7 Common Mistakes to Avoid when Hiring a Website Designer

Hiring a website designer is a crucial task for the future of your business. Online presence is now a sort of business card that represents your face to all potential partners and customers. So, it’s no wonder that business owners have high expectations from the website project.

As a crucial member of your business team, the designer is a key unit for the strategy and development progress of the project.

To make your collaboration long-lasting and mutually pleasant, there are certain things that must be addressed right from the start. Setting up objectives and seeing that they are met is one of them.

The web designer has responsibilities that must be fulfilled. While he is about to embark on a long-term relationship with you and to make it effective, you need to get the answers to certain problems that will help you avoid misunderstandings in the course of project development.

6 Essential Features of a Good Travel Website Design

Travel industry is the niche with a huge audience and travel agencies must make their online presence represented by a good travel website design.

As there is a multitude of websites specializing in offering travel tips and information sought after by the travelers worldwide, it is crucial to have a professional website design that will ensure an effortless experience navigating through the website.

There are several factors that you must consider before starting designing a good travel website design.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

When planning a trip to a sunny or snowy resort, people hit Google or Bing search engines to search for hotels and trips.

10 SEO Copywriting Tips to Get Found on Google Search

SEO Copywriting is an important tool in ranking your copy in search engines and boosting your website traffic. And with a little experience, this can become a child’s play.

But it is not only about optimization and ranking we’re talking about here. You want your web copy to be consistent, to engage people and to sell.

We compiled 10 important tips about SEO copywriting techniques. Read through and share.

Know your reader

You want to write copy that appeals and sells to a particular group of consumers. Before starting writing your content, you want to know their social background, age, sex and education level to identify the best approach and writing style to use. Research your audience before you plunge into writing your copy.

Write alluring headlines

Sometimes, good headlines worth a thousand words. You want your headline to attract readers and get that web copy read. The headline is the first thing people read and make an impression about the entire content. Use keywords in it and make your content rank.

Use subheadings

Subheadings make your copy scannable and keep readers engaged in the content. They make the text look well-structured and also describe your content to search engines.

Short paragraphs

Use of paragraphs is important for a good content writing. Every time you have a new idea, start it with a new paragraph. Keep paragraphs short. 2 to 4 sentences are enough to give you the required space to put down and develop your main idea.

Use active voice

When you use active voice in your copywriting, the sentences are easier to understand, direct and shorter. Active voice gives you the option of avoiding unnecessary words in a sentence.

Avoid keyword density

One problem the copywriters deal with when writing engaging web copy is the risk of optimizing too much for search engines and forgetting about the purpose of their copy in the first place. Although optimization ranks your content and attracts more clicks, the content is the instrument that sells your products. So, you want to avoid keyword stuffing.

Speak your audience’s language

Speaking your audience’s language means you are from its league. Try using words and phrases that people you’re writing for use often and your content will look more persuasive. Matt Cutts made a video on top SEO mistakes, check it out!

Add links

Links to relevant resources will make your content look more trustworthy. It will mean that you have done your homework and researched the topic to be able to include the most accurate information out there.

Keep content fresh

Web content gets out of date as well. You want to make sure that your audience gets to read only fresh information. Search engines are known to give preference to web copy written on the same topic and which is more recent than the other content that is one or even two years obsolete.

Read this: SEO and UX: How to Optimize Your Website for Both

Promote your content

Writing a well-structured and information-abounding content doesn’t mean that the work ends there. Now you need to promote your content. It will not do the job by itself. Share it with your social media friends. Make people comment on it. Once the activity on your web page will increase, the search engines will notice it and will rank your content higher. This means – you will get more sales.

Bottom line

These SEO copywriting tips are the most basic and relevant ones to make your content rank higher. They are easy to implement and follow and can bring great value to your website. If you want to get returning customers just make sure that the content you write is very good.

Your turn now. Do you find these tips helpful? What other search engine optimization tips, that we overlooked, can you add to the list? Sound them in the comments section below.

9 Reasons You Should Invest in Content Marketing

Content marketing has become an indispensable tool for smaller businesses to promote their products and services in the online world.

Although it requires special skills and ability to use words in a way to convince customers to turn their attention to and become loyal customers of your services, it's cheaper than any other means of marketing persuasion.

Good and clever content writing can make you stand out from the crowd and become noticeable.

Therefore, if you are still thinking whether your writing imagination is not enough to enhance the traffic on your website, you should give it a try and see what happens.

Here are 9 reasons you should invest in web content marketing that we have identified and want to share them with you.

Your business is at its inception

Small businesses need much more than just traditional advertising marketing campaigns to raise awareness to their products and services. Today, consumers are looking for fresh and engaging ideas, and what can be better than a well-written, information-trustworthy piece of content? You should make your presence noticeable by sharing information on platforms that your costumers are spending time.

