With the rise of internet among the large number of users, social media websites are being widely used by everyone. It is thereby affecting the lives of many people.
Due to social media, building and designing a website has become quite different and it has revolutionised the whole concept of Web Designing.
What make social media so popular in the field of Web Designing?
• It is easily accessible by a large chunk of internet savvy audiences.
• Major portion of every age group is keenly involved in social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and much more.
• Social media opens possibilities of direct access to clients without any interference of the third party.
• Facebook can be the best source of advertisement which is pretty much cost effective as compared to other channels like print, broadcasting etc.
• Social media also helps in rankings of a website through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
In the present era of digital world, for a successful business, just by developing a website is not enough. Social Media strategies have to be applied to the websites to make it popular among masses. You just have to follow some procedures which will help you to connect social media platforms to your website.
Social Media sites are considered as a great platform to let your audiences know about your business website. Hence to make a website socially active on social media, almost every website, nowadays, has many such social media icons/widgets on every page. With the help of a single click, users can directly visit their social media profiles for gathering more information.
This is why social media is transforming the web designing:
Effective Design for Social Media Pages and Profiles
Social media nowadays has made the website look lively and interactive. Besides, developing and designing a website, it is very important for a business to attract more and more audiences. Design of the website has to be such that, it focuses completely on its targeted audiences.
For example, if you are willing to make your business available on Facebook or Twitter, it is thereby essential to design a specific fan following page. The similar thing can be applied on Twitter and other platforms too. Your social profiles should be designed to attract the users with instant consequence.
Promoting Business through Social Media Profiles
With the rise of social networking platforms, website designing has to go through a series of updates. Almost every business these days has an official page on these social media platforms. The profile contains links of the website pages that encourage their audiences to directly connect with the business website.
Almost every business websites include Social Media buttons on their home page or at the header to allow easy connectivity. This trend is becoming popular and business knows they have to integrate links to their pages.
Advertisements on Social Media Platforms
The number of people connecting to Social Media has increased so much that it has made these platforms popular. This influences the company to use these platforms to extend their targeted audiences base. Thus, for better performance and engagements in social media, companies focus on doing advertisements using social media.
The main goal of these sites is to boost their efficiency and help them to gather more views and clicks. Designing of the ad copies is a vital role to make company generate more and more leads. The Website Designers and Developers should try to develop attractive content like banner ads, memes, GIFs etc to make it turn heads.
Employing Images for social media communication
Social media has changed the way a business operates. Social media is an ideal platform to interact with the potential consumers of the business. At this place, you can provide your audiences with the information for which they are looking. On the top of it, these platforms allow to decide and analyze on how to enhance your brand.
The design of the website has to be such that it boosts more interaction with lots of customers. Every business now a days needs a platform where it can create an image.
At last, I can say that, it is very much essential for the business to be socially active on social media platforms. Through this the business will gain more and more popularity among masses and thus can attract ample leads in order to make a business grow to new heights.
What is Black Hat in SEO?
Black hat is basically derived from a famous movie where the ‘Bad Guy’ is named as ‘Black Hat’ whereas the ‘Good Guy’ was named ‘White Hat’. Black hat refers to the use of deceptive and spamming techniques in order to rank a website on the top of the SERP. This can really damage your website by getting de-indexed in search engine databases.
As more and more users demand for highly relevant and quick information when searching online, Google continues to change and update its search algorithms for the best possible result which can further enhance the user experience.
Thus if SEO is done in a genuine and correct way, only then it can yield some positive results. One must stay away from illegal and unethical ‘Black Hat’ SEO Techniques and use only the lawful ‘White Hat’ SEO techniques for a better ranking in a long run.
Below are some of the Black Hat SEO Techniques that a digital marketer must know to safeguard their website:
- Content Plagiarism/ Duplicasy
- Keyword Stuffing
- Hidden Text
- Link Farming
- Unnecessary redirects
- Cloaking
Lets know more about these unlawful techniques in detail
- Content Plagiarism/ Duplicasy
Copying content from another website which is also called duplicate content is considered as one of the biggest black hat technique. Google disapproves this technique as it deploys regular and newer updates in its algorithm to take care that none of the website is using duplicate content. A unique content only gets indexed once in search engines. If the website uses duplicate content then the algorithms will automatically de-index the website in the spam-box. Therefore, the focus of the websites must be on writing fresh, new and unique content for a better engagement of the users.
