Video Descriptions

When you think about the title of your video, you should also think of the description of the video since it is an important ranking factor on YouTube and other search engines too.

YouTube and Google will not be able to extract any ranking factors from the video itself, so you have to provide optimized descriptions of your videos so they can easily determine the content on your video and rank it appropriately.

You would be surprised to know how many people ignore this factor, and keep complaining that nobody ever views their videos on YouTube.

Duh! It is time you understood the important of providing proper descriptions like you would on a blog post or web page.

The video description will actually be like a small blog post on YouTube and should have a minimum of 250 words in order to be effective.=; it must also include relevant and powerful keywords.

As a rule of thumb, when you want to use the video description for optimization, you should place the keyword in the first 25 words of the description. You should also place links to all your external URLs such as blog content and social media platforms.

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Polish up your on-page optimization

On-page optimization is intimately related to the UX discussed above. It is basically the techniques that are dine behind the scenes in order to improve the overall SEO of the page.

This is a feature that has been in effect for a very long time, and is yet to become obsolete; it will always affect how you rank on the SERPs, and by extension, the visibility of your website.

By simply updating their H1 tags, Mockingbird experienced a 62% increase in their organic traffic. Similarly, Brand New Copy also experienced a 48% increase in traffic when they polished off their internal links and metadata.

Did the tiny efforts that these two companies implement have the desired results? Definitely YES!

When you perform on-page optimization, then you greatly improve the probability of your high-quality content getting visible to users and the search engines.

We will now look at some of the basic features to pay attention to when you are optimizing for on-page in order to rank higher on the search engines.

1.  Metadata

2.  Schema

3.  Internal link structure

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Quick Research

You have just got a client brief by email, phone, questionnaire, etc. It seems like a quick job, so you really just need to get going fast.

Check the competition – see what other people in the same niche are doing. See how you can do a better job than they are. You will see similarities and differences, patterns and a great overview of the industry. You will now see what you “must have” to put your client ahead of the competition.

So we briefly look at the keywords that a competitor is using and also where he is getting his backlinks from. How are they helping them get leads?

Now, look at what ways you can improve your product or service so you can beat what they are offering to their users.

Using facts and data, how can you position yourself as a better, knowledgeable and more experienced than the competitor.

This light and quick research will give you an overview of the issues that need to be addressed in the niche.

After the quick research, we write a report and send it to you. Granted, we got a lot of information from the discovery session, but we did not go deeper and find out much about the niche that you are entering. But now we have a better understanding of your competition.

We now have enough information that will help us set out the strategy to undertake when designing your website.

Without proper research, then you will never get a sound strategy for your business, and that is why we take research very seriously.

Sometimes this quick research is sufficient, but at other times we need to go deeper into issues that may arise from the first step.

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Getting the Features and Scope right

The features and scope of a website are very important since they improve functionality.

If you look at John, he probably does not need his clients to create a membership account for logging in to interact. The website should just give information so the target audience can content him and create a deal about better construction.

For Mark, it will be necessary for children to create accounts so they can communicate with their old and new friends after they finish the vocational school term. And parents can download their child’s report card.

What are the features that will go into the website? This has to be carefully addressed in discovery so the website achieves its full intention.

• Do you need chatting facilities?
• Will the target audience need to post comments on products or services they get from the client?
• What kind of sales channel will be used – shopping baskets, check books, PayPal?
• What integrations will be required for content to be posted automatically on social media?
• Will you host a blog on the site?
• The conversions will have to be measured, so which methods will you use?

These are just some of the major issues that are covered when doing discovery targeted at Features and Scope. Getting the Features and Scope discovery right will mean that the site will resonate well with the target audience and also function effectively.

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Is responsive design for your website enough? You might want to give it a serious thought

Whether you’re a beginner or a skilled web expert, you might have faced the challenges while creating responsive designs, largely because of the all-encompassing changes in the technique of designing website. This not so latest trend now, of having a responsive design for a website is a straightforward approach for the organizations. The goal is to own a website that resizes itself according to the device it is being viewed on and should look great. Moreover, some viewers might start on browsing on one device but would like to recommence viewing it on a different device when they get back to the office or go home.

Here is an image of what responsive design looks like on various devices:

But do you think just by having a website with a responsive design is enough and is your only mobile strategy? Read to know more

Link building – key to effectiveness

Sometimes back, I wrote about the sudden release of Penguin 3.0. The basic intention behind releasing that algorithm is to get rid of the spams and penalizing such websites that uses unnatural link building tactics to rank abnormally high and affect the search engine optimization rankings.

