How inevitable is SEO for your business?

Research has shown that about 68% of the world’s population relies on internet searches for almost everything. The use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tested strategy for helping business to be front-runners in search engine results through the use of a good architecture website that contains the right content. Investing in this SEO strategy ensures that a customer reaches out to your business over your competitors due to the traffic generated strategically on your website.  Google receives over 57,000 searches per second on any given day, and almost 93% of Google users do not step beyond the first page of search as they deem all other content immaterial. The use of SEO strategies ensures visibility, branding, credibility, traffic generation, exposure, cost-effective mode of marketing, demographics based targeting, ROI, customer trend analysis, and the edge over competitors.

According to Sam McRoberts, CEO of VUDU Marketing and a widely published expert in the SEO field, “SEO is far from dead. It’s changed so drastically that people really need to learn to think of it as less of a marketing tactic, and more of a branding play.” An SEO optimized web infrastructure that is mapped as search-engine friendly, ensures the existence of any business which might otherwise become obsolete in the technologically fast-paced world.

Two main reasons why SEO is crucial to businesses are:

1. SEO is evolving: Although there have been changes regarding organic traffic in the recent years, SEO strategies are progressing towards focus exclusively on optimal user experience by generating higher positioning on search engines. Even video and audio files relevance on the search engine results are based on keyword searches. Having SEO strategies in place ensures that a business’s website is built soundly on rich content with tactical keyword placements without which the business could end up on an irrelevant page. Moreover, mobile optimization is on the rise as customers have started relying on smartphone searches for their immediate needs. This has paved the way for local search optimization techniques via SEO to ensure that the business’s relevance in its own locality is secure. This technique also helps with specific placement and positioning of the business’s brand on social media platforms, which in turn increases organic traffic on the main website. All these advantages need the proper installation, use, and regular updating of SEO stratagems to ensure maximum ROI.
2. SEO in the long term: Most common reason for the failure of businesses that employed SEO strategy is the expectation of results overnight. The employment of SEO tools helps to prepare for the adaptation and placement of the changing algorithms of search engines. Having a dedicated module towards SEO along with regular updating of website content and maintenance of website infrastructure generates the results eventually. To quicken the process, the website should be focused better in terms of content, and also be regularly cross-checked with market trends since online algorithms are constantly evolving. It is also important to have an update of competitor strategies for better placement. Proper maintenance ensures that the current customer base expands and also passively accrue traffic by being listed in the business’s top 5 search words online.

All these strategies will only pan out if the right SEO tools are employed for prime results. The tools employed should include analytics review, keyword research, competitive analysis, on-page analysis, content and link audit, and technical site analysis. Some of the top rated SEO tools available in the market are: Reload SEO, Magento SEO Suite Pro extension v4.4.0, Advanced SEO Suite by Mirasvit, Free Magento SEO Extension by Creare, Ultimate SEO Suite by AheadWorks v1.3.8, SEO Suite, SEOSpace Ultimate Magento Extension, etc. The use of these tools helps to analyze the on-page factors, generate content words, identify structural mistakes on the webpage, study traffic trends on the website, among other functions. Using professional help may go a long way towards successful use of SEO.

Key Tools used in SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is highly dependent on the employment of an effective strategy to ensure that a businesses’ website is crawled on and ranked for by search engines in order to enable maximum visibility to users and potential clientele. One of the primary requirements of SEO success is to employ effective tools that are updated in real time because otherwise, not only the tool, the effect of the business website starts to tend towards a negative spiral.

Some of the best tools that have proven to be assets are:

1) Research and analytics tools: The main purpose of these tools is to provide keyword ranking and content alerts. Ahrefs and SEMrush are tools that have been rocking the SEO strata because they

• Provide the most effective keyword research in the market
• Provide comparative competitive intelligence
• Analyze and strategize both traffic and content
• Identify new keyword opportunities
• Track both past and current rankings
• Enables effective traffic management
• Suggest available advertising opportunities
• Help create an effective guest blogging strategy
• Handle timely panda updates, and
• Perform real-time backlink analysis. The Google Keyword Planner is an operative keyword research tool that exclusively generates daily search volumes and price estimates.

2) Monitoring tools: Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an effective analysis tool equipped to analyze several on-site elements, such as page titles, meta descriptions, URL structure, response codes, images, etc. This tool is a must-have for any web designer/marketer as it helps to not only optimize a website but also boost its performance in search result pages. Google page speed insights is another handy tool which evaluates a businesses’ front-end performance as well as offer page performance optimization suggestions. It offers a more thorough analysis of server configuration and checks the HTML structure of a page and the use of external resources such as images, Javascript and CSS. The use of these tools helps understand the gaping holes in technical architecture which may have otherwise been ignored.

