Blog writers block
Finding something interesting to say for your blog isn’t always as easy as it seems. Though, good blogs require great writing ability, it is often the content and not the wording that lets them down. We all run dry of ideas every now and then, and such a problem can really affect our confidence – something good writing thrives on. So, where are the best places to look and what is the best way to find inspiration – we look at some ideas to drive you?
Statistics
Looking through your metrics and the number of people who visit you can aid your quest for a blogging idea. Firstly, you see the numbers that still visit you, even during writers block. While, secondly, using your most visited and popular blog stats may show you what interests people the most and gives you ideas for a new blog.
Remember It’s Your Blog.
If you seem to be having problems thinking up ideas for your blog, perhaps you should remember that it’s your blog and your voice and so should be written accordingly. Voice your opinions write about what irks you and let your own beliefs flow.
Read and Write
Reading other people’s work and blogs can be a great way to find inspiration. Look into how others write, evaluate their opinions and form strong opinions on their thoughts. This may motivate you to write something for, or against, or even completely different. By reading blogs about everything from local allotments, to the plight of Africans, you may find something that stirs you to blog.
Even if you can’t keep writing. All great writers suffer from writers block and just as with a plunger and a drain, they will tell you to keep going and eventually things will become unstuck.
Lists and Guides
Lists of the best books, ideas, or people in your field, or how to guides on certain areas give you the limitations to push yourself to write. Writing a couple of these more prescribed pieces can really give you the push to get back in the zone.
Comments and Social Media
Looking through your social media sites, or comments on your blog posts can also offer you an area to write about. Perhaps someone has said something topical, or engaged in a divisive issue. Have a think and then write about it. This may create further debate and even more blogs.
Events
Every month has some form of an event that relates to you and your readers. Whether this is an industry based happening, or a national even such as Valentines, summer holidays, or Christmas. Write about these issues and you’ll have a blog past as quickly as it takes to say Happy Easter.
Digg and Stumble Upon
What better way to get a random idea for a blog post, then searching one of these sites of plenty and finding something that interests you. It might not be relevant, but it’s all about writing.
Use the above for inspiration and just keep writing to get those posts flowing again. Code23 to the rescue again.
How can a blog improve SEO? Does your website need a blog?
One of the best ways, if not the best way to optimise your blog for SEO is to create a blog. Many of us try a number of other means and fail to realise the SEO prowess of a blog.
For many with social media interests, there is only so much posting to new products, or news stories on your site your subscribers and fans are interested in. Blogs, however, offer you the opportunity to do more than this and produce interesting content that readers will like to look through. This interest obviously is a very positive move for a number of reasons, and SEO is certainly the pivotal one.
Every time, you create a blog; you are creating a link directly to your site. These brand-new URLs are used in a very positive manner by your SEO provider. These back links, are looked upon favourably by search engines and count as a vote for your site.
Include deep links to products and relevant stuff on your site to get even more from your new blog.
New Content
One of the other favourable things about onsite blogs is that they are creating new content for the site. This new content is seen as a very positive force by Google (increasingly so) and shows the search engine that the site is alive and being updated regularly. This will push it up the SEO rankings and aid your SEO. By adding in keywords to the blog, as well as anchor text you are aiding your blog.
Of course if the content on your blog site is deemed as quality, you will find it becomes more popular again. Through the aid of social media and video sites such as YouTube, it is very easy to get content seen. By posting interesting pieces, or videos, you can hope to increase the number of visitors, who wish to read your blog and then share it with others. These increases in traffic workswonders for SEO. In the case of Google +, the Plus 1 button also feeds directly into the site and aids SEO. So encourage, plusing, liking, or re-tweeting for some positive SEO.
Of course if you manage to produce content that is extremely intriguing, you may even go viral across the Internet, which means significant SEO benefits.
Customer Information
Blogs are also great for a process called; harvesting’. Harvesting is where you encourage readers and customers to leave their thoughts at the end of a piece. This in turn can then be used for your own purposes. Perhaps someone leaves a complaint; you can use it to make things better, or perhaps someone gives you some useful advice in the comment’s box – all the greaterning these boxes, with feedback from social media and also customer service and you can really improve the customer experience.
All of these pieces of advice aid you with SEO and are definite reasons why you require a blog.
How to Use Metrics
Understanding the popularity of your site is fundamentally based on your metrics. Metrics provide the information on how your website is doing and go a lot deeper than merely page views.