2. Keyword Stuffing
This techniques worked many years back and was considered popular. Keyword stuffing means unnecessarily overusing the keywords, important words or phrases repeatedly in content. This can really very annoying and can harm both the user experience as well as can make your website getting spammed.
3. Hidden Text
The Highlighted Sentence is HIDDEN
Hidden texts are the texts that are not visible to the user or the visitor. It looks just like the white text on a white background that makes it easy to stuff extra keywords on your site.
We as humans cannot track the same colored text on same colored background, but Google’s crawlers can. Bots/crawlers is an automated system that scans your source code in the back-end of the website to trace such errors. If Google finds such malpractice on your website, then you will be penalized for it. Hence it is better to ensure that your website is ‘hidden text’ free.
4. Link Farming (Reciprocal Links or Link Exchanges)
There are large numbers of site or a group of sites that serve the purpose of increasing the link popularity of another website through the link exchanges. This practice is commonly called Link farming.
In this practice, the website will have numerous hyperlinks and anchor texts that are basically irrelevant. Google does not prefer unrelated links, linking to a website. By following this practice, your website will most likely be rooted out and penalized. Hence one must not get involved in Link Farming as it can definitely ruin the user experience thereby hurting your rankings.
5. Unnecessary Re-directs
Unnecessary redirecting can be a bit irritating for a visitor visiting your website. In this situation, a website automatically gets redirected to another website that is either irrelevant or useless.
Google bots get to know the URLs of such re-directs and according sends the websites to spam box. This technique was prevalent long time ago. But now this has been completely banned. A website can only use these redirects:
- 301 Permanent Re-direct.
- 302 Temporary Re-direct
6. Cloaking
Cloaking is most widely used and is a popular Black hat technique. Cloaking is the practice of mis-leading the Search Engine by showing different content to Google and taking your websites visitors to a different web page, after having clicked the search engine link.
For example
Your website makes Google think that you are directing visitors to a live football match update site. But your website is actually publishing information about sales on Men and Women’s apparels and accessories.
Google uses its search algorithms to locate such fraud and mis-leading activities, and if detected, such websites are subjected to penalty.
Web Design City?
- We are professional Web Design Company based in Australia.
- We offer all the possible web solutions you may require including web design, ecommerce
- shopping cart design, SEO, Web Hosting, Domain Registration
- We offer web solutions which are customizable, smart, intellectual yet affordable and deliver
- what our client really expects.
The Pursuit of WEB DESIGN CITY
- We aim to provide professional web solutions to businesses for both small and large.
- We deliver high quality solutions to businesses of all sizes on a national level.
- To deliver best web design services.
What We Really Offer?
- Website Designing
- Mobile Web Design
- Ecommerce development
- SEO Activities
- WordPress, Joomla!, Zen Cart Development etc.
- Online Marketing
- Domain and Hosting
- Social Media Marketing and so on…
Benefits of Web Design City
- Professional Web Designing Solutions
- Unique and customized web layout design
- CSS support and image optimization
- SEO Friendly Coding
- Proper use of Navigation
- Innovative eCommerce Website Development
Why Choose Us?
- We have a Professional and Well Experienced Team of Designers and Developers for Designing the Website for Companies.
- Best in Class Services
- Years of Experience in the Industry
- Affordable Prices
- Robust and Round the Clock Support and Maintenance.
Infographic by Web Design City
To Publish this Image on your Blog or Website . Copy this code
Our Leading and Trusted Clients
- SHIMANO
- GRACE
- ORACLE
- Ameriprise Financial
- Vista Print
- D & M RESEARCH and more…
Do you think, just by designing your website will make it rank good at SERP?
The answer would be a clear NO. Website design and development alone is not enough in order to make a website rank a better position in Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
Therefore, we have framed few important fundamentals of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that would help you to bring more and more traffic to your website.
But, to make it more successful, one must have a certain level of knowledge about HTML.
Page Meta Title
Meta-Title is the title that you give to your webpage within the meta-tags. It helps the people to know the page where he is about to visit. An attractive title will attract more and more visitors to the website.
