by Nick Throlson | Aug 2, 2017 | SEO, Web Design
Have you checked the loading speed of your website lately? The results of this exercise may be shocking and a slow-loading website could be causing all kinds of problems that you may not be aware of. However, finding out that your website is slow could save you a lot of heartache in the future and it gives you the opportunity to fix the problem before things get worse. If you're still not convinced that you need to address this important issue, the reasons explained below may change your mind.
Online Visitors Expect a Fast Loading Website
Today's online users expect more from a website. They expect it to be useful, they expect to have a great user experience, and above all, they expect a modern website to load instantly. If this does not happen, most online users are impatient and they will leave your website and go elsewhere to find the content, products, or services they are searching for online.
A Fast Website Builds Trust
The vast majority of professional websites that are developed by the leading organizations in the world perform to an extremely high standard. Your website should do the same thing or your visitors will start to lose trust in you, your website, and your online business. A poor hosting solution may be the issue, so you should consider purchasing a reliable, faster hosting plan from a professional hosting company like Certa Hosting.
A Fast Website Increases Conversions
Different website owners have different business models and they also have different types of conversions that are important to them. Some website owners want to convert website visitors into email subscribers, some website owners want to convert website visitors into paying customers, while other website owners want more people to click or view the advertising on their websites.
However, all of these different types of conversions can be affected in a negative way if a website performs poorly. This is particularly true if people get annoyed or frustrated while they try to navigate your website and they will be less likely to answer a call to action if the website is slow to load.
You Will Have More Returning Visitors
Websites such as blogs often depend on returning visitors who come back to a website to consume new content on a regular basis. If a website visitor has had a positive experience in the past, they will be more likely to visit again. A fast-loading website is one of the factors they will take into account before deciding to return to a website.
You Get More Organic Traffic from the Search Engines
When the search engines are ranking a website, its loading speed is a factor that is often taken into account. The more of the search engines guidelines like this that you follow, the better your website should rank.
A fast loading website is no longer an option in today's online world. Each of the reasons above should be seriously considered and if your website is slow, you need to rectify the problem immediately.
by Nick Throlson | Aug 1, 2017 | SEO, Social Media, WordPress
Job hunting is stressful enough. Being rejected is completely disheartening, and being repeatedly rejected can even make you feel like you aren?t worth it. Not only are there simple things that you can fix that?ll hopefully make you more appealing to potential employers, but there are also topics that you should learn and familiarize yourself that will wow them. Being hired is about selling yourself. Knowing these three topics can give you an edge over your competition because it shows that you know the basics of how the world today works.
Social Media
Social media is a topic that is both very easy to learn, and something that becomes increasingly complicated. You can know how to use social media, but the fact is, most people only know how to use it for their personal life. It is how to use it for businesses that can make you instantly more hireable. You don?t have to be an expert, but you learn the best practices.
Know how to increase engagement, how advertising on the social mediums works, and, most importantly, know its limitations. A great way to both practice social media marketing and have an example to show your employers is to start your own blog that you market. Think of it as your guinea pig where you can use trial and error to find the best strategies that work for you.
SEO
Search engine optimization is a digital marketing technique many people have heard about, but at the same time, know very little about when it comes to applying it to their business. Being knowledgeable in SEO strategies that increase page ranking is an incredible selling point for future employers. You can know everything there is about SEO, however, simply learning the basics and proving your knowledge can be enough. Once you are hired, speak to your company about improving their SEO ? lead them to companies such as Click Intelligence, who will help you with your apply SEO and link building into your business?s marketing strategy.
SEO increases page ranking. It means that people can find you when they use a search engine. The guidelines constantly change, so you need to make sure that stay on top of today?s best practices or hire a company to do it for you.
WordPress
WordPress is the most popular CMS with over 28.4% of websites using it. It is a versatile tool that most websites are built from, so knowing how to use WordPress is a critical skill to learn. If you want to be even more hireable, know how to use the other top content management systems like Blogger too. Be flexible. Be knowledgeable. Be hired. Knowing the basics of HTML and the other building blocks of the Internet like CSS is a bonus.
Whether you complete a course and get a diploma in them, or simply read up on the topics, they are great to know. Each one of these topics is crucial to any company, the second it goes online. Knowing the stakes and how the online portion of the business works can make you a more effective employee because it means that you can optimize your work for online from the get-go. It shows that you know more about the business than your competition. It will make you more hireable.
