What You Should Know to Build Traffic for Your Website

Before you start a website, there are a few things you should ask yourself. This is because there are too many websites out there that cater to the same audience and it is of no use if your website simply repeats what the others have done in the same way.

Analyse the traffic potential

Firstly, you should know if your website has traffic potential. Use a keyword tool to check the monthly

search volume. Search multiple niche keywords and know that a low search volume often indicates a low traffic potential.

It is also important for you to know if your venture is profitable. Are people buying products and services? And can your product or service fit in the demographic?

Evaluate competition

Search keywords in your niche to see who and what is ranking. Pay attention to the URL structure. Short descriptive URLs help users know what to expect from the page and search engine too, understand ‘what the page is about’ better.

To evaluate your competition, use a backlink checking tool to get a closer look at the links to the competition. Some of the good tools here are Opensite explorer, Ahrefs and majestic SEO.

Selecting your domain

Is it brandable?

Your domain is an important tool for generating marketing buzz. Build domains around popular words with mass appeal.

Domain Bot: Enter a word or phrase and it will find available domains.

Domain hacks: Get creative suggestions to help you find a domain name.

Brandable domains help with word-to-mouth marketing. Finally, make sure your domain name is short and memorable.

Focus on Content

Content is an asset that provides value to your customers and make you money. Is your content helping your audience solve a problem or fill a need? If visitors don't find the content useful, they won’t do anything with it.

Your content also has to be timely. Guiding your audience through new market developments helps increase your popularity. Use Google trends to find hot topics to develop your content around.

Social presence

First of all, do you have a social media presence? A feedback page and a twitter account for your website is a must. Join other networks you know your target audience is involved with. Build an active fan base by asking readers to like or follow you to continue reading your content.

Make your content easy to share. Place share buttons on every piece of content on your site. Place buttons above the fold so people don't have to scroll to get to them.

The 5 Key Indicators of a Quality Web Page

Today, the visitors of your website do not look for lengthy write-ups about any topic or product, however important it may be. They come looking for quality content. Now, the question that arises is, What do you call a quality content? Quality content is original, purposeful, and correctly optimized information that people and search engines are driven to read, view and share. This article looks at some of the elements that your website should have to be the best.

1. Context and Relevance

The era of keyword monopoly is over. Google is moving towards analyzing topics and context, not just keywords. Today, the search engine understands the meaning of the words and how they are related to each other.

Also, according to Search metrics, Google’s algorithm recognizes high quality, relevant content and rewards it with higher rankings. So, your focus should be on developing content for users, not search engines.

2. Responsive Design with Images and Video

Study after study has found that users prefer blog posts with images and videos and find them more engaging. This results in web pages with more images ranking better. In fact, web pages that rank at the top have an average of 7 images.

3. Length of the Content

It has been found that top ranking sites have around 900 words of content per page. For a blog, the content shouldn’t be too short either. An ideal blog post length from a reader’s perspective is between 1500-1600 words long. So, focus on developing a longer content.

4. Readability

Readability is the ease with which your text can be read and understood. The key here is to use shorter sentences, paragraphs and active verb forms. Remove all clutter, unnecessary words and limit the use of adverbs/adjectives.

To judge the readability of your text, you can use the Flesh reading ease formula.

5. Expertise

Google quality guidelines state that high quality pages and websites need enough expertise to be authoritative and trustworthy on their topic. Here, it is important to note that the expertise of the author is a critical factor for any content to be considered high quality.

You definitely don't expect people to spend their time reading content that they already know, right? People want to read posts from experts who can dig into a topic and explain it in a way that they can easily understand.

Payment Solutions- What You Need to Know

You need to accept different forms of payments if you’re running a e-business. If you turn down a customer because you do not accept their form of payment you’re just going to end up completely losing the sale and the individual is likely to take their business elsewhere. There is no reason you should lose this kind of sale and the best way to avoid this is to have different payment gateways. With the different payment gateways it is always going to drastically improve your ability to land a new client and to increase your chances of improving the way you do business, regardless what you sell or what kinds of services you offer.

In Store Payments

Of course, it is very important for you to accept in store payments. When you are able to do this it is going to improve your ability to make as many sales as possible the payment gateways are going to run through your point of sales system, as this is very important for everything to run through the same account. When everything runs through the same account it is going to improve your ability to monitor everything properly and to see whenever you make a sale or receive a payment. Having multiple accounts is going to make it very difficult to do this and you might not know when certain sales are made.