3) Webmaster tools: Both Google and Bing webmaster tools are designed for constant web analysis and the generation of error reports to spot out any anomalies on the page. The main benefits of employing these tools help with the disavowal of spam links, filter out negative SEO, evaluate sitemap and URL parameters, explore Geo targets and inbound links, and run crawl information. Google Analytics helps to study statistics of search insights by providing customer related interests towards the path of the business website, frequent choice in the business webpage, and visitor segmentation that will help to fine tune the business needs. Similar Web is another application that details out website domain information. SEO site checkup is an audit and score checker tool that helps keep tabs on the functionality of the businesses’’ website on the search engines.

4) Important extras: Copyscape is a plagiarism checker tool that checks and ensures the originality of the content as well as help avoid unwarranted repetition and such. Schema Creator is a structured tool to enable pass effectively through crawling’s semantic intelligence.

The tactical employment of these tools in any operative combination enables the success of any SEO strategy as they rely heavily on real-time updates given the fast expiration of data on the internet.

Staging Module Significance in Kentico

So you are all set with the content updates for the web page. Great! But are you sure on how the content will be appearing live? That’s where the staging module will come into the picture. Staging module allows you to easily transfer changes made to pages or objects in a Kentico instance on one server to a different instance on another server. You can also perform complete synchronization of all pages and objects. All connected instances must use the same version of Kentico. Staging is particularly useful if you need to synchronize multiple environments during development, for example:

Development  > Testing/Staging  >  Live (production)

WHAT IS CONTENT STAGING

Content staging is the practice of deploying changes to one or more servers outside of the development environment, such as content review, quality assurance, security validation or performance testing, before deploying to production. Despite the name, content staging is not just about staging visible content.

Why stage content? Organizations have many reasons for wanting to stage changes prior to deploying to production:

• Does the content adhere to organizational compliance policies and standards?
• Is the content grammatically correct?
• Have accessibility requirements been taken into account?
• Has a custom component/code been tested?
• Does a new template or layout adhere to organizational or departmental design guidelines?
• Does the content duplicate existing content?

KEY ADVANTAGES OF STAGING MODULE

● Review All Content Before It Gets Published

The Staging module synchronizes content from your authoring environment to the live server. You can review all changes made to the site on your local server before showing them to the visitors.

● Separate Authoring and Live Environments

Content staging not only adds extra approval and QA steps to your publishing process, but it also separates the authoring and lives environment. It means you can disable the administration interface on the live site and make all changes on your local server to increase security.

Having an internal authoring server also improves the user experience for your content administrators as they access their internal server, instead of making changes on the live server.

● Publish Content to Geographically Distant Servers

Since you can synchronize content to multiple servers at the same time, you can run multiple geographically distant Kentico CMS servers around the world and keep their content synchronized with your authoring server. It’s useful when you need to run servers in Europe, North America, Australia, and China at the same time while providing site visitors with a highly responsive website.

● Deploy New Templates and Other Code Across Servers

As with content, you can also synchronize development objects, such as page templates, CSS stylesheets, transformations, and others, across servers. This makes incremental updates of the website possible with only a few clicks.

References:

https://docs.kentico.com/k9/deploying-websites/content-staging

https://www.kentico.com/product/all-features/development/staging-and-synchronization

5 Digital Marketing Tips for Beginners

With the whole world progressing towards digital consumption, business players are grabbing their tickets to this future marketing form as traditional methods for marketing offline through print media and such has taken a back seat. Digital marketing is not only cheaper in terms of cost, but also yields steady output for businesses to track consumer trends in real time and instantly adapt their marketing strategies to maximize returns through blogs, internet banner ads, websites and SEO content, pay-per-click advertising, online video content, email and social media marketing, and mobile marketing. Businesses that are new as well as those that have thus far relied on the old marketing styles have to move forward and adopt the modern technological methods without which they will go extinct.

