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.

Link building is one of the most popular terms in internet marketing. In fact, it is the reason behind any business’s success. Unfortunately, it is also the most misinterpreted term. Marketers adopt different types of link building techniques without knowing their authenticity and lose their credibility by attracting manual penalties. Therefore, it is important to understand the basic concept of link building before putting your efforts into it. Link building is by far the most difficult task; however, if done correctly, it can bring success. Spotlight on Link building: Link building can be simply defined as a strategy to enhance a site’s traffic while improving its reputation. Modern marketers often build backlinks for their websites to achieve:

• High web visibility
• Website traffic
• Online credibility
• Referral traffic
• Better rankings

However, when it comes to link building, people have their own understanding. Sometimes they go after unethical techniques, which damage their brand’s credibility. In fact, there is a very thin dividing line between ethical and unethical. Let’s discover... Unethical link building techniques that should be avoided:

• Reciprocal link (Link exchanges)
• Link schemes
• Paid links
• Comments and forum posting

Ethical link building techniques that should be adopted:

• Blogging
• Press release writing
• Guest posting
• Conduct interviews
• Create compelling case studies
• Create beautiful videos and infographics

However, it is always safe to refer Google’s guidelines before you start link building activities. Not to forget, one of the most valuable advantages of link building is the generation of referral traffic which helps improve its overall conversion rates. Facts:

• Link building requires technical expertise.
• Link building generates extensive referral traffic.
• Good backlinks increase the likelihood of a website’s ranking in search results.
• Link building is a long-term strategy and increases a brand’s visibility.
• Link building improves a brand’s reputation, domain and authority.

Over time, your website will become popular in its niche and gain significant prominence as well. Tips:

• Understand the difference between Nofollow and Dofollow links.
• Identify high authority online sources for backlinks.
• Use a domain authority checker like - http://smallseotools.com/domain-authority-checker
• Create and publish valuable content for your targeted audiences.
• Study and analyse Penguin updates and their overall impact. (According to Google, the aim of Penguin updates is to curb the practice of using unnatural backlinks.)
• Always avoid link schemes and getting paid links.
• Create quality articles, whitepapers, and eBooks.

Popular Link Building Tools:

• BuzzSumo
• Alltop
• Google Drive
• Open Site Explorer

Analyse bounce rate, conversion rate, average time spent on site and other relevant details to adjust your link building strategy.

Statistics:  

• 81% of shoppers research products online before purchasing.
• Two-thirds of Americans aged 50-plus buy from e-retailers.
• 89% would prefer an online store with advanced mobile capabilities.
• Those who shop via mobile spend 66% more than those who shop only in-store.
• According to PWC, 67% of shoppers admit influence of social media review on their online shopping behaviour.

Thus it can be said that e-commerce websites are able to attract good number of customers. However, an online store never appears in the organic search results unless it adopts a powerful SEO strategy. A balanced SEO strategy needs to address a great number of technical, structural and content aspects. A few SEO strategies for e-commerce websites: Implement Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster code on the website to measure performance from time to time. Check every detail of your site with the help of these tools and adjust your internet marketing strategies accordingly. Select and focus on the right set of keywords. It will help you to improve the organic search performance. In fact, you also need to choose different keyword variations having high search volume in order to achieve high rankings as well as traffic. According to an online study, online store owners neglect Meta titles and descriptions, which eventually harm their websites. Therefore, optimise Meta titles and descriptions on a regular basis. Tips:

• Use Google’s Keyword Planner, Analytics, and Google Search Console to find relevant keywords and fine tune your site.
• Ensure that every page on your online store has a unique Meta title and description.
• Add canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Search engines reward sites that are mobile friendly, so make and optimise your site for mobile.
• SEO strategies drive more traffic to your store, supplement content marketing, and outperform other form of marketing.

It is a well- known fact that an e-commerce site has thousands of pages, and many of which may not be important for users as well as search engines. Therefore, use robots.txt to restrict those pages from being crawled. However, you should not use the robots.txt to block private content (use server-side authentication instead), or handle canonicalisation. This will not only improve the speed, performance and usability of your website, but also make it user and search engine friendly. Facts:

• Google uses software known as “web crawlers” to discover publicly available web pages.
• The crawl process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners.
• With the robots.txt file, site owners can choose not to be crawled by Googlebot, or they can provide more specific instructions on how to process pages on their sites.

It is important to have Breadcrumb navigation on a website. It is useful for audiences and search engines as well. It helps the search engine better understand the site structure.  According to Wikipedia, Breadcrumbs or breadcrumbs trail is a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces. So, devise your SEO strategy according to your business objectives and address these SEO issues to make your e-commerce site perform better.

An online survey has revealed that conversion rate optimisation poses critical challenges to online stores. Online stores also pay little attention to this concept because of their lack of knowledge and resources. However, it is not a difficult concept to understand. No doubt, conversion rate optimisation is a perfect science of understanding the behavioural patterns of users, and adjusting a website accordingly. To improve the overall conversion rate of a website, it is essential to make it authentic and compelling. You need to show that you are a genuine seller. This you can do by integrating social proofs with your website. Use testimonials from your customers, reviews, and display social media icons on your website. This is one of the easiest and most effective ways to gain confidence of your intended users. Statistics: According to Socialmediatoday, customer testimonials have the best influence (89%) on all types of content marketing. Tip:

• Use Video testimonials for higher conversion rates.
• Place your testimonials at a sensible position for maximum visibility.
• Real-life examples add tangible value to your brand.
• Add testimonials from famous customers or influential authorities and use their logos.

Gifting is an act of self-satisfaction. In fact, it is a great way of strengthening relationships. If you want to maintain good relationships with your customers, you need to gift a free e-book, instructional guides or discount coupons to them. For better results, you should reward your customers frequently so that they develop a sense of belongingness and engage with your brand. This will help you to sell more. Statistics:

• 70% of people make use of coupons or discounts they learn about from email.
• 60% of people say that receiving special offers is the best reason they subscribe to an email list from a business.

Tips:

• Proactively promote your products through discount offers and coupons.
• Try to understand how customers interact with you, and what they want from you in the future.
• Always try to disclose new opportunities to improve your customers’ experience.
• Re-design your internet marketing strategy on the basis of customers’ feedback.
• Never commit e-commerce website design mistakes to lose your customers.
• Every online store should blog regularly to connect with fans as well as to rank better.

Some online marketers use powerful triggers, which are also a good technique to boost sales. One of the best ways is to create a sense of urgency is by using certain triggering terms such as "limited time offer", "limited quantity", etc. You must take advantage of this technique to improve your site’s conversion rate as well as lower its bounce rate. Moreover, you also need to do your homework properly by:

• Regularly updating your inventory
• Embracing e-mail marketing
• Performing A/B tests
• Launching a Facebook Store
• Using Instagram to engage with your audiences.

Conclusion In a nutshell, the key to success is to keep your customers happy by making them feel more comfortable with your brand. This will automatically improve your store’s overall conversion rate.