Mobile Payments

The payment gateways also work while on the go. Mobile payments are an excellent way for you to make money while on the go through sales. The mobile equipment connects directly through a Smartphone or a tablet computer and allows you to swipe credit cards anywhere. With this feature you'll be able to travel for work and even take vacations without having to worry about leaving your business at home. When running your own business it is important to have as many different payment gateways available in order to take payments from individuals inside your store, on the road or over the Internet.

Internet Payments

With more and more individuals making sales and purchases over the Internet it is incredibly important for you to have an Internet store and offer products and services online. This way, someone who isn't even in the same city as you can purchase your material while over on the Internet. The Internet feature will greatly help you is going to help you out with this and it also expands your services to even a completely new region.

6 Design Essentials to Modernize Your Website

With huge completion between companies on the web, it is essential that you have what it takes to ensure your company finds its rightful place at the top. For this, it is important that you design your website in accordance with the preference of the customers. In this article, we look at what your website needs to have to attract visitors.

1. HTML5

HTML5 is the now and the future of web development. It is the new standard for coding. It is very good at cross browser compatibility and also extremely mobile friendly. It is cleaner and smarter than other mark up languages and gives you a better experience and faster loading time.

2. RESPONSIVE DESIGN

Make your design responsive to the resolution of the device your visitor is browsing with and make it applicable to the screen size

3. FONT

Font, font size, spacing between letters and line height all have a big impact on how your visitor feels when reading online. Larger font makes your site more clear and easy to look at. Sans-Serif fonts are best suited for digital content while you want your font size to be 16pt at a minimum and should go even more to 20pt+ for best results.

4. FIXED NAVIGATION

Many websites now fix their navigation menus to the top of your browser window so that the navigation follows you as you scroll down the page. This helps the visitor easily navigate your site at any time and gets

them to explore your content deeper. For this to work best you should think about what pages or posts you want to put into your navigation in order to best present your site

5. LIVE SEARCH

Much like how Google works, upon starting to type a search query your visitor will get a dropdown of different options and search results. A couple of simple plugins are available to get this functionality. Ajaxy live search and Dave’s Wordpress live search are good examples.

6. SIMPLICITY IN DESIGN

Simplicity rules in modern web design. It gives your visitors a better web experience when browsing your content as it puts more emphasis on the content itself and makes your site load faster. Think twice before putting more things in your sidebar.

If you keep in mind the above when you design your website, and can implement them with efficacy, the visitor stream won’t abate any time soon!

The Many Plugins of Wordpress

A plugin is a program or a set of one or more functions written in the PHP scripting language that adds a specific set of features or services to the Wordpress weblog. Plugins can extend the functionality of your blog in almost every possible way. In this article, we throw light on some of the most essential plugins for your Wordpress site.

Cache plugins

These plugins increase site speed and prevent server overload. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are some examples of good Cache plugins.

SEO plugins

SEO plugins allow you to optimize your tags, site structure, and much more to make your website more search engine friendly and improve your site rankings. Wordpress SEO by Yoast handles your SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and import functionality for the Headspace2 and All in One SEO plugins.

Social bookmarking plugins

Social bookmarking plugins allow your visitors to spread your content on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Sharebar is a powerful toolbar that adds a floating set of social buttons to your site.

URL management plugins

URL management plugins redirect the old URLs to the new ones and keep track of the outgoing links. Redirection keeps track of URL changes and automatically adds a 301 direction when the URL of a post is changed.

Login protection plugins

Brute force hacks can be nasty if your website is not properly protected. These plugins stop hackers dead in their tracks. Limited login attempts limit the number of times people can try to login before being locked out and notifies webmasters of suspicious activities. You may want to try WP Login Security.

Maintenance plugin

All webmasters need to take time to maintain their web properties. Vaultpress is a service that maintains Wordpress sites for webmasters. It covers disaster recovery, theme and plugin scanning, migration assistance and other services.

Security analysis

These plugins can identify and notify you of security threats. Better WP Security applies common security techniques to your website and can patch many holes in one shot. You may also want to try WP Malwatch and Ultimate security checker.