As per the search engine point of view, in order to crawl a website, the crawlers make use of the Meta-Title and the keywords placed in it.
It must be kept in mind that the meta-title must be relevant to the URL linked to it. The meta-title should not be too long.
The title should be kept under 55 characters including spaces and punctuation which is best for display in the search engines. It is a recommendation that the keywords and phrases must be used only once in the title.
Your page Meta-Title must be:
- concise.
- Longer than 40 characters.
- Take the form of a sentence rather than a list of keywords.
- Repetition of the word must be avoided.
- Unique to every page’s content.
- Company name must be at the end, not the beginning.
The HTML code for Meta-Title tag must be
<title> Basic Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)- Web Design City </title>
Meta – Description
Meta – Description is a concise description of the content of the page and must be different for every page of your site. There is no limit for the length of the Meta – Description, however, a good rule of thumb is a maximum of 150 characters.
Your description should be in sentence form rather than just a list of keywords.
This description will appear as the description of your site below the title in some search engine result pages.
Again, many sites make the mistake of having the same description on every page in their site or omitting these tags altogether.
<meta name=”description” content=” we have framed few important fundamentals of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that would help you to bring more and more traffic to your website.”>
Proper Usage of Heading Tags
Heading tagsare part of the HTML coding for a Web page Designing and development. Headings are defined with H1 to H6 tags.
The H1 tag is defined as the most importantheading which is mostly the largest or boldest in a web page, whereas H6 indicates the lowest – level heading tag.
The six different HTML headings those are included in a web page:
- <h1>This is heading 1</h1>
- <h2>This is heading 2</h2>
- <h3>This is heading 3</h3>
- <h4>This is heading 4</h4>
- <h5>This is heading 5</h5>
Use Neat URL
Many sites, particularly sites that are mainly driven by databases system or Content Management System, tend to use long (Uniform Resource Locator) URL’s also called Web Addresses to provide their content.
If you look in the address bar or your web browser, you will see the address of the page you are currently visiting. It is very important that the URL must be neat because it is easy to remember and is also easy for the Search Engines to follow.
Many website URLs are not at all optimized, which leads to inconvenience to the visitors. These sorts of addresses are not only difficult, for your visitors to remember, but they can also stop search engines to track your website.
If the URL’s on your site is long as well as clumsy without the presence of any keyword, you could be preventing Search Engines from even finding your page, indexing it and listing it in their result pages.
1. Your website needs a place to live
The first component that your website really needs is a web space that would enable you to save all the files, media, rich media etc. called as server. The faster the server the faster would be the loading speed of the website.
Think of your website as a collection of large amount of files. When it’s “hosted” on your computer like all of your other files, only you can open it up as it is utilizing space on your hard drive. But, when you host those files on a web server or purchase the web space, anyone can be able to connect to that server via internet.
Hosting companies offer you space on these servers, or if needed they can even provide your own hosting on your own dedicated web server, but only after you pay for it. If you are interested in purchasing a hosting package from a dedicated hosting provider, which is usually offered by the domain name of the registrar and they would let you upload your website files on it. Now once you connect that domain name, anyone can be able to view your website.
There are a few things that must be considered while planning for a Web Hosting.
- Uptime Reliability
- Customer service
- Speed Factor
2. Choose a good Business Name
Before initiating your own website designing, try to survey a name for which you want to be get known for. The more spicier and attractive name would help you to grab more and more people’s views. The name of the website must be in parallel to the products, service or the information that are on offer on the website.
On the contrary, it’s not necessary to have a perfect domain name. Some names might be better than others, but ultimately it is considered as a very small part of your business, but what matters most is the actual content available on your website.
3. Build and Edit Your Website Using CMS
CMS (Content Management System) is a very valuable platform through which you will be able design and customise your own website. If you really wanted to alter the changes onto your webpage, you could easily edit every time you want to make a change to your business website. This is the minimum amount of pain that one has to bear.
A CMS platform like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. lets you edit your website using your own domain itself. You can log on using your own username and password in order to customise the layout, settings as well as contents, create new posts and pages, often using website templates that are easy to use.
In other words using a CMS platform makes creating as well as updating information’s to your website much easier and thereby saves your valuable time.