You need to become trustworthy

Businesses that are not afraid to share fresh, innovative information with their consumers are those who have only to gain. Digital marketing allows you building a trustworthy relationship with customers and potential customers with fewer costs. This will not happen over the night, but if you are willing to educate and give away valuable piece of content, you will increase your credibility.

SEO

Although marketers are obsessed with social media marketing, you should not forget about search engine optimization. This internet marketing drive will push your content on top of Google search results, as long as it is fresh and custom-made.

Boosting traffic to your website

Nowadays every business has a website. But how to attract new customers and boost traffic, when there are so many options to choose from? Your website is your marketing tool. Hire a website content writer to create content that is intuitive and helps drive traffic to your website.

Lead generation

There is no other better-proven means of generating leads than intelligent writing. No more cold-calling to promote your services and products. You can control your leads by simply creating intuitive content.

Engaged customer base

Engaged customers mean buzzing business. Great piece of content will make this easier to achieve.

Cover global market

Creating high-quality content makes your online presence noticeable and set you as an authority in your domain. You can interact, discuss with everyone who is online, and nowadays their number is outstanding.

Great ROI

Valuable content enables you to measure the ROI, which, often, is much higher than the ROI yielded by traditional marketing means. Thus, you can get long-term effects from good content with little investment.

Minimize crisis

It is no secret that, at some point or another, businesses might face crisis of trust deficit. However, a strong writing strategy can minimize this crisis and you can play the card in such a way as to turn the discussion into the direction you want.

Do check you website content from time to time to observe whether it's still relevant for your business. Your services are evolving, so that make sure update your business information according to you actual situation. This procedure is called "content audit". Click the link to find out why and how you should do it.

Related post:How to Unlock your Creativity and Wake up from a Creative Slumber?

Conclusion

Content marketing is exploited by many businesses in the net environment. You should know that an intelligent, engaging way of acquiring costumers through your content can drive profitable action to your business. Readers are more likely to respond to fresh ideas and pieces of content. Therefore, with great content be sure you will be alive on the net for a long time.

What are other reasons, according to you, that address the need to develop a strong content marketing? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.

SEO and UX: How to Optimize Your Website for Both

At the moment the world of digital marketing and web design are colliding, as there has arisen a tremendous necessity of combining ever-changing white SEO tactics of achieving high organic page rankings and positive user experience. However, there is no need to be overwhelmed – there exist strategies of achieving a golden mean between SEO and UX.

In order to be useful, pleasing, popular among users and engines your website must include the following features:

Safety and Speed

You need to install security plugins, because if you don’t – you might end up penalized for the lack of security on your website. Remember that users like to browse safe and fast websites. If yours is not safe of quick enough – you’re risking to lose visitors and ultimately your conversion rate will drastically drop.

In order to avoid that regularly update your plugins and versions of your CMS. Websites with near 0 downtime and congestions are the most popular ones. Moreover, your organic rate will drastically drop in case users will be closing your website almost right away. Quick loading time is tremendously important for both SEO and UX, so work on it to catch two birds with one stone.

Check your website speed

Intuitive Navigation

Despite of what many website owners currently think, search engine bots are not only measuring relevance and quality of content, but also estimate the value of the website from a human perspective.

New algorithms set forth in Google Panda and Google Penguin prevent improvement of organic traffic, obtained by grey hat or black hat SEO techniques. At the moment Google aims at appreciating quality over quantity, which is why navigation must be pleasant, helpful and intuitive. Websites that are hard to navigate are ranked lower. Use intuitive navigation techniques proved to deliver great results from SEO and UX perspectives.

Cool Outlook

We all love with our eyes and it’s not hard to imagine why. Pretty things sell much better than average-looking ones. Users spend just a couple of seconds on your website and you must grab their attention while they are wandering through the pages. Your website design must be shockingly good and multifunctional with all the scripts, deeply hidden beneath the gorgeous outlook.

Responsiveness

The website must be responsive, if it’s not - you are depriving yourself of the influx of mobile users, who are considered to be an exponentially growing minority. Nowadays, responsiveness is not a question of trend – it’s a must. You want your website to be available from all the possible devices, which is why its adaptability must be a given.

Conclusion

Considering the impact a good SEO and UX optimization has on your website, it definitely worth to spend time and resources on making them better. They are almost indispensable and regardless of how much effort you put in developing one of them, you will always be one step back to your competitors. Only making them work together you will achieve both usable and high performing website that drive huge traffic from organic search.

Keep in mind that you can have your website optimized for Google and your visitors simultaneously- all you have to do is to implement SEO and UX optimization tactics that we already shared here.

5 Obsolete SEO Techniques that Harm Your Business

Which of these Obsolete SEO Techniques are you still using? Find below the ones you have to get rid of and as soon as possible.

Let's start!