It is pertinent to bring such updates and releases from time to time so to ensure that people understand the criticality of having a clean search engine optimization strategy.

There was a time when thousand of spam links were used to be created and they shot up the rankings of a website. But those days are now long gone. Such techniques of black hat search engine optimization still exist, however, are not that effective now and their results are temporary and very short lived. Google’s strict algorithms seek to penalize the websites using manipulative links and stresses upon the significance of having healthy and natural inbound links.

For Search engine optimization link building is the most important action and is directly intended at securing the quality inbound links that helps any webpage to rank high. Link building is a culmination of several skills and those search engine optimization’s fair well, that do not get indulge in malpractices and dedicate serious resources in their link building activity. Search engine these days do not get tempted with quantity but is in love with the quality. Having quality links from trusted and authority sites is not a cake walk though, however, if you succeed you are hugely rewarded.

So, now you have a fair idea about what is link building and its significance in search engine optimization. But now the questions arises as to how do you get your hands on such links that won’t get you penalized in anyway.

We have been witnessing a significant shift from how the link building used be done in not so distant time ago such as asking for reciprocal links, buying or selling links, too much usage of article marketing etc. However, now absolutely different strategies are being adopted to do this important activity.

1. The first and the foremost is the content and that too amazing one: Every effective link building strategy is directly proportional to having excellent and relevant content that resonates with its intended audience. To make this work you need have high-quality content that can keep the readers engaged and have them come back to you for more. This attracts links. 

2. Build links and drive traffic with guest posts: The guest blogging is that tried and tested strategy that has been there for a while now and works well. Guest blogging is a way to build authority and credibility. But you are required to have relationship with high-quality websites and should contribute some great and relevant content so that their readers out there should love reading a piece from you. Once that readership is attained you’ll get the targeted traffic to your site.

3. Reaching out to bloggers: To get new audience it is a good practice to reach out to other established bloggers in the industry. This will mutually benefit both and will help in getting links back to your site.

4. Social media presence: Creating excellent content is important but promoting it on social media is even more important. As this would reach out to mass and get you some really good audience. Once the content is like and shared, it gets visible and there are chances that some of your audience might want to link it to their articles or publications. This way your website receives organic linking back to it. 

The potential power of the social media is huge as you got large circles out there and if you share loads of material in your circles the chances are you see more of that material being pushed in search results.

 

It is critical to understand and use the above notable strategies as they are worthy of consideration for effective link building purpose. These and many more are considered by professional search engine optimization across the globe.

No keywords – No SEO

For effective Search Engine Optimization it is extremely important to research, analyze and select the best keywords. But do you know what a keyword is?

Keyword is that word that people will punch in the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other) to look for the products and services that they require and you provide. These Search Engine Optimization keyword or key-phrases are the cornerstones that pave the way for the people to find your website from the search engines. Thus, better the keywords and its linking, better the chances of your website of being found during the searches.

Right keywords are an essential for the success of Search Engine Optimization and are a fundamental part of it. It is similar to a situation where you are trying to dig a well without exactly knowing where the water is. Thus, a website that is well optimized for search engines have the keywords or phrases that its potential visitors may enter in the search engine to look for the services or products that you offer. Obviously quality content is favored by search engines; however, if you do a bad job at selecting the relevant keywords that people use in active searching, it sure will lead to missing a lot of traffic on your website and all your subsequent efforts will be in vain. Therefore, developing a list of keywords is one of the first and foremost important steps in any search engine optimization initiative.

Since keywords are essentials for all your other Search Engine Optimization efforts, it is of utmost importance that It’s worth the time and funds to make sure the keywords are highly pertinent to your audience.

Usually keywords selection and subsequent optimization is considered to be the most difficult task and ironically it is the most important part of search engine optimization. If you carelessly choose keywords and have no idea what keywords your potential customers are using to search for you services, I am afraid all your efforts would be in vain and you won’t be found. Hence, this would affect the traffic to your website and result in no sale. All other aspects of search engine optimization are directly keywords dependent.

We will walk you through certain important aspects of how to use a keyword so that you can leverage from it.

1. What is believed to be the most significant piece of content on your website is a Title tag, both on and off-page. You should ensure that you keywords are included in the Title tag.

2. You should include keywords for Search Engine Optimization in the URL too.

3. Keyword optimization should be a part of the link building strategy. All the links be it internal links, inbound links, breadcrumb links, navigational links should have the main optimized keywords.