by Nick Throlson | May 26, 2017 | Business, SEO, Website Security
Web design has to be one of the most arduous modern day professions. Seeing your website going live may make up for all the hardships during development, but the result does not erase the fact that to reach it, you had to spend countless hours perfecting the code, troubleshooting, and minding the overall design. We offer several Do's and Don'ts that might cut your checklist shorter by reminding you of the few things you should be aware of at all times during development.Don?t gamble early on
Don?t immediately go for the latest software or the greatest new build out, if you don?t have a solid plan how to go about working with it. Taking an unnecessary risk, in this case, might not grant you a high reward. By choosing the latest software that you and your colleagues might not be familiar with, you are using up time you do not have and opening up possibilities for bugs and troubleshooting for days on end. Start with a reliable software or platform, and once you have settled in comfortably, take smaller steps to experiment with completely new software. That way, if it even comes to losses, they are minimal.Don?t access a user database directly with user-supplied information
When a database is accessed directly with the information supplied by the users, you are leaving the door wide open for possible security breaches. This could erase archives with very sensitive data, or give access to confidential information regarding your users. And it can all go into the input box on your website. This is easily addressed by sanitizing user input: you limit how many characters they can use to input a username or a password, whether they can or cannot contain other symbols, and have the code reject any character input you have not pre-approved.Don?t neglect SEO
Many developers have the tendency to leave SEO as the last thing to do for the website when, in fact, it is something that needs to be tackled as you go along. SEO is more than just keywords, content, alt text in images, etc. It also deals with back linking between pages, accounts for load time, gets rid of duplicated content, and keeps the hierarchy of important pages and links refreshed and constantly updated. So, to avoid having to restructure entire sections of your website, later on, take SEO into consideration from the very start.Do keep users in mind
The safest way to stay on track with the original idea and design is to create a profile of what your typical user would be. When you know the demographic, and the target audience, it is easier to analyze the type of people that will be visiting our website. You can build the website around the given data: their age, occupation, financial standing, and lifestyle. These will dictate the user experience, from font styles to the navigation between pages.Do focus on multi - platforming
You can decide to optimize your website for PC users only. And in a time when fewer and fewer people sit at their computers for longer periods of time, this would be a big mistake. A lot of e-commerce and browsing nowadays occurs via tablets, smartphones and other devices. To ensure the website is visited as frequently as possible, adapt the website so it can be seen and read clearly across multiple platforms.Do save the user?s time
The attention span has been in decline over the last twenty years, and new technologies only sped up the process. It is the reality of the modern age and in order to succeed, you will have to adapt to this. Many expert web developers from Sydney advise ?trimming the fat? wherever possible. Get rid of excess imagery in your gallery or pages that cause slow loading time; write shorter texts, then blend them with pictures to create quickly scrollable content that will also be informative and useful.To sum up
Thoroughly plan how to go about the development process of your web page. There are countless factors that can impact not only the final outcome of your work but the process itself as well. As Murphy?s Law says ?If anything can go wrong, it will?, so prepare for everything. It is wise to make your own checklist of Do?s and Don?ts upfront and keep them around as a reminder. The best way to stay on track is to create your typical user profile and tailor the design to them. In this way, you ensure that whatever choice is made, it is in the user?s best interest.
by Nick Throlson | Dec 14, 2016 | Business, SEO, WordPress
Have you noticed that most of your competitors seem to have blogs on their websites and are wondering whether you should follow suit? Research has shown that adding a blog to your website can increase the traffic that you?re getting by more than 50 percent - that?s a huge increase! There?s no doubt about it, when used effectively blogging can be a great way to boost your website?s traffic. Of course, the thing that a lot of business owners fail to understand is that it?s not just a case of writing any old post and it being effective. Oh no, there?s a lot more to making your site?s traffic soar than that. Want to know what it takes to use a blog to increase your website?s traffic and search engine ranking - then keep reading! 
Quality content is crucialIf you want your blog to boost your website?s traffic and improve its search engine ranking, it?s crucial that you only share quality content. Blog posts should be well thought out and researched, and should always focus on something that links to your business. So for instance, say you run a wedding cake business, your blog posts should link to weddings and wedding cakes. They could be tips posts, how-tos, or event industry specific posts - it all depends on who your target audience is. If the content that you provide isn?t of a high quality, then having a blog is pointless because no one will read the pieces that you?re posting, and so, your site?s traffic won?t increase and neither will its search engine ranking. It?s vital that you understand how to use SEO To give your website the best chance of increasing the amount of traffic that it?s getting, you need to boost where it ranks in search engines like Google. One of the best ways to do this is with the use of SEO - Search Engine Optimization. Most business owners have heard the term SEO before but don?t totally understand how SEO works, as such. When it comes to using SEO effectively, it?s important to understand that if you don?t use keywords in the right way, it can have a negative impact, as the Google Penguin Infographic shows. However, if you learn how to use keywords and other SEO tactics properly, you can significantly improve your site?s search engine rank, as well as the amount of traffic that it?s getting. Understand the best ways to promote it using social media marketing In order to increase the amount of traffic that your website is getting, it?s important to know how to promote your blog content effectively. One of the best methods of doing so is with the use of social media marketing - aka sharing your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. The key to success with this is the use of relevant hashtags. There you have it, a guide to using a business blog to make your site?s traffic soar and your search rank improve. Hopefully, everything that you need to know to do this has been covered above!
by Nick Throlson | Dec 9, 2016 | Business, SEO
It?s an admirable goal to try and keep the future of your business away from digital tech and the internet in favor of good old-fashioned hard work, but sadly it won?t last forever.It might be time to, well, get with the times.