Perhaps every businessman understands the importance of having a commercially successful website in terms of increasing the digital reachability of his business.

However website cannot become commercially successful by itself (such cases are extremely rare and usually imply crowdsourcing).

Therefore, you need the help of the experienced SEO professional, who will be able to boost the reach of your website and increase its overall turnout.

It's worth to remember that your SEO must be well aware of the current trends in the SEO world. Sometimes websites get fined for so-called “grey” practices, in other cases, practices that are considered legal and popular this year, may be penalized the next year and if your SEO is unaware of the changes – your business will definitely take a hit, no matter its size or nature. Google spares no one in this regard.

Below you will find some tips on how to improve your SEO practices by simply pulling the plug on the obsolete ones that can get you in trouble.

1. Backlinking:

There is a fair chance that you’ve heard of this term, whether from your SEO or somewhere in the

net. It’s one of the practices that can influence your business negatively.

It implies the creation of unbelievable amount of links to the website you’re promoting, without accomplishing any audit or research on the domains that you’re linking.

When Google Penguin appearedin 2013 such practice immediately became not only obsolete, but also harmful for your business. Nowadays it’s all about the qualitative links.

Why not backlinking? 

Simply because your website’s rating will drop if you create links back from websites that are absolutely unrelated to your nature of business or from websites or blogs with bad reputation.

If you want to avoid it, simply stop including your links in various directories, exchanging links with websites that have absolutely no relation to your business or writing posts chock full of your links on any open blogs.

Now Google ranks high only those websites that have a few links, but from very qualitative websites with excellent reputation. The focus is on quality, not quantity.

2. “Fake” Content:

A lot of misinformed SEO and business bloggers consider that long pages of words will be ranked high, as they waste tons of time to create them. However, to their great disappointment, they couldn’t

be further from the truth. Google Panda will not let any poor quality content to be ranked high.

The so-called “fake” content, that is full of links, is no longer perceived and ranked high. Just like with back links – quality means high rank, even if your article does not reach 2000-words. You can simply make sure that it’s above the 300-words minimum and you’re set.

Of course, that is given that you will provide interesting and engaging content with helpful tips or insights for the users to read.

Duplicate descriptions, that can be found on various pages of the same website will also be ignored by Panda, who’ll drop your ranking like it’s hot. Your visitors and users of your website must want to read the content you’re providing, otherwise Google Panda will penalize your website and you hardly need that.

3. Excessive Keyword Usage:

There is no denying that keywords have been one of the main ways to promote your website. However the excessive usage of keywords can never lead to anything even remotely productive.

Cramming lots of coarse sounding, out of place key words in a text makes your content unreadable to users, considerably decreasing overall website or blog quality.If you are an experienced online business owner, you understand the importance and benefits of using keywords the right way.

Moreover, it’s worth to mention that such practice of keywords cramming is currently strictly against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Nowadays, content writers can finally take a deep breath, because there appeared Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What does it mean? It means that it uses the most widespread phrases of your page as the keywords.

Even more surprising is the fact that it can find synonymous phrases in your text, so you don’t have to annoy your readers with constant repeating of the same words over and over again.

For example, if your article is about “website design”, Latent Semantic Indexing will also determine that your keyword phrase is “web design” or “responsive web design” and so on. All the focus is now on quality and user experience.

Bots are being taught to analyze texts from the point of its simplicity and usefulness for users.

4. Keyword Rankings:

This obsession with keywords ranking is so obsolete. You need to simply understand that nothing will change financially speaking even if your website is on top, but no one clicks it and there is no

traffic.

No traffic means no sales and revenue.

Therefore, before you invest a good chunk of your funds and time into reaching higher rankings, you need to think it over and determine whether these resources will be better spent on something that actually maters.

For example, creation of new products/services or improving the UX of your website.

You will be much better off targeting a few keywords instead of a multitude of hardly related ones. Long tail keywords bring most of the traffic to the website.

Another good strategy is to write exciting meta descriptions to your pages. Thus, visitors will be more inclined to click them.

5. Ignoring images:

It’s not a secret that a while ago images weren’t considered a useful tool in your website’s promotion.

Well, guess what? Now they are!

People are attracted to visual materials, such as images, video, gifs, animations and so on. What you probably did not know is that search engines like them as well.

They just need some help seeing them. In order for search engines to see your images and index them better you need to write alt texts for them.

Suitable and well defined description will help Google determine to what category your images and your text is related. Such relevant images can sufficiently increase your overall website quality and Google ranking.

For instance, if you’re selling washing machines you can rename your boring 1.jpg file to the name of the washing machine model. Thus, users will know for sure that such model is available on your website and will visit your website to see if they will be able to purchase it.

Make sure you omit these obsolete SEO techniques from your promotion strategy. Instead, focus on recent tactics that proved to be efficient and are Google-friendly. Don't know what they are? Keep checking our blog to find out.