4. Ensure using the keyword in the meta tags, especially in the meta description

5. In any image file paths and in the images’ alt text

6. Using the keyword as the anchor text

What should you keep in mind while evaluating Keywords?

 There are number of factors to be considered while determining which keywords to choose:

1. Popularity: Target most popular but the less competitive keyword.
2. Relevance: Keywords you choose should be relevant to your products and services, without it you’re unlikely to convert any traffic into customers.
3. Keyword intentions: It is important to find out the intent behind the search queries. Whether they are only navigating here and there to know about some brands or are the ones who are curious and looking from some information which is question oriented and lastly that category which is ready to make a purchase.

By now you must have understood the importance of having right keywords to have an efficient Search Engine Optimization. Do come back to learn more about how to do researching, analyzing, discovering and optimizing keywords and more on our blog.

Till then keep on the research!

Flat user interface design

Flat user interface design – a new trend is taking the world of UI and website design by storm. It is an evolving and emerging web design trend and is at present the most discussed topic in the web-sphere. It refers to a style that is focused on a modest use of uncomplicated elements, typography and flat colors. Is this just a passing fad or a trend that is here to stay?

Click here to read through the following para’s and know makes flat UI a more streamlined, user-friendly and efficient design.

Infinite scrolling on the website

Infinite scrolling is an ongoing trend these days for most of the website designing and is becoming increasingly popular. This kind of scrolling came into being from social networking websites such as Twitter, LinkedIn etc. The basic idea behind using infinite scrolling on the websites is to get rid of the ‘Pagination’ i.e. the requirement to click while browsing between the pages. Once you finished reading the content visible on the screen and scroll down, more content will keep appearing without the need of click or moving on to the next page.

Today, we are in the era of responsive website designs where you can browse the websites on the desktop, smartphones, notebooks or other compatible hand held devices. In such case it is of utmost importance to provide the user with an equally pleasing experience on all the devices. Here where infinite scrolling is working best. Most of the devices today are using touch technology. For small screen devices it will be quite a tedious task to tap on to the links to move to the next page, here infinite scrolling plays the genius and provides a convenient user experience.

Though this kind of infinite scrolls work remarkably well on small devices and for the websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. However, for almost the rest of the websites who implemented it just for the sake of following the trend, it didn’t really work out and gave a subdued user experience. For these websites it weaken the web’s original intention of providing the to the point information. For example, when a user searches for some information on the web, certain numbers of links are presented to him to choose from. Once the user clicks on the link it gets you to the information page. However, in case of infinite scrolling it usually doesn’t. It directs you to a web page and you need to scroll down some dozen pages for getting to the information you require. Hence, here the basic purpose of the web is defeated.

Just how many times are you going to scroll down to get to the information you require? It sometimes gets impossible if the webpage is quite content heavy. On the other hand on web pages having multiple heavy pictures lot of data is consumed while scrolling down several pages and this slows down the PC or may even crash the browser that you are using.

You must be wondering why ‘infinite scrolling’ is working well for social networking sites such as Twitter, Pintrest, Facebook etc and not that well for the rest. It’s because of the fact that these websites have huge user base and as a result infinite user generated content that flows 24×7. This kind of heavy traffic requires the content to be continuously updated and for this ‘Infinite scroll’ is a best option as the content here is being automatically loaded and ready before users the moment they scroll down.

But this doesn’t hold that true for rest of the websites. There are some other disadvantages of the infinite scroll that one should keep in mind.

1. Lacks orientation – Infinite scroll lacks orientation which leads to difficulty finding the information that have been seen on the page sometimes ago. However, this is not the case in paginated content, there you can comparatively map the information with the help of page numbers.
2. Poor navigation – Website navigation is quite important for a better user experience. It is essential for a better user experience to know where they are on the sitemap. In case of infinite scrolling it is almost impossible to track. On top of it, it is extremely annoying sometimes when you click on a link and then want to go back to where you left, it would take you to the start of the feed. This is a nightmare especially for the e-commerce websites, where a user after having a look at the certain product want to go back and instead of getting to the point from where he left, landed on the start of the page.
3. Crash of browsers – With infinite scrolling another misfit is when the huge amount of content loads to the memory of the computer either it slows it down to almost dead or crashes.
4. No end – There is no capability to directly jump to the end of the content.
5. Bad for SEO – There is almost negligible Search Engine Optimization opportunities for the content located below the first scroll.
6. Bookmarking is tedious – If you want to bookmark a special point of interest on a certain page, it is not possible with infinite scroll.