According to market research, marketing has undergone a major transformation online in the past two years as compared to the last 50 years. Content Marketing Institute, based on a survey in 2015, pointed out that “55% of B2B marketers say they are unclear on what content marketing success or effectiveness looks like. To get to the right target customers with the right strategy and to build a strong base for online visibility, here are some of the most productive tips to enhance oneself in the world of digital marketing:

1. Stepping up

One of the most common misconceptions about digital marketing is that brand awareness and lead generation are one and the same and that they work in tandem. While the latter is a fact, the need to know when one should roll out brand awareness or lead generation is critical to determine the success or failure of the company. Ideally, brand awareness is essential to establish the business in the virtual world and from there on work towards expanding the customer base for growing in the global world. This in turn would generate leads that can be effectively converted into fulfilling sales. Nevertheless, both these objectives should be constantly monitored and adapted online without which a business can dwindle down into a spiral collapse.

2. Connecting with the customers

Everyday, online users which is a major portion of the world’s population, have questions that need to be resolved. At most times, the answers to these questions end with a purchase. Given this scenario, each company should focus on connecting with their customers on an emotive level rather than a mere functional purposes because customer bases grow when they find they can find a business that looks out for them and settles all their unease in everyday life. Instead of simply posting an online ad, businesses have to reach out by promoting new content innovatively that leads them to the desired end result.

3. SEO

Having enough traffic to lead to sales is just one functional chapter of SEO. Using content not only puts your business in the competitive run, but having best content ensures that your customers stay with your business definitely. SEO also helps understand the constantly evolving consumer behavior trends and allows for the business to develop its strategy to fit the customer needs.

4. Test and play

One cannot simply generate content and expect that content to be the base of a successful campaign. Having structured campaigns requires intel on the trends, which can be got accurately through SEO. This in turn ensures that your campaign is on the right track. Setting up a dedicated team to monitor the content flow, study trending patterns, build, test, launch, and edit campaigns, etc, are strategies that are effective for the long run.

5. Time

Having a schedule goes a long way to effectively churn out the best results. Decide the timing of your launches, consider the local sales patterns and amp them up in case of any important days like Black Friday, etc. The simple task is to set a calendar for the regular monitoring and content creating activities, and a time for taking it out into the open. Every business has its unique needs. In the digital arena, businesses that stand out are the ones that are able to perform steadily with a strategy from the beginning.

Top 5 SEO Tips for Startups

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial element for many business startups because having an SEO strategy ensures the online survival of the business over time. According to Duane Forrester, the Senior Product Manager of Bing, “On a broad scale, I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the same way TV, radio, and a print is traditionally thought of as marketing tactics.” A business always needs proper marketing strategy online because search engines have about 80-90% market share as a result of customers always going online for a quick review before making any form of purchase. Having an updated SEO strategy ensures that the business invests in the right branding efforts to help customers pick out their products or services over various other open options on the internet. The failure to implement an organic SEO presence diminishes the ROI and negatively impacts the business. A better online positioning is possible for any startup, provided they focus on maximizing their users’ experience through the employment of the right methodic strategy.

Every startup can get a sizeable bite in the market provided they understand the successful implementation of SEO. Top five pointers that can help get SEO strategies into focus are:

1. Set up a targeted strategy

Any startup that is just testing the waters with SEO needs to set up a list of achievable targets for the short run because SEO strategies change quickly based on consumer behavior. The goal setting in the initial stages ensures that the targets are achieved via the maximum usage of the SEO strategy employed, and in the case of unachievable targets, the gaping holes in the SEO strategy are exposed. Keeping track of this progress is crucial because the changes in the website behavior enhance the insight into the true working of the SEO model, thereby enabling any startup to adapt before hitting rock-bottom.

2. Using keywords to get to the top

Any content, however original and perfect, can get to the search engines the first page only if the words match the consumer’s search behavior. Keeping tabs on the word behavior and implementing them into the business’s content ensures that your official page is not lost in a pile. According to market research, nearly 75% of users do not look beyond the first search page display because they consider the remaining to be stale or not as best as the ones on top. Using the right set of keywords and long-tailed phrases better the chance of visibility.

3. Keep track of the posted content

An effective SEO strategy requires the businesses to keep track of the content within their websites to study the site’s performance behavior. One cannot leave unattended or un-updated content online because that will lure the site to the end of the competitive market and cause a fallout. Actively tracking the content, date, and state of publication, the relevance of keywords, etc., helps decide the shelf life of the content. Taking the help of professionals or having a dedicated SEO team to study market trends ensures definite success in the long run.

4. Mobile optimization

A startup cannot set up separate links for each device mode used to view the content. Since the growth of smartphones had generated quite a lot of online traffic due to easy accessibility for users, the startup business should ensure that there is a solid software infrastructure to take care of the device optimization automatically. This not only favors user experience but also generates good returns.

