Month: November 2020

A Day in the Life of an SEO

Search engine optimizers are like black sheep in a family. Our work is often misunderstood. Colleagues wonder what we are doing or how we make money for the company. Why do we read blog posts all day, they sometimes ask?

Success in organic search can be elusive. It’s often hard to measure. Other digital marketing channels produce more data for tracking and forecasting. With search engine optimization, however, we frequently guess. We run tests. We experiment.

I’ve been an SEO practitioner since the late 1990s. My agency now manages SEO for large and small companies worldwide. My day generally consists of the four activities below.

SEO: A Day in the Life

Learn via self-study. SEO was born in forums and blogs. Before SEO was an acronym, we were sharing and debating tactics. The forum at HighRankings.com was my textbook in 1996 when I began trying to improve my employer’s organic search performance. This was before Google, incidentally.

We used avatars and user names to hide our identities. But we were part of a community. We shared what we learned and argued theories.

Google launched in September 1998. A user named “GoogleGuy” — who, we found out later, was Matt Cutts of Google — would pop in and gently guide our suspicions.

Fast forward to 2020, and forums aren’t nearly as popular. But the SEO community lives on — in blogs, Facebook Groups, Twitter, and the like. Self-study is part of the job. We spend hours reading and discussing with other optimizers.

Original Article Here

20 FRESHEST WEB DESIGNS, NOVEMBER 2020

As we approach our first winter holiday season since the pandemic set in, the world could feel like a very scary place; there is a great deal of uncertainty about the future for businesses, for young people in education, for jobs, for travel. Celebrations are certainly going to be a lot quieter this year.

And yet, the web is far from showing doom and gloom. We’re seeing confidence and positivity in designs across the board. As businesses and people adapt to the demands of social distancing and WFH, we’re seeing a focus on simplifying, appreciating quality over quantity, taking better care of ourselves and our world, and making the most of our time. And this is reflected through design in a variety of ways: visually minimal style, pared down content, fresh colors, statement type, great photography, illustration.

There is confidence in abundance on the web. Enjoy…

Mammut Expedition Baikal

Mammut make outdoor clothing and equipment, and this microsite is for its Eiger Extreme collection. Stunning photographs of Swiss speed climber Dani Arnold climbing at Lake Baikal in Siberia are cleverly interspersed with details of the company’s products he can be seen wearing, along with links to buy. It feels natural, rather than forced.

Original Article and More Samples Here

15 Social Media Plugins for WordPress

Leveraging social media to promote your WordPress site requires only a few simple plugins.

Here is a list of social media plugins for WordPress. There are plugins to display icons from hundreds of social media networks, schedule and automate publication, track engagement, and more. Some of these plugins are standalone, while others are bundled with larger sets of WordPress tools. Nearly all of the plugins are free, though most also have premium plans.

Social Media Plugins for WordPress

Shareaholic provides a comprehensive set of marketing tools to engage with your audience, get found across search and social, and grow your following with access to 40-plus follow buttons. Add share buttons anywhere in your layout. Add smart share buttons to your images. Share and recommend content, analyze performance in a single dashboard, and generate revenue with native ads, affiliate links, and more. Price: Basic is free. Premium plans start at $8 per month.

Shareaholic

Revive Old Posts lets you schedule old and newer content to share on social media. Automatically post to social media as soon as you click the publish button or as soon as content is automatically published. Choose the maximum and minimum age of posts eligible for sharing. Create common hashtags for post shares and more. Price: Free. Premium plans start at $75 per year.

NextScripts SNAP automatically publishes new or existing posts from your blog to your social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and more. Filters allow you to post only specified categories, tags, and post types. Posts are entirely white-labeled. Price: Free for one account per social network. Pro is $49.95 per year.

Monarch lets you choose from over 20 social sharing networks to display. Add and arrange any number of available networks to create a custom collection of sharing options for your visitors. Use six automatic pop-up and fly-in triggers off unique user interactions. Price: $89 per year.

Monarch

Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed lets you display Instagram posts from your Instagram accounts, either in the same single feed or in multiple feeds. Customize the width, height, number of photos, number of columns, image size, background color, image spacing, and more. Display thumbnails and medium- or full-size photos from your Instagram feed. Includes a “Follow on Instagram” button at the bottom of your feed. Price: Free. Pro version is $49 per year.