Though there are some simple metrics, such as PPC and SEO, there are also another number of metrics that tell the tale of the tape and give you a better understanding of how your site is performing.
By understanding this performance it is possible to tweak your site to suit the metrics in such a way to make it more successful and get more from your site.
Conversions – these are a great way to gauge the success of a site, and though they are limited a little, they do offer a good idea. Conversions are the ration of people who click onto your site and are converted to purchase, or filling out the necessary request. They don’t include those who contact you via other means, such as phone, or email, but as most people will use online facilities, they do offer a decent reflection.
Visitors – Site visitors is the most basic of all the metrics and is just a showing of the amount of people who click on your site. This is the basic reason for metrics and is fundamental to success. It is a mixture of all marketing efforts and the more eyes you have onsite the better you can do.
Bounce Rate – This shows the amount that come to your site and leave immediately. This metric is a telltale for website design and layout. People who look on your site and can’t find a service on offer, don’t trust your site, or leave immediately for any one of a myriad of other reasons will increase this rate.
Time on Site – The longer people stay on your site the more likely it is they are reading through it and will have a high level of interest. Though, this may not always be true as people maybe can’t find the information they want – it is generally a case of the former and if not interested web users will click off. Longer times on site for web metrics, usually mean more success.
Top Content – This metric will show you the top web content people are clicking on and what they are interested in. This shows the characteristics of your audience and what interests them – something you can cater for in the future and increase page views.
Keywords – This in-depth report is a great way to see the keywords people are searching for online. This gives you a better insight into your web visitors and allows you see the phrases they look for and so cater for them. This metric also allows you to filter out the company name from the keyword list and shows a list of the terms people search for without your name and so show the amount of people who found you without knowing who you are. It is also possible to filter between paid for and no paid for keywords.
Comparing these metrics each month offers you a great insight into the difference and what areas need help. Making a positive decision on what metrics to look at is the first step here, then comparing them each month can really help you improve your site.
Perfect Text for your website
Perfect Text for your website.
With Google’s continuing orientation towards content ever increasing and Google training its bots to check article quality, content has never been as important to the web. This factor alongside the book like handiness of tablets and smart-phones has led to the perfect text being a powerful and effective part of sites.
So how do we get the perfect paragraph?
Set out to wow the reader. Ensure the paragraph has the content to wow and the typography to gather on invisibility. Unassuming, crafted text is a thing of beauty and harder to do than is thought, at its best it provides a vague beautiful distraction, though should ideally allow for comfortable, flowing reading.
Arranging type is an old art and one lost by many as they battle with frameworks and protocol. Though, typesetting is an age-old discipline and should be adhered to.
The Typeface
Conventional wisdom states that only sans-serif fonts are to be used for body text during a web design. Though these fonts may seem a little less effective in smaller sizes, they do offer a number of advantages. Small x heights impair readability, though not all serif fonts impair readability. Georgia is a fine example of a font that offers great body text if set properly.
Look to see if the font has all the bold and italics and even the semi bolds and italics necessary. Headings need one style, but paragraphs need variation. Using the variation can make the style of a font more attractive, readable and clearer.
Rendering is also important. Some fonts are great for heading and some for bodies; it depends on the size most suited to the specific area.
Font and Measure
Below 16 pixels for text, and readability is compromised. This is because browsers render text at this size. If you wish for it to be larger, change in inclines of whole pixels.
The measure of text is the number of characters in the line of text. Comfortable measures are important for usability. This is because lines that are too long are awkward to scan. A good measure is between 45-75 characters per line, which is much less than most sites. The average in some studies is put at 88.74.
Leading and Vertical Rhythm
Leading is the space in between lines and is similar in terms of creating readability to measure. Leading divides letters and words, but should be judged to do so to prevent making letters and words appear fragmented.
Line height is the vertical measure of the space between lines. Line height should be set by equal font sizes. This is because these lines will be increased by 1.5 times when all is taken into account so a font of size 18 allows for size 9 of empty space and an overall size of 27; Whereas an uneven number won’t result in a whole number and causes issues.
Word Spacing
Paragraph text on web pages is set ragged right on HTML. The issue with hyphenation is also significant in HTML5. This is because to insert a hyphen in text (¬)must be included. This means ¬ must be included between words, which is also an irritation. Though Firefox and Safari support CSS3′s text justify properties, which give more control over text align: justify, which eases problems such as this with characters.
