a site will look on a PC and instead creates an entirely new mobile version of a website that will be loaded automatically on smartphones. Not only this, but at the touch of a button the user can swap between the mobile and regular version of a site at any time, allowing for a browsing experience that suits them.
Does your website have any external links? An external link is a link to another site.
Why is this important? Google values your site on how many links it has incoming as positive votes, and outgoing links as negative votes. So the more sites that link in to you, the better. The less sites that you link out to, the better. Easier than it sounds because you must get people to link to you without a link back in return. (Methods of obtaining links is a subject for another post)
Most small sites I see have at least 3-5 external links. Most of these links are to associations they are members of, link directories, or sometimes external links just to be helpful to their visitors. (However, this has a negative effect on the site’s position in Google).
By adding a ‘no follow’ tag to these links, Google will not cast these outgoing links as negative votes, therefore making an improvement to your positioning with them. The ‘no follow’ tag is very easy to implement and can make huge difference on your placement in Google.
The ‘no follow’ link strategy is employed by most of the major websites including Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. There’s no reason why small businesses shouldn’t employ the same inexpensive, yet highly effective tactics.
The majority of my sites I build are powered by WordPress. This allows the use of plug-ins (sorts of upgrades). I always include the SEO Smart Links plugin, this automatically adds the ‘no follow’ tag to any external links on my customers’ sites.
If you are not yet one of my customers and have any external links on your website. I can add the ‘no follow’ tags at a very reasonable price. Please use this contact form to get in touch.
How often is a particular search phrase used in Google? This is a good question, and one that you should be asking to form a good online marketing plan.
When looking for the frequency of the use of popular keywords and phrases, I use ‘Google Trends’. It’s free to use and it provides data that’s invaluable to online marketing.
Here are all the links you’ll need to use Google Trends;
Choosing the correct keywords for your website is essential. If you’re not getting the right traffic, how will you get sales of your product or service?
The ultimate tool for choosing keywords is the Google Adwords: Keywords Tool. It’s free to use and it gives you advertiser competition, search volume and many more vital statistics about the keywords your potential customers are using.
I can highly recommend the following video as great guide for using the tool: (Video by coachlasse)
In modern culture, the term social Networking is thrown around frequently. What is Social Networking you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Social Networking is the act of communicating with other individuals or organizations over some form of internet based platform. Social Networking is typically(and often wrongly) associated with young people. This, however, is not the case at all. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are growing at a rate which proves that their core demographic is in fact, everybody. YouTube videos receive over 2 billion views per day, whilst Facebook has over 600 Million active users, almost a tenth of the world’s population. Figures like these can’t be ignored so it is important that as a business you choose to embrace these new forms of communication and allow them to help your business flourish.