Typically, every new technology has its share of pros and cons, so is the case with infinite scrolling. For some websites it is beneficial and engaging, while for the rest it can slow down or crash the UX and backfire. Usually it depends upon the basic objective of your website. Infinite scrolling may backfire if your website serves a specific purpose and expected to return specific results. This will provide a bad user experience.However, if the website is content heavy and almost all the content holds the same importance for a user, then infinite scrolling can be a really effective way of delivering that content.

 

Elements to keep your responsive website design engaging

We have been talking and writing enough good things of having a responsive website design lately. Today we’ll talk about various essential elements to keep the responsive website design engaging enough to have a visitor come back to it often.

With an exceptional aesthetics and emotional quotient a website speaks a language, louder than words and builds a brand identity for the organization. A creative, engaging website not just flabbergasts a user but also build quality professional relations. Having a responsive website is the need of the hour these days and is becoming increasingly accepted. However, the question that arises here is how to keep it ‘engaging’?

Numerous brands, big or small from a static web design are switching to the responsive website design for their businesses, a logical choice. However, having just a mobile-ready site accessible across the various available gadgets, from Smartphones to desktops to tablets to other hand-held devices is not enough but making it engaging on all browser formats is imperative. With the increase in number of people using smartphones or other hand-held devices it becomes essential for the designers to tailor the website using all their creativity.

Let’s talk about the essential elements to keep in mind while getting along a responsive website design to keep it engaging:

1. Visually appealing images: It is very well said ‘picture paints a thousand words’. It holds true for the websites as well as we are residing in age of visual culture. Having appealing images across the website help a user to connect better with the content and the possible purpose of the site. A well sought picture in a website represents the business, provided the pictures and the messaging on the page work together harmoniously. From the marketing point of view, a well placed picture works as a story teller for your business. 

   Also, content with images get 94% higher views, than the ones without. Including visually appealing images in your website attracts users to stop on your page and view it. In the era of e-commerce it gets even more imperative to have high-quality pictures of the products on the website, this influences the buyer and the purchase takes place. A good quality, comprehensible image showing the product characteristics well, answers questions or otherwise appeal to the target audience.

    

2. Excellent typography is a staple for an engaging responsive website design: The purpose of a responsive website design is to making it accessible for the user on the go. Typography here plays a vital role. For the users it is critically important to have a similar wonderful experience of viewing a website on a hand-held device with a comparatively small screen as on a desktop. It is mandatory for the responsive website design to have it typography capable enough to transform and shrink (or move) in unison along with the decrease in the screen size of a device. Choosing a strong font that scales well is a key to responsive web design success.

    

   Also, do not hesitate to mix in different fonts to create the right feel for your website.

    

3. Easy to use navigation: Having an easy to use navigation on your website is as important as any other element. If a user visits your website and he is not able to find out desired content on your website in few seconds, he may want to push the back button or switch to a competitor website for the same. If people do not find a clue to navigate around your website easily and in lesser time, then they won’t.

   While dealing with a responsive web design it is pretty tedious to have a perfect navigation. If you are thinking so, you are wrong. It isn’t a huge task when it comes to responsive design. You can have a condensed menu at the top or have a drop down menu with handful of important links. A thoughtful, neat and convenient to use navigation design can do the trick.

4. Work on the smaller details for your website: Here comes the make or break situation. There are some important elements that if not given due attention while designing a responsive website, could be irksome. One of it is the load time, which is much lesser for the users viewing a website on the desktop than the ones on mobile phone or tablets. If such situation occurs, then to counter it a backup plan should be ready, such as upgrading the server or otherwise to ensure that the visitor is treated to something interactive while the lag in loading a page is dealt with.

5. Few drops of creativity can turn the ball in your court: Making your website accessible on all platforms requires some thoughtful planning so that it doesn’t get boring and its is critically important element in case of a responsive web design as it offers an entirely different layout when viewed on different screen sizes. If a site is done creatively it can do wonders and can keep the users engaged in ways that traditional static designed sites couldn’t even figure out.

The conclusion is, having a responsive website design is not a hard task. It’s rather simple. You only require keeping in mind the essential elements to keep it engaging and have a site of your choice.

For more information on the responsive website design and how your business could benefit from having one, contact us on rahul@credofy.com or alternatively call us at +919711054188 or visit Web design company – http://credofy.com