Finishing touches
Having considered the aforementioned factors, there are also other factors such as indentation, punctuation – which are both parts of rhythm. These and other factors make documents flow and create an attractive style making text more powerful and effective.
Common Mistakes in SEO Strategy
Common Mistakes in SEO Strategy
SEO strategies fail all the time and there are increasingly hundreds of things to do to optimise a page for SEO. However, of those dozens of things, there are some things more common and easier dealt with than most, which allow you to increase page rankings.
Keywords
Of course optimising your pages for the wrong keywords means you end up failing miserably. Using very generic keywords, or ones that don’t describe the exact page can lead to SEO failure. Each page should have a set of its own keywords for the best effect. To get the most from this write text around keywords, not the other way around.
Furthermore, ensure you try and rank competitive for broad keywords means you won’t really. So use targeted keywords that bring targeted traffic.
Low Optimisation
Optimising your page for loads of keywords will result in a lot of issues as regards SEO. Make sure keywords are closely related to each other and key the keywords low, using only the important ones.
Avoid stuffing with keywords as this will not only have no effect, but maybe even a negative one. Using a keyword analyser, or keeping them within certain limits will mean you have a significantly better chance of succeeding.
MetaTags and HTML Tags
Without these tags and poor usage of these tags, you will suffer SEO issues. Wrong use of the meta robot values can lead to noindex and nofollow and a disaster. Make sure landing pages can be optimised, and links are followed to make sure you get the best SEO.
Furthermore, ensure your SEO rankings and HTML code is proper as this will have effects on SEO. Ensuing all pages can be parsed by search engines is a good practice that wields positive results.
Duplicate Copy
Duplicate pages don’t come available to search engines and aren’t returned in searches. They are indexed but consume Page Rank juice, which can be used elsewhere.
Using 301 redirections you can reorganise and sort out your link’s structure. Though remember that some parts of pages are meant to be the same – menus, footer, header. This structure should be maintained across your site. However, do avoid news and other text across your site as it will hit the similarity percentage and should be avoided. Using duplicate content tools will prevent this and show you how much similarity there is. 30-35 per cent is okay, though it is best to keep it well below this for safety’s sake.
Multiple Pages with the same keywords
If you have this problem, you will have internal competition in your site for the same keywords among different pages. This affects your overall site ranking. Avoid this from happening by optimising for a small number of keywords on each page. This should help you avoid any such situations, which will bring down your search engine optimisation ranking.
Following these rules should go a long way to sorting out the larger problems in SEO and increasing page ranking.
How to know when your website needs a redesign?
How to Know When your Website Needs Redesign
Redesign of a website is often dreaded by many; however, there are generally a number of signs that show you when such a reshape is necessary.
Metrics
If it looks like your metrics (also known as web analytics) are down, then a redesign may be part of your rethink of where everything is going. Now, of course this could also be a product issue, but websites are often to blame. Reducing trends in conversions, sales and participation can be something to do with your sites current design aging. It is essentially your audience getting tired with your current design. The biggest factor if this happens to be understanding what went wrong and where it’s gone wrong. Just adjusting your page, or the conversion flow can have significant effects, and you can save time by doing so.
Users
Contact your users, send them out surveys and ask them what’s wrong, this can often result in you getting to the core of the problem. Usability tests are especially important and conversations on a person-to-person basis allow you to delve deeper than a survey ever could. These can allow you to see undertones, you wouldn’t with surveys. If your brand is considered in a negative light, then look for a redesign – this can all be seen in depth by talking to customers directly.
Tech/ UX Debt
Over a lifetime of a website, you accrue tech/UX debt. This is created during shortcuts around the site, from the initial build over a lifetime of short cuts and corner cutting. Over time these all add up to create a Tech /UX Debt that is a greater cost than the size of continuing to upgrade the site, and you are better off starting from scratch and building a new, clean site. Fixing all the elements can cost more than a new site, and so a rebuild is necessary.
Old Looking
Some sites just age with time and they need a rethink every so often. Sites date. Aesthetics changed, and politicians were honourable when you were young. Keep with the times with a new and updated site. This will aid declining metrics and ensure you are up to date with the competition. Look at brands who are performing well and then assess your site in relation to them. Make sure to look objectively, but also fairly as looking at your own site day in day out can make you feel it is older before its time. Do a cross-section of options to get an accurate reflection, before making rapid changes.