Click To Tweet allows you to create tweetable content easily. Use pull quotes and custom messages inside the body of a blog post to highlight your content for readers and make it simple for them to share on Twitter. Price: Free.

Jetpack is a toolkit to design, secure, and grow your site on WordPress. Jetpack includes a variety of features to promote a site, including social media icons, widgets to display networks, social network distribution tools, and more. Schedule promotions of your content to social media sites. Add additional social shares for previously published posts, and schedule them for the days and times that work best for your audience. Price: Basic is free. Premium starts at $19.95 per month.

Jetpack

Simple Social Icons is an easy to use, customizable way to display icons that link visitors to your various social profiles. Choose which profiles to link to, customize your icons’ color and size, and align them to the left, center, or right, all from the widget form. Price: Free.

MashShare provides social sharing features similar to the layout on Mashable. MashShare lets you display a large total share counter beside three large prominent share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and the option to place a prominent subscribe button for your news feed and mailing list. Price: Free. Add-ons start at €39.

Blog2Social lets you cross-promote, schedule, and automatically share your blog posts to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google My Business, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Medium, and Telegram. Blog2Social automatically creates social media posts for your content and auto-posts at the best times for each network. Saves the time and hassle of manually sharing and promoting. Price: Free. Pro version is €99 per year.

Social Warfare is a plugin to add social share buttons to your site and promote your social content. Match the buttons to your website’s branding, with over 5,000 potential style combinations. Customize tweets that are populated when a visitor clicks your Twitter button. Upload Pinterest-specific images and descriptions. Display social share counts prominently. Add a custom widget to display your most popular posts. Built with performance in mind, these buttons will not slow your site. Price: Plans start at $29 per year.

Warfare Plugins

Floating Social Media Icon allows icons to appear automatically. Use social media widgets, shortcodes, or PHP code to display social media icons anywhere. The plugin includes over 20 icon themes, icon animation, widget support, and more. The icons will fly from top left to bottom right and will stay there even if the user scrolls the page — thus, it floats. With the power add-on, choose where to start the icon’s fly animation and where to end and stay. Price: Free. Add-on is $24.49.

Nelio Content provides an editorial calendar and content assistant to help schedule, create, and promote your blog. Automatically post on social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, Google My Business, and Pinterest. Nelio Content also includes support for Instagram through Buffer. Focus on the content that works best with built-in analytics. Price: Free. Premium is $99 per year.

WordPress to Buffer will auto-post content to your Buffer account, scheduling publication to social media profiles including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Use Buffer’s default schedule, or set your own schedule with days and times that work best for your audience. Price: Free. Premium plans start at $39 per year.

AddToAny Share Buttons is a plugin to share posts and pages to networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and over 100 sharing and social media sites and apps. It features share counters, floating share buttons, follow buttons for popular social networks, vector icons, analytics integration, and custom icons and placement. Price: Free.

Original Article Here

These Are the Scam Apps That You Should Remove Right Now From Your Phone

If you are a Google Play Store user, pay attention to these applications as they could generate expenses of hundreds of dollars a month.

Recently, the Avast team managed to identify various rogue mobile applications. These work through the Google Play Storeand mainly affect fans of the Minecraft video game, as well as users of other games.

These applications are part of fleeceware, a category of cyber crime that hooks users through “attractive services” such as colorful wallpapers and various modifications for video games. They also offer trial periods for a very short period of time, and then each one starts charging from $ 30 to $ 90 per week.

Later, those in charge of these applications rely on users to forget that they have them installed or the real cost of the subscription. Likewise, they take advantage of vulnerable sectors such as children, because children may not understand the consequences of carrying out these downloads. That’s why Ondrej David, who leads Avast’s malware analysis team, noted:

“We encourage our customers to remain vigilant when downloading any applications from unknown developers and to always carefully research user reviews and billing agreements before subscribing.”

Next, we share the name of the fraudulent applications that were detected so that you can remove them from your mobile devices:

  1. Skins for Roblox
  2. MasterCraft for Minecraft
  3. Skins, Mods, Maps for Minecraft PE
  4. Live Wallpapers HD & 3D Background
  5. Master for Minecraft
  6. Boys and Girls Skins
  7. Maps Skins and Mods for Minecraft

What to do if you have these applications installed?