4. Brand yourself by choosing a great LOGO design
A logo is one of the main ways that will help your viewers and the customers in order to recognise your business. If you already have a business of your own before the launch of your website, then it would be an easy task. Else, you have to devote your time in order to design your own logo for your website. You can also take the help of different websites in order to make your logo creation easier.
5. Continuous Updates
A website will stay alive only if it gets a dose of regular content updates. To make a website perform better, it needs to be updated on a regular basis ranging from daily, weekly or even monthly. Haphazard or irregular updates would lead to a trouble and could lead to lower ranks in the search engine result sites. You must stress on adding engaging long content, adding rich media like pictures, videos, presentations etc that can make a user stick to the website for a long time.
In online marketing, use of video content plays a very vital role in creating a business demand. With the rise of internet use, video content has dominated the web and, with its user engaging nature, most of the big brands follow this marketing strategy. The video content has the power to increase the reach of businesses, build brand image, boost followers in social media and thus generate ample leads to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI).
In this article, marketing metrics are explained in brief in order to establish Return on Investment (ROI).
1.) Search Rankings
Monitoring how well your content in the website is ranking for all the listed short tailed keywords should be considered as a top priority, especially. Your video content should aim to help your target audience resolve their issues and queries.
In order to ensure that your content is being seen by right people, ranking at a good position will help to increase your reach and boost a variety of other key areas that will generate important data for further enhancing and altering the planned digital strategy.
2.) Views
Views are considered as one of the most important as well as easiest to find out. It is mostly said that higher the views of the videos, the higher would be the rate of conversion.
The total views will provide you with a fair knowledge about what your video has achieved from when its uploaded, but that doesn’t mean people are watching your videos till the end.
3.) Play Rate
Play rate, is the percent of page visitors who clicked on play button and started watching. This is a great metric for measuring whether your video is the best based on its context and is fairly relevant.
Understanding the play rate figures is crucial for ensuring your videos are well-positioned on your website as, if this figure is lower than expected, you will be able to efficiently ascertain whether additional attention to placement is required.
4.) Watch Time
Watch time exactly shows how much time your viewers are spending on watching your video content. It is a medium to judge the engagement rate of a particular video they are viewing.
This metric will be displayed as a percentage and, the higher the percentage, the more successful the video has been in engaging and entertaining your audiences.
On the contrary, if you discover that your viewers aren’t fetching your content to be engaging, closely reviewing both format and length is important, especially if your call to action is positioned at the end.
5.) Subscribers
Establishing a strong subscriber base is a key contributor to the success of your regularly produced video based content.
Expanding your subscriber base will help you to increase your reach, but it will also provide you with important data that you can analyse in order to ascertain the demographics of your existing audience.
From here, you can look at whether your video content is gaining attraction from the target audience, or whether your approach needs adjusting in order to do so.
6.) Social Sharing
Monitoring your social shares will give you an idea of how well your audience are getting engaged with your videos on social media.
If you’re making videos specifically for social media then this is obviously a very important metric.
Alongside increasing your reach, views, and subscribers, the knowledge you will gain about the types of content your target audience wants to share with their friends and followers on social media should form a key part of your video content strategy moving forwards.
7.) Back-Links Generation
Video marketing is essential part of SEO. Video is typically a type of content that can be shared countlessly by the people who might think the video to be worthy for sharing and are likely to link to it.
Although video isn’t necessarily the best method for building lots of backlinks, keeping an eye on this metric will help you assess how your video content is playing into your SEO strategy.
SEO metrics are often far more tangible in terms of ROI, as rankings increases ultimately lead to more onsite traffic which can be closely assessed through Google Analytics.
It’s also worth noting that more back-links to your videos mean higher rankings in Google and, more importantly, YouTube, meaning more views and more exposure.
8.) Click Through Rate (CTR)
This data will provide you with a clear indication of how persuasive your video content is at encouraging viewers to follow your calls to action.
If you want your audience to click through to a specific page on your website for further information, sign up to your mailing list or follow you on social platforms, it’s important to understand what percentage of your audience is following through and how you can improve these figures to achieve your goals.
9.) New Lead Generation
The golden ticket of all marketing data; keeping a close eye on your lead generation and sales figures will always give you the most comprehensive understanding of the levels of ROI your video campaigns are achieving.