12 Month Rule
More than 12 months can make a significant difference in your site and should be looked at. This refreshes the experience for customers and also breathes fresh air into the site. This will impress customers, the press, other design companies and others and ensure your site looks fresh and attractive.
Following these factors ensures that your site is up to date, but isn’t exhaustive in its width. Access each factor and try and maintain a fresh face to the world.
Understanding SEO to improve your Website rankings
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of undertaking a number of measures to ensure that your web pages offers you the best, or most optimised chance of getting as high of Google ranking as possible.
With business’s increasingly going online, SEO offers websites, the chance to get as high of ranking as possible. A high ranking will significantly increase visibility and so views and clicks on your page. This in turn creates the chance for more revenue, conversions and is overall better for your business.
There are a number of factors, which can affect SEO and increase or decrease ranking. One of the most important things is the speed of the loading time of the web pages. Faster loading pages mean surfers won’t click off your page, and Google’s crawlers can index your page easier. This can be easily achieved by some savvy web development.
Text
Clear easy to read web pages also help. Large clear dark text is best and ensures none of your pages will be treated as spam by Google and achieve the best ranking. Clear paragraphs help with readability and also indexing, as do bullet lists.
IMG ALT attributes also are of consequence and aid pages in both real and SEO terms. This allows web surfers with images turned off and the visually impaired to see your site. Also search engines can’t index content, but can index IMG ALT attribute.
Your site should also include customised 404 error pages. Providing a link from these pages to another part of your site means users will perhaps click and stay on site. These pages are also positive for search rankings, and a good SEO company will help here.
Navigation Links
Navigation links also aid both search engine movements around your site, as well as ensure it is easy for users to find what they wish. Ensure all your important info is also in the top part of your screen as it ensures people with smaller screens; don’t have to make the effort to scroll down. This also means that search engines index it quickly, which improves your chances of positive rankings.
Of course, this open and explanatory aspect should be used through all areas of your site. Ensuring that page titles are clearly labeled and explain what they are about helps surfers book mark and SEO index. The page’s title is one of the most important parts for SEO and should both contain your keywords and also look attractive. This provides for both purpose and function for surfers and search engine indexing alike.
This explanatory onus should continue into your URLs. If your URLs contain your keywords this also has a positive effect on your search engine rankings. If you have dynamic URLs with a number of variables, you will end up having issues with Google’s spiders and this will affect page rankings.
The Difference between Web Designers and Web Developers
Though often confused, there are as many disparities between the work of a web designer and a web developer as there is between a policeman and a traffic warden.
Both work on websites, and the two jobs are often considered as interchangeable by many without a deeper grasp of website creation. Essentially, web designers are the artists of the site; whose main job is to make the website look attractive.
Designers
They use a number of tools to create the visual aspects of the site, including Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Talking to them about Base64 encoding, Soap requests and other development, or programming lingo may generally draw a blank face. Many of these designers are trained in typefaces, layouts and usability and try and get inside the companies head and understand their vision and what they require.
Developers
Unlike designers, who is generally a stylish bunch, web developers work on the site mechanics. They design everything from the backend to the way the site works.
They use a number of programming languages, including Java, CSS, HTML and SQL. They will also use a text editor or IDE, a number of browsers and development plug ins.
The Site
Without developed the site may look beautiful, but won’t function well. Badly developed sites are slow, break quite often and are a general hindrance to your business. On the opposite side of the coin, badly designed sites also mean a number of issues.
Website design not only makes sites more attractive, but also means more engagement with customers, better placement of aspects of the site that encourage selling and higher conversion rates. Good designers know where to place items for maximum effect and so are equally worth their weight in gold.
However, due to lack of knowledge of the industry, monetary problems and a range of other issues it is all too common to find one or the other of these people doing both jobs. This is often the reason why web projects fail miserably. Unattractive looking, or feeling pages mean people feel confused, bored, or wary and so avoid them and go to other sites.
How to Get the Best
Defining a clear boundary between both is the best way to get the most from both individuals in these positions and get the top site you can afford.
The best way to choose one or the other is defining what you require for the job. Some of these professionals will have picked up some of the other’s skills along the way. If you’re looking for someone to do a job that is a vast percentage development, with a tiny amount of design you may be able to get away with a developer only, and vice-versa for a designer. However, it is recommended to choose both for any job that involves a reasonable amount of both.