5. Focus on off-page strategies too!

Any seasoned SEO expert would advise you to spend sufficient attention on off-page SEO activities as well. Off-page SEO coupled with on-page efforts will result in effective long-term results. Some of them include social media marketing, content strategy and listing the website and content is good and relevant web directories.

How Magento Makes you Festival Ready

The last quarter is undeniably the busiest season of the year for every e-commerce retailer as the beginning of festival sales opens the channel for growth and surplus sales to ramp up revenues and build up your customer base. Letting your website exist as it is, hoping that your e-commerce site gets all the needed attention by itself will not allow you to be a part of the festival league. Having a pre-planned and tested strategy is the only fool-proof method that can tide you through the season with customers having seamless and hassle-free shopping experience to choose you over your competitors and return back for more without any second thoughts.

After all, the first impression is indeed the best impression. According to Statista and the National Retail Federation, the holiday season accounts for around 20% of the retail industry’s annual sales and can account for as much as 30% of an individual retailer’s total sales. The shopping days beginning from Black Friday through Christmas pulls in almost 50-100% more revenues than any other shopping periods during the normal course of the year. E-commerce retailers can enhance their website’s presence and visibility by getting into the following practices for ramping up their sales this season:

• Integrating the rating module using Magento’s development tools can aid with building a trust factor with the customers by enabling them to view the previous reviews. Trusting a 100% online portal depends purely on the feedback of its regular users.
• Hiring a Magento developer to take care of all your social media promotions. Today world is highly driven by the opinions and promotions on social media. Cashing in on this platform to regulate one’s business requires proper integration of sources and captivating marketing.
• Keeping the e-commerce site’s social pages buzzing with the season’s celebrations by promoting contests, offering freebies, etc, will definitely drive the traffic of the website and definitely regulate sales if the expectations of the customers are visually appealing and fairly priced.
• Customizing using Magento themes and installing google analytics into the e-commerce platform will the business to thrive by building upon sales via promotion of these commonly sought after products which are advertised extensively through the internet.
• Build the brand by displaying all laurels won by the e-commerce platform. This helps the customer to know that your e-commerce platform is also free from scams and establish yourself as a genuine customer portal.
• Keep the promotional offers interesting. One size does not fit all, and there should be good incentives that will drive your customer for more purchases rather than being bored with just a few promotional offers on repeat. Getting creative and enabling these promotions through Magento’s tools will prove effective.
• Integrating SMS API will enable text promotion which will be driving factors for sales in last-minute shoppers looking for sales at the closing. Last minute offers are always tempting to the customer and this method of promotion is the fastest since most of the population is hooked to the phone.
• Having an in-house Magento developer will be beneficial, especially during the festive season, because the developer will be able to constantly update and keep track of the website’s progress for zero-downtime sales.

While these pointers are sales boosters, some of the other preparatory steps to take note of to boost the holiday performance include; theme modifications, working payment portals, responsive customer service team, upgraded server capacity, device compatibility for apps, customization offers portal, including accurate product descriptions with product videos, and a interactive homepage with top brand lists based on customer trends.

Why Kentico is a Preferred CMS Platform

Kentico is an all-in-one CMS, E-commerce, and Online Marketing platform developed with ASP.NET and MS SQL. From developers to content editors, it’s easy to use and allows users to make edits and update the system quickly, enabling companies to operate both more efficiently and effectively. The beauty of Kentico is that it’s loaded with features such as WYSIWYG editor, workflow, permissions, multilingual support, full-text search, online forms, newsletters, e-commerce, blogs, polls, web analytics and other modules.

There are three basic development models provided by Kentico.

1. Portal Engine: Provides you with a browser-based interface using web parts components to create websites. Coding with the Visual studio is only required while creating custom components.
2. ASPX templates: The developers can find varied templates to suit the website needs and this can be further customized using standard ASP.NET architecture and standard development tools, such as Visual Studio. This model requires you to be familiar with ASP.NET web form development and have at least basic programming knowledge of C# or VB.NET.
3. MVC: Kentico allows you to create websites using the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern (based on the ASP.NET MVC framework). Note that, not all features are supported for MVC development; see Supported and unsupported Kentico features on MVC sites for more details.

Why Kentico?

1. Ease of Use

Kentico CMS is out of the box one of the easiest CMS systems to use. Anyone who has ever used the Internet has all the skills required to add and update pages, add dynamic content, and create stunning, feature-rich websites. Kentico administration system comes with plenty of tips and descriptions to guide users through nearly every process. Additionally, Kentico provides step-by-step guides and tutorials directly on their site along with videos, blogs, and forums.