Thankfully, it?s not too hard to get your business starting off on the right foot in the digital age, and once you grab hold of the basics, you might be a master in no time at all.So, does your business have a website? If not, why not? A website can help you network, promote your business, act as a marketplace or run as a customer service platform. A website can give your business, more business. Sites like Wix.com and Squarespace can give you the tools to get started. If you want to really race ahead, consider speaking to an SEO expert, and you can get the right words embedded into your site to attract the visitors you want.You might also like to check their free SEO competitor analysis tool: Now you?ve got your site sorted out, maybe you should think about what social media platforms you want to use. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are basically free promotional tools for your company, and if you use them the right way, you can see the benefits instantly. Social media offers a platform to speak to customers one to one and deal with customer service issues over the internet. You can also market your brand with the right language and content!?How to Increase Sales Using Social MediaDigital marketing is something you?d want to look at as well. But you have to figure out your exact target audience to market your digital presence to any degree of success.Next up is the cloud. Gone are the days of backing up to flimsy hard-drives. You can now upload your data and work to internet based storage drives that give you the option to access your work remotely from anywhere. Not only that, but it?s secure and there are numerous opportunities for your business on the market. Most cloud storage solutions offer you and your employees the ability to collaborate on documents remotely and simultaneously. Communication platforms like Slack can connect to your cloud and ensure collaboration and communication are consistent across the business.Outfitting yourself and your staff with a company smartphone? encrypted with a VPN ensures everyone can keep in touch and work remotely. They even have access to your cloud-based storage, so it?s truly a mobile solution and can solve many issues with networking and connectivity.Giving your business the digital edge is going to increase your internet profile, and that will attract cyber-criminals. It?s best to secure your data, install anti-virus software and keep your systems protected and updated.
If you start off, you?ll give your business a substantial digital presence in no time, and you?ll be able to identify and strengthen your business?s weaknesses by hiring and speaking to the right people if you can?t solve the issues yourself. If you follow these tips, you?ll be on the right path and your business will benefit!
by Nick Throlson | Nov 25, 2016 | Business, SEO
A professional website is a must-have for every business. It can help push your business forward in many ways. It?s one way to get across your company identity to customers and other viewers. You can also use your website to sell online. One of the most useful functions of a professional website is marketing.A site can be used in conjunction with many inexpensive marketing solutions to make a profit. By redirecting people to your site, you can convert them into customers. Here are a few of the useful ways having a website will help with your marketing efforts.Search Engine OptimizationIf you don?t already know about search engine optimization (SEO), you need to learn about it now. A global survey of businesses found that SEO is considered the most effective form of marketing. It entails getting your site listed high on search engines like Google to bring attention to your website.Search engine optimization
involves numerous techniques for boosting your ranking on search sites. Using specific keywords and building affiliate links can help increase your visibility. Climbing to the top of Google can be complicated. But SEO marketing firms can help. You can learn more from guides such as SEO Services: When You Get It Right, The ROI Is Phenomenal. SEO helps with website traffic, and those hits can eventually become profit. It?s one of the main reasons a professional website helps with marketing.Web AdvertisingYou can also use advertising links to market your website. Google offers a pay-per-click ad service with which you can pay for extra traffic. Sites like Facebook also use paid ads. By paying for advertising space on popular websites, you can generate traffic for your business site.This method has its downfalls. Just directing people to your website doesn?t guarantee that you?ll make sales. But some ad services target your advertisements at your desired audience to help. It?s another way your site can come in handy for marketing.Content MarketingYour business website isn?t just for news and information about your company. It can also be a home for all kinds of interesting content to catch people?s attention.The best way to start is with a blog. Tools like WordPress let you integrate an easy-to-use blog to any website. You can create user accounts so multiple people can post on your blog. You could create interesting top-ten lists and how-to guides to appeal to your desired audience.Blogs aren?t the only form of content marketing, though. You could also create videos on sites like YouTube. These often have the potential to go viral, and you can draw people to your site with a website link in the description.Social MediaSocial media marketing is becoming a useful practice for businesses. By building up a following on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn you can gain a loyal customer base. As well as keeping your followers entertained, you can potentially bring new ones to your business.Your social media channels can be used to promote your website. By posting links to your content, you can direct followers to your site. You can also post sales promotions to entice people. These posts can also be shared by others, bringing more eyes to your business.
involves numerous techniques for boosting your ranking on search sites. Using specific keywords and building 