The trouble of course is that new leads generated from individual videos can be difficult to measure when you have multiple campaigns and tactics playing out across multiple platforms.
A lift in leads and sales figures are the most important indicator of good ROI however and so must always be closely monitored following the launch of a key video campaign.
10.) Adjusting Your Video Strategies to Improve ROI
Digital marketing is in a constant state of fluctuations, with video marketers needing to adjust their approach towards the expectation of the audiences, the marketing landscape and seasonal changes and trends of the audience.
Like any marketing strategy, accurately measuring ROI is very important in order to ensure that you are consistently investing time, efforts and resources into the areas that will yield the most positive results. This means regularly and accurately reviewing your data to ensure your tactics and campaigns are working in the expected manner.
Portfolio plays a very dominant role in making your freelancing work look fantastic. It can be used to highlight your past and present projects on which you have worked upon in order to encourage clients to hire you.
Now a days, Portfolio isn’t just a collection of work samples. Instead, it’s a golden opportunity for you to showcase:
- Who you are?
- What kind of work you do?
- How you do that work?
- Where you want to go next? and,
- With whom YOU really want to work with?
You must try to design your portfolio in such a way that can really convince a client to hire you as a contractor. Here are the tips that can help you design an impressive portfolio.
1. Customise Your Site Theme or Template
Even though you know how to build a website from scratch, it makes more sense to use a robust platform or Content Management System (CMS) with complex tools built right in.
You can also include your customised site theme or template in your portfolio. Instead of saying “I used my coding skills to build this site” it is better to show the audience the website that you created and designed. This helps people to build trust upon you for the service you provide.
Customising code on a theme or template for the purpose of portfolio has great benefits for designers, developers or freelancers in establishing their brand image and help them gain recognition.
2. Google Yourself
You must have searched yourself on the internet a number of times just to check your existence on the web world. If you have not done that yet, it is the right time to do so.
When you’re just at a budding stage, you might not have a social proof – like blog portfolios and testimonials – to show how awesome you are at coding activity. But you can broaden the scope of what you can include in your portfolio.
Google yourself and see what comes up. There might be a chance that you’ve been and featured more than you might have realised. If you appeared online in a positive light then you can feature it in your portfolio, whether it’s related to tech or not.
3. Get Testimonials
Testimonial is a written declaration certifying a person’s character, conduct, or qualifications, values, knowledge, excellence, etc., that they possess. It is a letter or written statement of recommendation.
Just make sure you feature your own testimonial on your site. This will help people to gain more trust on you and the brand with which you are dealing.
You can get testimonials about other work you’ve done. If you’re changing careers, ask your former coworker to write a few sentences on what working with you was like. And don’t forget to return the favor!
Infographic By Web Design City
For some people especially those people who don’t consider themselves as writers, the thought of composing a testimonial might be a difficult task. But with the help of advanced CMS tools you can easily prepare your own testimonials.
4. Showcase Your Education
It is an important factor to feature your education in the portfolio. You must be able to explain what you have learned in a training program to enhance your skills. It shows what you learned and how dedicated you are towards your new career.
Don’t be shy at featuring other courses you’ve taken even the online free ones or in workshops. This is because, education done in any form can prove to be beneficial.
5. Include All Your Online Projects
Since you have already mentioned your education in testimonials, why not include the work you did while learning your skills? Don’t limit yourself to final projects for major courses. You can include any exercises or projects that are still incomplete.
If you have built an application using JavaScript or jQuery, you can just include a screenshot and link to that application. Also try to put in all the screenshots of the stages when you were planning to build the app, how the application looked before you made it interactive, and even different screen-shots showing certain features and the X-factor of the app.
6. Include Community Involvement.
Another non-digital aspect to point out in your own Website portfolio is your participation in any groups or organisations. If you attend meet-ups, documentations, seminars or are part of professional organizations, it’s pretty much better if you list them.
There might be an important aspect of the group or your role in it – like you created HTML newsletters for your entrepreneurs’ club or maintained the WordPress site for any function in your area. Those are both best examples of you using your technical skills “in real life” as well as working in a team and on different projects that can add up to a real experience in the eyes of people those who are looking forward to hire you.