According to the Avast experts, it is not enough to locate and uninstall the mentioned applications. Therefore, it is necessary for users to cancel the subscription in the Play Store. You can do this by accessing the application, then the menu that appears in the upper left and then subscriptions. From there you can cancel all the mentioned services.

Original Article Here

Looking for a Web Hosting Service? HotDash Is Worth a Good, Hard Look.

Every business these days needs a website. More and more business is done online, with some retailers reporting online sales growth of almost 300 percent over the past year. Ecommerce is changing the way people shop, and businesses should be ready to adapt. One of the first steps businesses can take is to build a website, but that can get expensive in a hurry when it comes to hosting.

That’s where HostDash Web Hosting comes in. HostDash aims to provide fast web hosting for individual business owners as well as small- and medium-size enterprises. They give companies the digital tools they need to operate a successful online business, whether you’re a web veteran or a complete newbie.

HostDash utilized the market-leading cPanel™ control panel, giving you complete control of your hosting environment from an easy-to-use graphical dashboard. You can manage all of your files through an FTP client and install more than 400 programs to your website with just a click. HostDash helps you manage, download, or restore backups; manage, create, or access unlimited email accounts; and manage databases and import SQL files with absolute ease. You can even view usage statistics and error logs to ensure your site is operating on all cylinders at all times.

When you use HostDash, you’ll get free website migration (if applicable), a free SSL certificate, and unlimited bandwidth, email accounts, and website coverage.

If you want to run a business website, HostDash makes it easy. Right now, you can get a one-year subscription to Host Dash Web Hosting Growth Plan for 87 percent off $119 at just $14.99. Or, if your needs aren’t quite as extensive, you can get a one-year Startup Plan subscription for 88 percent off $83 at just $9.99.

Original Article Here

Here’s How to Improve Your Business’s Content Marketing

Content marketing is the only type of marketing that doesn’t cost anything. What’s more? It’s as profitable a marketing strategy as paid search advertising or paid social marketing. Below are some pointers to help you decide whether to invest your resources in content marketing and guide you through building a successful content marketing campaign that’ll get results.

What’s the purpose of your content? 

You’ve probably heard many times the importance of keeping a blog and creating social content. Assessing the necessity is the first step to a good content marketingcampaign. Does it align with your business model? Do you have the resources for the upkeep of a blog site? Content marketing is a lot of work. If you don’t see how content marketing can serve you, or if you don’t have the means to update the blog periodically, now is not the right time to launch content marketing. 

If content marketing serves your business model and you have the resources to run the blog, ask yourself this next: What’s your goal? In other words, what are you trying to accomplish with a content marketing campaign? 

For an e-commerce website, the obvious goal is to increase the conversion rate by producing highly convertible content. Ecommerce conversion rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who make a purchase on the site. 

The conversion rate in a broader sense refers to the percentage of users who take a calculated move. It could be based on a number of indicators, such as the percentage of people who filled out and submitted the contact form, or the percentage of people who RSVP’d to the webinar series.

Know your keywords

Identify keywords and do a deep dive with tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Moz. What do you know about the client demographics, and what does that tell you about the kind of content you should produce? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What are the keywords and phrases they’d type into a search engine in the hopes to find a service like yours? 

Once you’ve identified the keywords, scratch your customers’ itch. What would they like to know about your products before making a purchase? Do a thorough review of your products and share glowing reviews from influencers and bloggers.

Original Article Here

5 Content Marketing Ideas for December 2020

In December 2020, online retailers and B2B sellers can focus their content marketing on getting things done during Covid, launching a YouTube channel, profiling the Nobel Prizes, teaching skills, and raising AIDS awareness.

Content marketing starts with creating or curating content such as articles, videos, graphics, or podcasts. Next, that content is published, distributed, and promoted, all for the sake of attracting, engaging, and retaining an audience of customers.

What follows are five content marketing ideas your business can use in December 2020.

1. Living during Covid

Put aside U.S. presidential elections and political machinations worldwide. Don’t even consider earthquakes (there have been 96 serious quakes by October) and murder hornets. This year, 2020, will be known for the Coronavirus pandemic.

So there is no reason not to create content that includes Covid.

Original Article Here.