2. UI Personalization

The Kentico Administration site provides the feature of UI personalization. The UI personalization application enables you to provide certain users of the website with a simplified user interface. This is useful for business users who don’t need to see all the applications, tabs, menu items, or parts of UI pages which they do not use. Setting up a personalized UI can significantly decrease the learning time for users, new to the system and makes the system generally easier to use and understand.

Note:

1. UI personalization does not apply to users who have the Administrator Global administrator privilege level. Administrators always have access to all UI elements, regardless of the system’s UI personalization settings.
2. Do not confuse UI personalization with the permission system in Kentico. Permissions control what users can do, such as create or modify objects, while UI personalization controls what users can see. A user may be able to see a part of the UI but still not have permissions to perform any actions.

3. Content Staging / Continuous Integration

One of the challenges of updating content on a site is the repeated effort to migrate changes from one platform to the next. Often companies will have different environments for their staging (QA) content and their production (live) content. With Kentico, publishing data from one environment to the next is accomplished easily through the use of “content staging”. With a few clicks, a user can migrate content between the systems and quickly synchronize all environments. With the use of the “Scheduled Tasks” feature, this process can even be accomplished on a daily or hourly basis to increase productivity even further. This minimizes administrative time and easily allows a company to define a concise process for updates and deployments.

4. Workflows

Workflows in Kentico allow content to be moved through a set of predefined steps. These steps are easily created and configured in the Kentico system and can be quickly applied to any or all content. An editor can make changes to a page, and then submit it for approval. The approving manager gets notified automatically by the Kentico system of the change. The managers can then view the edits, submit them back to the editor for correction, publish the changes, or even edit the edited content. Workflows can also be configured to have several steps that must be completed before content is published to the site.

5. Smart Search

Smart Search in Kentico is a Lucene-based search functionality that quickly analyzes and locates content. Through the use of this module, defined content is indexed and stored in the system to allow searches to be completed much quicker than traditional database-based methods. Search results can be customized to only return relevant content and images. The Kentico system constantly updates the search results as new website content changes to keep the results accurate.

6. Feature-rich CMS

Off the shelf, the Kentico CMS system allows for eCommerce, blogging, forums, messaging, and a number of other critical functions. With the Ultimate license, companies have full access to every feature and can quickly add new functionality to their sites. Many other CMS systems require a series of add-ons to obtain the functionality readily available in Kentico. Even if a company decides to add modules, later on, all that is required is a simple update of the license and the features for the module are unlocked. Having such a wide range of features allows a company to focus on their business, not piecing together functionality.

7. Smooth Updates

Kentico provides step-by-step guides for every product update. Their installation packages are professionally written and provide a solid, concise process for applying the updated content. Any special requirements are clearly defined and easy to follow. Updates come complete with documentation and files targeted at a number of environments (.NET 2.0,3.5,etc.) so that all clients can benefit from their improvements.

8. Customer Recognition

Kentico is constantly gaining market share and quickly becoming a premier CMS software company. Kentico constantly communicates upcoming changes with their clients and values their input. Kentico listens to its partners and strives to deliver a product that meets their needs. For the training program, Kentico reached out to several of their “Gold” level partners to create the training material and guidelines. This type of customer involvement demonstrates Kentico’s commitment to their clients and their success.

9. Constantly Evolving

As each day passes, new technologies and functionality are being created. The folks at Kentico embrace these changes and are constantly incorporating them into their product. They test their code using the latest development environments and servers (Visual Studio 2010/Windows Server 2008) to ensure compliance. Kentico integrates a number of third-party components (CKEditor, Lucene, AJAX, etc.) and utilizes the latest source code that is available. All of these efforts allow Kentico to deliver the latest technologies and functionality that drive dynamic, interactive websites.

10. New Documentation

With the release of each new version of Kentico, it keeps on adding a lot of developer-centric functionality. With this, there comes a lot of questions from the community on how to utilize them and best practices. With the release of each new version of Kentico, they also keep updating their documentation to provide the information to get developers heading in the right direction. It really helps the developers to understand the new features and help them implement within the applications.

References

1. https://docs.kentico.com/k9tutorial/site-development-overview
2. https://docs.kentico.com/k9/managing-users/ui-personalization
3. https://devnet.kentico.com/articles/five-things-developers-should-be-excited-about-in-kentico-9
4. https://bitwizards.com/Thought-Leadership/Blog/2010/May-2010/Top-10-reasons-to-use-Kentico-CMS