Backlinks what are they and what they can do for your website?
Backlinks are simply links from other websites back to yours, or another site, they are also known as Inbound Links (IBLs). These links are basically the placing of your web address on another’s page, linking to your site and allowing others to easily click and get to your website.
Backlinks have been a fundamental part of the Internet since the beginning. Before search engines, people moved between sites in either of two ways – by entering a URL, or using links from one page to another.
When SEO first became prominent Google and other search engines gave huge weight onto this form of linking, as it was one of the most important things in determining a page. Googlepage rank still gives this backlinking a place as a determining factor in the importance of a page and Google’s PageRank system notes ‘“Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B”.
Though, not just as important as they were originally, IBLs are still one of the tools used to determine the importance of a site. Inbound links from trusted, quality sites are a significant indication of quality and popularity and Google pays a lot of heed to them. Quality not Quantity Inbound Links are not merely important as regards quantity and Google bases SEO for these on quality. Sites with relevance to the content of your site are seen as of better quality than non-relevant sites. This is to prevent people loading sites with irrelevant backlinks to improve SEO and also to cut out the idea of buying backlinks from other sites.
Google also will look at sites and the speed of the building of backlinks. Building a large number of backlinks over a short period arouses suspicion. Natural links built over long periods are rewarded by search engines. This is there to prevent webmasters using certain programmes to build links, insert hidden links and be generally deceptive as regards links. Pages with these large numbers of links are known as link farms and disregarded by search engines. This is where the onus on quality, natural links comes into play. Linking to a link farm can have significant negative consequences for your sites SEO.
Good backlinks are important as they get your name out there and make your site visible to the world and potential suitors for your service. Reciprocal linking is often central to this procedure, though this is a grey area and there are numerous issues over this practice with changes regularly occurring in this area.
Understanding the anchor word with which you are linked back to from other sites is also important as it dictates the relevance of certain words to your site. Anchor texts are the words used to link back to your site. So, instead of having a click here, you have a link under a relevant word highlighted for backlinking. These all help with linking back to your site and are just some of the many ways in which backlinking helps your site.
What are the top skills for a web designer?
Web design is increasingly important, whether as a shop front for a business, or an informative area, or for other reasons. Therefore, hiring a web designer with top skills is a necessity – so what should potential business suitors be looking for from their web designer?
They Can Create Fresh modern sites The web is changing at an ever increasing rate. A company, which can create a dynamic, fresh and engaging, modern site with a close eye on the future of the web and search engine optimisation, is a must. Keeping ahead of the game is necessary to succeed on the top level and even slightly older designs fail to stand out.
The Power of Experience Of course, modern sites are prized, but there is no accounting for experience. Web designers with over 15 years experience will have the experience to offer better service. They will have proven themselves in business and so are more likely to be around in five years if you have problems, then a new company. Experience means a web designer can advise you on what is best for your site, what is the optimum type and style of a site to go with and also allows them to showcase designs of the past for you to look at and take and leave things from?
Marketing and SEO A web designer that can bring together a range of knowledge, beyond just the design of the site and ensures it fits into your marketing strategy and meets your SEO needs to help you rank well on Google is a fantastic person to have on side. More-so, if they can help with the social media aspect of business and allow for an easier e-commerce experience through design and their know how you’re onto a winner. Some web designers don’t do this alone; however, work with partners to offer you the fullness of these experiences.
Flash Development Adobe Flash is a very attractive web standard for animation and multimedia creations on sites. Whether it is from banners slide shows to full sites, Flash is a great tool for a designer to know how to use and can brighten up sites and create a more intuitive and interactive site. A web designer that has Flash skills can add something you your new web site.
Content Management Content management systems (CMS) allow any authorised user to edit the site in an easy manner without the need for programming. This allows you to simple updates for the site in text, video and picture forms and any other content you can think of. Web designers with the skills to add these to your site make life easier for you in the future and allow you to update your web pages, blogs, or site as you wish.
Ecommerce Online business is big and good web designers have some excellent solutions for it, offering bespoke services that can manage stock levels, create voucher codes, complex reports and also look great, are designed to a fantastic degree and are rich with SEO content.
Web designers with such skills should be prized and offer you everything you’ll need for your new site.
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